http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080109/...ush_fire_crash

I hope any of you who live down there will be safe.

There must be tons of smoke over that area.

Lakeland is central Florida, really--not south.

We have brush fires a lot in Florida--this was just a bad combination of circumstances with the fog. It caught people unawares. They are investigating what knucklehead thought it would be a good day for a controlled burn... There's a lot of stupidity down here about how to do controlled burning.

Jay

You make it sound like some people feel that "it's controlled as long as it isn't burning my property".

IA about what some people consider safe. We have quite a few counties here that allow burning on certain days. These are counties where they don't have resources for picking up all the debris from their property. It's usually the mountain properties. However, there is always someone who thinks it's OK to burn in the dead of summer when everything around them is dry. Some people really deserve the Darwin award.

A controlled burn is something done by fire specialists on land that has become too overgrown thanks to fire suppression. It sounds weird, but in Florida our ecosystems are fire-based, meaning that fire is supposed to sweep through from time to time. Florida is the lightning capital of the country, and wildfires are common--but when the land became settled, people tried to stop the natural fires. So the undergrowth gets too heavy, and then when a fire happens it's disastrous.

So, the environmental agencies of the state and counties hire fire specialists to do controlled burns, which means that they are supposed to start the fire and keep the it under control. Unfortunately, the companies are not always reputable. They choose to burn during the wrong conditions. The fire gets away from them, and there is a big problem.

So, it's not just that some guy decided to burn in his backyard. But it may be that the company doing the burn might as well have been!

Jay

My sister lives in P'cola. They have allowed burn days so they can burn some of the brush from their land. Sometimes they have a portion of the property stacked with brush until the next burn day. They are so conscious of the mistakes that can be made. It's too bad some of their neighbors aren't.

Remember the brush fire that the Forest Service or some such agency started in Arizona or New Mexico a few years ago? I don't know why some idiot would start a controlled burn when they were having 50 mph winds! Typical case of - I got my orders and did what I was told. Geez!

I hope the smoke and all won't be too much longer.