Frustrated Florida officials and firefighters battling a raging wildfire in the Green Swamp admit they can’t put out the 11,000-acre blaze, saying the most they can do is attempt containment by using bulldozers to surround it with firebreaks, and then pray for rain.
“Humans don’t have the ability to carry enough water to put out a swamp fire,” said Division of Forestry spokesman Timber Weller. “All we can do is secure the perimeter, so it doesn’t get any larger. It’s frustrating to be this powerless.”
Officials also say the fire in the 54,000-acre swamp about 40 miles southwest of Orlando could burn and smolder for months.
The fire and smoke aren’t the only problems. Crews are cleaning up scorched trees that have snapped and fallen on Interstate Highway 4, which has been closed since the weekend and could remain off-limits to traffic until Monday or longer. Wayward cows are wandering nearby, freed from pastures because the fences have burned.
About 140 firefighters spent most of Tuesday plowing 30-foot fire breaks, ditches designed to contain the flames. They took advantage of low winds by back-burning the areas near those lines. With 21 tons of muck and plants in a single acre that serves as fuel for the flames, the back burning ensures that a fire threatening the boundary has less to burn.
The intentional burns sent plumes of black and white smoke barreling into the foggy sky. Flames leapt as high as 80 feet, all under the careful eye of firefighters. There were no evacuations Tuesday or reports of property damage in the heavily rural area.
“Either we get rain or this fire gets down to the soil, and there is nothing left to burn,” said Donnie Callahan, a firefighter from Panama City who has been fighting the blaze since Saturday.
The muck fueling the fire is essentially a layer of peat that extends 6 or 7 inches underground, fueling a slow, steady burn.
Officials closed Interstate 4 to prevent a loss of lives on a road obscured by smoke and threatened by falling trees.
Jim Harrell, a top official with the Division of Forestry, said the falling trees also make fighting the fire extremely hazardous. So the strategy is to devote most manpower to containing the fire, in the hope that rain will come and douse it.
That may not be soon. Forecasters say there is no end in sight to the region’s crippling three-year drought. Harrell pointed out that March and April tend to be dry, and with no rainwater in the bank, conditions might not get better until early July, when the summer thunderstorms begin.
“Generally the outlook is it’s not very likely to change real quick,” he said.
Letting the fire burn itself out might in fact help the swamp; fires replenish the soil with nutrients and encourage some plants to grow.
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“A hundred years ago, a fire like this would have just burned itself out,” Weller said. “But as humans, we’re not good at letting nature take its course.”