SEBRING Highlands County residents parking their cars or mowing on dry, high grass are inadvertently causing wildfires, which have been higher than usual for this time of the year. ...more

March 3, 2009

Thanks to the cold fronts and frost conditions from last week and continuing lack of rainfall, Highlands County is right now the driest county in Florida, adding to dangerous wildfire hazards, according to the Florida Division of Forestry. ...more

January 29, 2009

It's a tinder box out there. Dry conditions are prompting officials to warn of the threat of wildfires. The Division of Forestry puts the fire threat in Hernando County at high. ...more

December 24, 2008

AVON PARK — A fire that destroyed an isolated mobile home late Monday morning spread to the surrounding yard, then growing into a wildfire that had firefighters on alert through the afternoon, according to firefighters on scene. No injuries were reported from the Avon Park Estates mobile home on West Starr Road, which was believed to be abandoned. However, the mobile home was reduced to its cinder blocks and a floor that resembled a nearly cleared, blackened platform. ...more

May 12, 2008

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. ...more

February 19, 2008

LAKE PLACID — As firefighters battled flames Monday and Tuesday, they kept talking about defensible space. That's a minimum 30-foot no-vegetation zone around houses, barns, outbuildings and other possessions. Two hundred feet is more desirable. ...more

February 14, 2008

LAKE PLACID — About 400 acres of brushy, forested land burned Monday and Tuesday, but no houses, no barns, no businesses were damaged. Exactly how does that happen, when hundreds of structures are threatened? ...more

February 14, 2008

LAKE PLACID — Tuesday morning, bright and early, Florida Division of Forestry crews were out with bulldozers, pushing down brush and small trees that could cause future blazes. ...more

February 12, 2008

TAMPA - Forestry crews are continuing the difficult job of extinguishing smoking hot spots from a fire in Polk County that still could force the closing of Interstate 4. ...more

January 16, 2008