Florida girds for horrific wildfire season

Disaster News Network: The latest seasonal outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns that despite some heavy storms in February and March, both western Texas and Oklahoma and much of California, along with central and south Florida are likely to see drought conditions continue or get worse into June.

The wildfire season in all of these areas typically ends in June with the onset of summer rains, but long range forecasts predict that the drought conditions across the south over the last year have been so severe that even if rains were to return at normal levels, fire threats would not diminish this year.

In central and south Florida drought have been increasing, and some cities had their driest winter on record. In the panhandle across the northern part of the state, heavy rains in March and early April eased the fire threat for now. In that area of the state, flooding is a greater threat than fire.

“Flood potential is high across North Florida at this time and fire threat remains high in central and south Florida,” said James Karels, director of the Florida Division of Forestry. “It is possible that we could be looking at a fire season as bad – or worse – than we had in 1998.”

In 1998, extremely dry conditions, coupled with temperatures that fell below 95 degrees only once in the month of June, set the central part of the state, literally, ablaze, burning 120,000 acres that month. In all, about 120 homes were destroyed and hundreds were damaged. Twenty-three people were injured by those fires.

“Many of those fires were in rural or agricultural areas,” Karals said. “In the last11 years, a lot of those areas have become more developed.”….

The 2007 Bugaboo fire in Florida, FEMA