Wildfires

At this writing (posted later), I am sitting outside, surrounded by smoke emanating from a wildfire many miles away in northeast Alachua county. Yesterday I heard that Florida was currently experiencing several wildfires and that other parts of the country were plagued with fires, most notably Minnesota and California. It reminds me of the plague of wildfires that afflicted Florida back in 1998, but at that time firefighting help came from other parts of the country. If they're fighting their own fires, we'd better hope for some rain, and soon.

During that time in the spring of 1998, immense stretches of land in Flagler and Volusia counties east of us were scorched to the ground (whenever we go to Ormond Beach, we pass a sign marking a site of the "Firestorm of 1998"). But Alachua county had its share of trouble, too. At the same time as the other fires, there was a bad one on the outskirts of Waldo (a small town about twenty miles northeast of Gainesville known chiefly for its speed traps on U.S. 301) threatened to engulf it, but I didn't get the full thrust of its severity until the wind changed direction. The fire had been raging for a few days, and I pulled into my workplace's parking lot a little before 11:00 PM. When I stepped out of my car, I was astounded and frightened, because the entire air had heated up greatly and grown much smokier, with even small particles of ash visible. And this was about twenty-five miles from the scene of the fire! But it felt as if the fire was just a block or two away. I cannot begin to understand how intense it must have been for those actually near the conflagration. A few years later, we also had a smaller wildfire about two miles north of us. It seriously threatened some nearby homes, but, like the Waldo fire, was put out before it could cause too much damage.

The smell of the smoke from today's fire and from the one back in 1998 reminds me of the first time that I experienced this sort of thing. Back in South Florida in the spring of 1971, we were experiencing a drought, which, besides putting a strain on the water supply, didn't really bother people all that much. Until some contemptible fool(s) decided it would be fun to set fire to the Everglades! For weeks, fires blazed unchecked and all of South Florida was blanketed in a thick cloud of stinky, filthy smoke that got into everything. The only similar thing that I can compare that experience to is the sensation is get when I walk into the home of a heavy smoker, even when no smoking is going on. Eventually, of course, the fires were extinguished, rain fell, and life went on. The next spring, in 1972, saw the opposite occurrence: for weeks it looked as if it would never stop raining! That was a peculiar year, though , weather-wise. In June, Hurricane Agnes hit the Florida panhandle and merged with a severe cold front to cause massive flooding in the northeast, especially in Pennsylvania. After Agnes, there were only three other named Atlantic tropical storms that year, an anomaly. Which makes me want to say a few things about hurricanes, but I'll leave that for another time ...