Henscratch Fire May Smolder For Months

LAKE PLACID - On Henscratch Road, a column of smoke moved from east to west, with the wind. Eight days later, the fire is still simmering.

Two blocks away, behind Bert Dawson's mobile home on Grand Concourse Drive, there's more smoke.

"Yesterday, the wind started it up again," said Dawson, who paused while building a deck between his home and his mother's travel trailer. "Little fires. I got on my 4-wheeler and went back there."

Behind his ranchette, there's a hammock of pine and hardwood trees, and the underbrush is as thick as it gets in Florida. Somewhere - Dawson thinks it was east of his home - the Henscratch fire started on Feb. 11.

It's still 95 percent c ontained, as it was on the third day, said Melissa Yunas, a Florida Division of Forestry wildfire mitigation specialist. The fire has stayed behind the fire lines, she said.

She doesn't know when it will eventually die out. Muck fires have lasted more than a year.

"Until we get a significant amount of rain," Yunas said. A one-inch downpour on the night of Feb. 12 helped a little bit, she said, and so did showers on Sunday and Monday. But none sufficiently drenched the tree trunks and green vegetation that forest service bulldozers piled into a 400-acre circle while digging a 30-foot wide firebreak.

"I was kind of mad at them, at first," confessed Dawson. He didn't like the way the dozers ruined the forest behind his acreage. But before long, he figured it out. The firefighters saved his house, his barns, all of his equipment.

"I told them, if they need to get under there," he said, pointing to the open-air barn, "and spray it all down, go ahead. It'll dry out. But if it all burned, it's gone."

The smoke was bothersome at first, Dawson said. On the first and second days, the wind pushed smoke into his acreage. He sent his mother away to safety, and retreated inside, where he took some oxygen which he normally uses for sleep problems.

The fire was set, accidentally, by a resident burning trash, Yunas said. The law enforcement division of the agriculture department has not completed its investigation, so she has been instructed not to release the name or the address of the firestarter.