Got an e-mail from my landlady just after noon, our trailer park is evacuated and but there's no damage. The fire has consumed 7,500 acres at the west end of the Everglades near Naples, southwest of the I-75 and Collier Boulevard. No casualties but a few houses and other buildings lost… So far. But the fire is only 40% contained and winds are expected to increase tonight. Here's the Collier County Emergency Management's wensday afternoon update.
Now the backgrounder: The everglades stretch from the coastal barrier ridges of Miami to Naples, a vast literal “River of Grass” that in it's former glory covered much of south Florida. At the western end towards Florida hundreds of square miles of Cypress forest was logged off in the 40s and 50s, largely by native and Black loggers standing hip deep in swamp water. Then infamous Florida land developers moved in, draining the swamp with a vast network of ditches and using the spoils to build crude dirt roads to poorly serve the world’s largest subdivision, Golden Gate Estates. While some of the northern portion of the subdivison has been slowly built out, even with all the drainage ditches the lower southern portion flooded regularly and was pretty much abandoned to drug runners who used the development's miles long “main street” as a runway for their DC-3s full of dope. Florida has bought up most of the abandoned two and a half acre lots, nearly 20,000 of them, and they’re developing the area into a state forest. A massive federally funded project is filling in the drainage ditches and attempting to reflood the Everglades, but we’re just starting to see results from that project.
I’ve explored the area by motorcycle, and it’s hard to believe it was once a vibrant swamp… Looks more like an arid and sandy semi-desert with the occasional palm and the odd tropical creatures making the best of it in the ditch waters. In spots second growth cypress has returned, but in many areas you can still see the roadbed and tie marks of the logging railroad tracks that were pulled up six decades ago. It’s a perfect setting for a wildfire, and with only narrow roads to delay fire’s spread. Heck, embers even blew across the 4 lanes of I-75 and started the county dump afire yesterday! To top it off, this land that should have been left alone sits 10 feet above sea level and 10 miles inland, and over 80% of the county is in flood plain. But that hasn’t slowed down the developers, who are throwing up strip malls, Walmarts, condos, and McMansions as fast as the dwindling supply of largely immigrant labor can build them.
Paradise Coast? More like hell awaiting the flood...