Central Florida was in the firefight of its life 25 years ago today; half a million acres of brush burned, taking with them homes and cars while disrupting life for three months.
The firestorm of 1998 finally ended on July 5 of the same year thanks to heavy rain relief.
Florida learned valuable lessons from that disaster. For example, the Sunshine State now has the No. 1 prescribed burn program in the country.
The Florida Forest Service claims it does more prescribed burning than any other state in the country.
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After 1998, Tallahassee lawmakers revised the state’s Prescribed Fire Law to give more people the ability to do prescribed burns safely.
Fire managers began teaching homeowners to clear brush away from houses and build a fire “break” around homes instead of allowing vegetation to grow up against a house.
Hundreds of fires destroyed more than 300 homes and businesses in 1998, threatening to converge into a monstrous out-of-control inferno.
Cars were charred, major highways were closed for days — including I-95 — Fourth of July celebrations were canceled, and tens of thousands of people were evacuated, including the entire county of Flagler.
News 6 meteorologist Samara Cokinos said that year was so wet during the winter that so much fuel grew so quickly, and then an El Niño drought into July and dry lightning (lightning without rain) caused the brush to burn across Central Florida.
“We had a really wet winter that allowed the underbrush to really grow and flourish during that time,” Cokinos said. “When we went into the spring, we had a tropical high anchored over Florida, and basically, what that did is get rid of rain chances for several months. It did so much damage that we were in a major drought, and so a lot of our vegetation was very, very dry.”
Cokinos vividly remembers having to evacuate.
“We were driving, and I just remember seeing ash falling from the sky and landing in the windshield of my car, that’s something I will never forget,” Cokinos said. “The things that really matter to my family and I were pictures because the older the picture, you can’t replace those. So I just remember putting picture frames from my mom and dad’s walls in the backseat of my car. I mean, they were just stacked on top of one another.”
But what was also different in 1998 is Florida wasn’t aggressively back-burning, or prescribed burning, like it does now, according to Melbourne National Weather Service meteorologist and Fire Weather Program Leader John Pendergrast.
“Well coming out of 1998, the State of Florida recognized that prescribed burning was a really wonderful tool to mitigate large fire and fire spread,” Pendergrast said.
Pendergrast advises the Florida Forest Service when and when not to burn brush — on purpose — to eliminate potential brushfire fuel before a drought.
The Forest Service said that after 1998, it began certifying prescribed burn managers — sending them to a four-day class, even supervising their first back burns, to teach more people to burn responsibly and prevent another firestorm.
Also before 1998, private landowners such as ranchers were largely concerned about the liability of prescribed burning. The law changed to where they are not liable for a prescribed burn unless they are “grossly negligent.”
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