Thousands of people were evacuated Tuesday but later allowed to return home after a sea breeze pushed a massive wildfire away from their houses near Cape Canaveral.
“It’s contained for now, and hopefully, we think we can keep it that way,” said Joan Heller, a spokeswoman with Brevard County Emergency Management. “We’ve got firefighters all around it, so it’s looking good.”
No homes were lost, and no injuries were reported.
The evacuation order was lifted for residents of 2,000 homes between Mims and Scottsmoor near Titusville and the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s East Coast.
The order to leave had come about five hours earlier.
The 10,000-acre blaze in Brevard County diverted attention from Volusia County, farther north on the coast, where firefighters battled a series of new blazes sparked Tuesday night during a severe lightning storm in the southwest part of that hard-hit county.
The storm sparked fires, knocking down power lines and splintering trees.
In Brevard, two separate fires, in a hunting preserve and wildlife area, had been burning for two days. Tuesday morning, a wind shift began pushing the fires to the east, toward populated areas.
Dozens of firefighters made their stand east of the blaze along utility lines that run almost parallel to Interstate 95.
As bulldozers roared to cut a firebreak, Athea Presley watched from her yard nearby.
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“Thank goodness I just did my wash this morning,” she said. “We’ve been dealing with this for a week now.”
The power lines were the site of a command center set up over the weekend. Presley said she felt safe then because so many firefighters were surrounding her house.
But that changed when Brevard Sheriff’s Cpl. Jim Kellison pulled into her driveway a few minutes later.
“We need to get you packed up and out of here,” Kellison said.
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she headed for her trailer, saying she had to get her dogs first.
“All locked up? Got your keys?” Kellison asked.
She gave a tearful nod and left.
Clouds of dirt rose from the road as residents sped off, all beneath the clatter of helicopters fighting the inferno.
“I got my dog, my medicine, my cigarettes and my scooter. That’s all I’ll be needing,” said Jim Ramsey, 82, who lives in a hunting camp.
A stroke a year ago makes the scooter, a battery-powered cart, a necessity for him to get around.
Ron Weiss of the state Division of Forestry stood beneath the utility lines gathering information from spotter planes and deploying ground crews.
“We’ve got a three-pronged attack under way,” Weiss said. “First, we send in the helicopters to wet it down, then the bulldozers work the fire line, then we send in the brush trucks.”
As Weiss and Rowdy Muir, a U.S. Forest Service official from Wyoming, plotted strategy late Tuesday, they got an immense assist from nature when the eastward sea breezes pushed back the fires.
The wind shift couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
“Based on what (forecasters were) telling us earlier, there was a real possibility this fire was going to jump the interstate and head into Kennedy Space Center Property,” Muir said.