TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Florida could be on track for a record-shattering year of wildfires after nearly 2,000 blazes have scorched the state so far, forcing evacuations and causing millions of dollars in damages.
From the Georgia border to the Everglades, wildfires have burned more than 120,000 acres — an area four times larger than Disney World — as of Sunday. Dozens of wildfires, fueled by the state’s most intense drought in decades, are still actively burning statewide. The droughts have put some areas under stringent water use restrictions, while wildfires have caused 49 of the state's 67 counties to institute burn bans as of Tuesday.
And Florida officials are bracing for more.
“Typical year, we have [2,200] to 2,400 fires in a whole year, and we’re almost there already,” Florida Forest Service Director Rick Dolan said. “And we're just now coming into May.”
Mid-to-late May marks the start of the Sunshine State’s lightning season, when frequent strikes could cause wildfires. With firefighters and other first responders already out in full force battling the blazes, Florida officials said they’re concerned lightning season could spike fire numbers.
This year's season will likely last longer than normal, too. Florida's peak fire season usually spans from April to June — but the latest outlooks from the National Interagency Fire Center predict the state will have heightened wildfire potential through August.
Florida braces every year for major hurricanes, and its residents are well-versed in how to respond to severe wind, rain and storm surge. Yet severe wildfires require a different playbook, one that Florida can’t necessarily copy from the wildfire-prone West. Eastern wildfires have different factors — like weather, types of fuel and housing distributions — than those impacting Western blazes. Wildfires in Florida also haven’t taken on the same political dimension as those in states like California, where leaders deal with more fires more often.
Wildfires have killed one volunteer firefighter in Florida so far and prompted hundreds of evacuations. For the first time in its history, state officials staged equipment like brush trucks and water tankers around Florida to respond faster to wildfires in financially strained counties.
The state has worked to fill firefighting vacancies and replace its aging equipment over the last few years, state Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson said. The state has swapped out Vietnam-era helicopters for new models and purchased firefighting drones and bulldozers.
“Without the additional hires, without the training, without the equipment that we’ve acquired the last three and a half years, this could be a completely different fire season,” Simpson said.
While Florida has had smatterings of rain, it’s not enough to quench the most intense drought the state has experienced since 2001. Generally speaking, droughts can cause wildfires to burn hotter, move faster and become harder to contain, according to University of Florida fire ecologists Victoria Donovan and Carissa Wonkka. Droughts can also make it easier for people to ignite fires simply by mowing their lawns or driving trucks across dry grass.
While wildfires are most often associated with Western states, they’re becoming more frequent in the East, according to Donovan and Wonkka. Increased fire risk can be particularly bad for areas that have “wildland-urban interface,” or places where human developments mingle with undeveloped wildlands — a common occurrence in Florida.
“Because we have this really high probability exposure, there's something that we need to be paying attention to,” Donovan said. “In terms of drivers, we don't know exactly what's causing these wildfires. It's something that we're starting to research now.”
Wildland-urban interfaces are becoming more common in the Eastern U.S., Donovan said, which increases both the potential for wildfire exposure and ignition sources. According to the researchers, it’s “very possible” the East will continue to see an increase in large wildfires.
“Then in the future, we're projected to continue to see more drought or variability in precipitation and drought across the region, which could create more wildfire-conducive conditions like the ones that we're seeing this season,” Donovan added.
Other researchers have linked climate change to worsening wildfires in the East.
Florida has already received funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover 75 percent of the costs of battling two major fires: the Cow Creek Fire in Levy County and the Railroad Fire Complex in Putnam and Clay counties, which have burned more than 7,000 acres combined.
FEMA’s fire management assistance grants will cover everything from firefighter overtime pay to diesel for firetrucks, said Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management. Guthrie added that he’s “pretty positive” the state will have to apply for more FEMA grants in the coming weeks.
Despite the damage faced by some Florida homeowners, that assistance doesn’t currently extend to individual fire victims, Guthrie said. FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program, which provides underinsured victims with financial or housing assistance after a disaster, can’t be turned on until the president declares a major disaster or emergency.
“If you don't have insurance on your home, and you're expecting federal or state government or even local government to come and write you a check, that is not government’s role,” he said. “And I think we need to have tough conversations with constituents and our residents and let them know that the government is not an insurance backstop.”
It’s especially common for homeowners in wildland-urban interface areas — the same areas with heightened wildfire risk — to be uninsured or underinsured, Guthrie said.
FDEM has yet to request federal assistance for the Highway 41 Fire in the Everglades, which burned more than 9,000 acres, because it also stretched across federal and Miccosukee Tribal lands, he added.
The fire also burned less than 30 miles away from the immigration detention center in the Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Guthrie declined to say where people in the detention center would be evacuated to in the case of wildfire, but said the detention center has a “compress and shift” evacuation plan. That contingency plan would involve compressing other state-owned facilities and then shifting detainees into those vacancies.
The detention center nearly executed its evacuation plan earlier this year when another fire burned close by, Guthrie said.
“We ultimately did not have to pull that evacuation order, but we had aircraft from the United States Coast Guard ready to come in,” he said. “We had buses on the ground … about 15 different buses to do a full evacuation of that facility.”
Severe wildfire conditions are expected to last through the summer — overlapping with hurricane season.
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