How the Palisades Fire's acreage compares to past fires on the Gulf Coast
The Palisades Fire is already much larger than even the biggest wildfire in the history of our coastal counties.
The Palisades Fire is already much larger than even the biggest wildfire in the history of our coastal counties.
The Palisades Fire is already much larger than even the biggest wildfire in the history of our coastal counties.
As the Palisades Fire continues to burn in Southern California, you may be curious how to put into perspective its growing size to the wildfires we've experienced along the Gulf Coast of South Florida.
Our local wildfire risk typically spikes in March, April and May as the months of minimal rainfall during the dry season take their toll on our area's vegetation and moisture content of the soil.
As of last check, CalFire data shows that the Palisades fire has now burned 23,713 acres and is considered to be less than 20% contained.
This acreage makes the Palisades Fire much larger than even the biggest wildfires our three coastal county areas have experienced.
According to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the largest single wildfire in the history of our coastal counties was the 2007 Great Balsa Fire in Collier County.
That fire started on May 5, 2007, and burned through 18,027 acres.
Inland areas of Southwest Florida, though, have had larger fires in the past.
The Moonshine Bay Fire for instance is the largest single wildfire in Glades County history. That fire happened in February of 2007 and ate through more than 43,000 acres before it was extinguished.
When you consider Florida's history as a state, there have been some very large fires in other parts of the peninsula, like the Deceiving Fire that burned through some 173,000 acres of Broward County in 1999.
But with Florida's wildfire history, what could be called the "worst of the worst" in modern history happened a year earlier, during the summer of 1998.
That year, some 500,000 acres of land burned, mainly in the northern and eastern areas of the state. Though not one single fire, multiple fires over several months earned it the designation as the Wildland Fire Outbreak.
Florida Health says that $620 million in damages have been attributed to the fires that burned in various places between the panhandle and along the east coast, primarily south of Jacksonville and north of Melbourne.
You can learn more about the 1998 Florida fire outbreak here.