It took a week to do it, but Florida firefighters reported on March 7 that the 16,000-acre “Iron Horse fire” was fully contained. Crews had been fighting the blaze on the Brevard County and Volusia County border a few miles west of I-95 since Monday, March 1, with one firefighter suffering serious burns, reported Orlando TV station WESH (“' Iron Horse Blaze Burns 17 500 Acres ”). With limited manpower and equipment, fire commanders had to balance the goals of containing the fire’s spread and protecting valuable property, reported Central Florida News13 on Wednesday, March 3 (“ Winds cause flare ups at 16 715 acre Iron Horse Fire ”). Division of Forestry official Cliff Frazier told reporters, ““There's no way to say we have enough crews to battle this fire at every inch of the way, so we're battling it in phases we know that's going to be effective.” Even while focusing on houses, firefighters could not protect every building. The YouTube video below shows an outbuilding engulfed in flames after being overrun by the fire. Experts say the intense heat of peak fire is only present for a few minutes, not enough to ignite a building; but to protect buildings, dry brushy growth and large trees have to be kept clear from the zone immediately around the building. Home landscapes that are carefully maintained to remove fire fuel have a much better chance of surviving when fire touches the area, studies show. Fire has targeted this area before. Residents of the Lake Harney Woods subdivision in Oak Hill were on alert in case of evacuation orders, reported the Daytona Beach News-Journal, but a burn-over two years ago meant that fuel that might support the current fire was thin on the ground (“ Subdivision residents on alert “). “"Everything has already been burnt," resident Cindy Decker told the paper. If the fire was surrounded, that didn’t mean it was out, fire officials emphasized. It may take weeks or even months and a long rainstorm to put out all the embers and sub-soil smoldering remnants of the fire, they said — and for now, live flames are still cropping up within the fireline perimeter. On Monday morning, March 1, smoke from the fire caused a four-vehicle pileup and closed a 13-mile stretch of I-95, reported News13 (“ Bad pileup on I 95 amid heavy smoke from Iron Horse Fire ”). And with the official fire season just beginning, officials say Florida will be lucky if a traffic accident is the worst consequence the state sees from fire this year. Florida typically ranks among the nation’s top ten states for wildfire occurrence: in 2007 (an especially bad year), fires burned more than 500,000 acres in the state, and as recently as 2009, fire consumed 124,000 acres. This year may be another bad one, officials told the News-Journal (“ Officials Conditions still prime for fires ,” by Dinah Voyles Pulver). Fire official Mike Kuypers told the paper that the Iron Horse fire is an early arrival. It’s "pretty unusual to have a fire this large this early in the fire season,” Kuypers said, adding, “We're a couple of months early. That doesn't bode well considering they're still expecting a fairly dry spring."
