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State need days of rain, and it's just not out thereBy DAVID BALLINGRUD and CRAIG PITTMAN © St. Petersburg Times, published July 2, 1998 "Typically we get some fires this time of year, but we haven't had anything like this in half a century," said Liz Compton, spokeswoman for Agriculture Secretary Bob Crawford. "We had 73 new fires start just on Tuesday," she said. "What we need is a tropical storm." Steve Parsons, a U.S. Forest Service official from Virginia, said if the dryness persists, "these things can seem like they burn forever." "It's almost impossible to extinguish every ember, and they can even burn underground for a long time," said Parsons, in Florida to help fight the fires. "It's going to take a good, long-term soaking to bring this to an end." A bolt of lightning, a Fourth of July firecracker, a careless match. It doesn't take much to get a fire started in Florida's dry forests these days. Pine is rich in pitch, the highly flammable material that once was the backbone of the state's turpentine industry. While a forest fire does not necessarily destroy a forest, June's fires have been especially hot and damaging. And the prospect for heavy rains is uncertain at best. "I don't see anything like a tropical storm out there," said National Weather Service forecaster Walt Zaleski. A potentially rain-filled tropical wave is in the western Caribbean, but it's moving in the wrong direction. It is expected to push on toward Texas in the next day or two, Zaleski said, where it will be welcomed by drought-stricken cotton farmers. It looks like the only help it will offer Florida is some showers in the southern part of the state. The National Weather Service on Wednesday said a second tropical wave had formed a few hundred miles east of the Windward Islands, but it's too soon to count on any help from that system. Zaleski said there is hope of soon returning to conditions more typical of a Florida summer -- late afternoon and early evening thundershowers, "the kind that can quickly give you 2 to 3 inches of rain." What's really needed, said Zaleski, is not a downpour, "but light to moderate rainfall over a period of time, to saturate the first few inches of soil." At present, he said, the Florida ground is dry and crusty, and a heavy rain would run off the soil in the same way it runs off a road, potentially causing flooding. The state's summer thundershowers have been slow getting started because of some jockeying of high pressure systems in the area. The vast Bermuda high, which provides Florida its normal summer weather, has been slow to form in the North Atlantic. In its absence, our weather has been influenced by another high pressure system parked in the Gulf of Mexico and over the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. That system, turning clockwise, has directed warm air across mid-Florida from west to east. These breezes have kept Tampa Bay hot at night and have helped dry out the state. But the gulf high is subsiding, said Zaleski, "and we're starting to see the re-establishment of the Bermuda high, which would mean afternoon and evening breezes from the east (moving west), and the creation of more storms inland over the next few days." More than 90 percent of Florida's summer rainfall comes from thunderstorms, he noted. Normally hardy trees can't survive extra-hot blazesGenerally wildfire is beneficial for Florida's forests. But in some areas that have burned over the past month, the fire has burned so hot it has killed trees that normally would survive, experts from the U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday "There will be a lot of trees killed. There already have been a lot killed," said Ron Coats, the Forest Service's southeastern unit leader on fire. "A number of acres are going to have to be replanted," agreed Susan Husari, a fire behavior analyst with the service. At this point, no one knows how many of the 250,000 acres burned by wildfires have fallen victim to the extra-hot blazes, or how many trees have been scorched to death. Assessing the damage will have to wait until the fires are out. In some areas, such as Apalachicola and Osceola national forests, rangers have conducted periodic controlled burns over the years. Those fires, moving slowly and burning at comparatively low temperatures, clear away the more flammable underbrush without harming the trees. Soon after the fire the underbrush springs up again. But some of the wildfires now racing through the state have burned at a higher temperature than a controlled burn, so hot they fatally damage pines that have survived for 25 or 50 years, Coats said. The fires have also consumed far more of the underlying vegetation than would be burned up in a controlled burn, or even a normal wildfire, according to Forest Service spokesman Greg Thayer. Even the soil is affected in some areas, Thayer said. Most of the too-hot fires swept through areas where no controlled burns have been conducted in recent years, so there was plenty of highly flammable underbrush to fuel the blazes, Husari said. But even some of the areas that have been subject to controlled burns were scorched by the extra-intense fires, she said. Experts blame the drought that has kept Florida drier than it has been in years. The moisture level in the underbrush has dropped to the point "it's like oven-dried lumber," Coats said. A lot of pines were already stressed by the drought, Coats said. Even the trees that survive the fire will probably not survive the added stress it brought, he predicted. "You're going to see a lot more trees dying later on because of the stress," he said. Meanwhile, the firefighters' plan remains aggressive: Attack each new fire and try to keep it small. "Protection of life is the first priority," said Steve Parsons of the Forest Service. "But if we have resources in the area we will try to contain even the fires far away from people."
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ith a quarter-million acres burned and new fires popping up all over Florida, experts say it will take a tropical storm to put out the wildfires raging throughout the state.
