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10 June, 2006

Florida Burning

Brush fires have been popping up around our area for the past two months. It's an annual occurrence - right before the rainy season, everything catches on fire. This year, it's been a little worse. They've had to close various stretches of I-95 and some toll roads down on the coast. But this time it's personal:

Due to smoke, the Osceola County Sheriff's Office have closed a stretch of U.S. 192 between West Orange Lake and East Black Lake Roads.
Actually, after the Sentinel put out that article, the road closures went all the way from 429 to 27, and they closed a whole stretch of 429 as well. This, of course, is my way home from work. So I had to take I-4 all the way to Haines City and double back. And, wouldn't you know it, when I got to the 192/27 area, the FHP guys were gone. They reopened the road some time between 11:30 when I last looked at the website and midnight when I drove by. Grrr!

Right now the road is open. Hopefully it will stay that way and I'll be able to get to work today without going 15 miles out of my way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I lived in your town, so that was between 1999 and 2000, the smoke was so bad they closed I-4 from 192 to 528! THAT made the world's happiest place SLIGHTLY inaccessible ... which was fine, because the smoke was so bad that it was hard to see inside the parks! And it was very hard to breathe. And, of course, they got complaints like, "Can't you put up some big fans to blow the smoke away?

Anonymous said...

Now wait a minute, I was still in the condo in 1999 ... which I remember because of all the Y2K stuff! LOL So I lived in your town from Spring of 2000 til the Spring of 2001 ... but the fires were before the rainy season, like you said, so it had to be Spring of 2000 ... because in the Spring of '01, I was a mystery shopper!