The year-long drought is turning pine trees into standing matchsticks.
The ground under all those pine trees is so parched it could easily burst into flames if lightning strikes, or a careless smoker drops a still-lit cigarette.
The trees and their parts felled by hurricanes Ian, Helene, and Milton are dried out. In the forests, there are hundreds of tons of this natural kindling per acre.
When a wildfire has that much fuel, it burns hotter, spreads faster, and is much harder to control.
Even hurricanes give people more time to flee than an approaching wildfire, days compared to hours or minutes.
“It will probably be the most severe drought and wildfire season we have seen in years,” said Kevin Rambosk, the Collier County sheriff. “Like everyone else, we’re watching the environment. We're watching the weather. We know it's extremely dry. I'm not a scientist, not a meteorologist, but I can tell you that out in the (Golden Gate) estates right now, it's a tinderbox.”
He was speaking at the Collier County Sherriff’s aviation hanger at the Naples Airport, where a half-dozen firefighting agencies gathered to stress that they expect the coming weeks to start a busy spring wildfire season.
The agencies gathered to make sure Southwest Florida understands that a drought unlike any the Sunshine State has seen for more than 20 years has been drying out portions of the state — especially Southwest Florida — for a year.
Early last summer, an atmospheric heat dome slid over the region, not only setting high temperature records from Fort Myers to the Keys, but causing life-threatening heat many communities reacted to with cooling centers and warnings about heat stroke.
A below-average summer rainy season meant the drought got knocked down, but it got up again. With no hurricanes landing in Florida and low rainfall totals during the summer, by November heat was already baking the soil and dropping lake levels that hadn’t yet recovered.
“We're anticipating that we're going to see an early and more active-than-regular brush fire season in the upcoming year,” Chris Wolf, chief of the Naples Fire District, said. “This is mostly due to the significant drought that we're experiencing.”
On display were helicopters that police pilots use to drop huge buckets of water of fires. Bladed tractors that cut fire lines into the earth often in front of an active wildland fire manned by rangers with the Florida Forest Service.
The day after the wildfire awareness event Friday, Collier became the 15th county to enact a ban against outdoor burning. The final county in the region to enact a burn ban did so Tuesday when the Lee's Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously to put one in place, immediately, until further notice.
Related stories:
- Sunshine State mess: Drought strengthens, wildfires threaten, hurricane season approaches
- Warm temperatures in store after heat dome parked over worst drought in Florida in 25 years
- Southwest Florida's 2025 drought resumes as burn bans resurface
- How wildfires begin in Florida and their benefits to the forests
- Prescribed burn at Naples Botanical Garden to thwart wildfire
Most counties in the region watch the Keetch-Byram Drought Index, a measure of the dryness in the soil where zero on the scale is totally saturated soil and 800 is desert-dry with a lack of moisture at least eight inches down.
Pine forests have all but disappeared from Southwest Florida’s coastal counties to make way for subdivision, malls, and roads.
But there remains about one million acres of pine forest in inland Southwest Florida, a broad estimate based on data from Global Forest Watch and the U.S. Forest Service.
Needles, pinecones, and dead undergrowth often build up underneath pine forests, creating a thick layer of ground called “duff.”
During a drought, that thick duff layer dries out. In extreme cases, like conditions now, the layer itself catches fire, making the blaze harder to control and allowing it to spread underground.
The National Weather Service has issued a special drought information statement for the region since a dearth of rainfall during the last several weeks resulted in the worsening of drought conditions.
That caused the average KBDI in greater Southwest Florida to rise to up to 650: “This puts most of South Florida in a high risk of potential wildfire activity,” the NWS statement said.
The agency forecast the drought will continue through the spring — the heart of wildfire season — with no mention of the drought ending after then.
Last week, the National Integrated Drought Information System raised its total of Floridians living in a drought-affected region to 15.9 million, up 6.6 percent over the previous week.
“Given the current dry conditions across the region, continued below-normal precipitation this winter could impact multiple sectors when temperatures and water demands start to increase in the spring,” drought information system said on its website.
The cold part of winter may be short in the Sunshine State compared to more northern states, but during the entire season it usually rains enough to refill reservoirs and groundwater supplies. Not this winter.
“We’re in significant drought,” Jessie Lavender, a Florida Forest Service ranger, said. “Things are just incredibly dry right now. We need feet of rain.”
Tips to prepare for wildfire can be found online at BeWildfireReadyfl.com
— WGCU's Mike Walcher contributed to this story.
Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.
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