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Periodically, throughout the month of March, Lake Okeechobee area residents have complained about the smell of something burning.
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Periodically, throughout the month of March, Lake Okeechobee area residents have complained about the smell of something burning.
According to the Florida Forest Service, a 35-acre mulch fire has been burning since March 1, west of Interstate 95 near Range Line Road in western St. Lucie County. A lightning strike apparently started the blaze.
The mulch stacks are surrounded by the C-23 canal, a solar panel field and several ponds. No structures are threatened by the fire.
Throughout the month, winds have spread the smoke over a wide area.
Because the fire is smoldering underground in the mulch piles, it may take rains – likely more than one rain event -- to extinguish it.
Late January freezes and a drier-than-normal dry season have combined to make much of South Florida at high risk of wildfires. As of March 28, Okeechobee, Martin, Glades and Hendry Counties are under a burn ban.
The Florida Forest Service has been fighting dozens of brush fires since the start of the year. An online map shows current firefighting operations. If no structures are threatened, in many cases, they contain the fires with fire breaks and back-burning and let the fires burn themselves out. Florida is a fire-dependent ecosystem. Fires burn off the dead brush, making way for new growth.
Fires on federal land (such as the fire that burned 35,000 acres in the Big Cypress National Preserve) are tracked on a different website.
