- December 15, 2025
Fire season, which officials have already predicted to be as bad as 1998, is upon us.
Crystal Martin was feeding her 4-month-old baby April 11, at her home in Daytona North, when she got a knock on the door.
It was a firefighter. “I don’t know if you looked out your back window, but you need to go,” he said. Then he drove away in a hurry, down the dirt road.
“I just started scrambling,” Martin recalled. “As I was running back to my daughter’s room, I looked out the window, and I didn’t see any flames, but all I saw was this big, huge, black cloud.”
Martin’s home was one of 15 evacuated in Daytona North that day. That fire, combined with smoke drifting into Flagler County from an 11,500-acre swamp fire in Columbia County April 10, led Flagler officials to schedule an emergency burn ban, which will be ratified Monday.
“(Fire conditions) are at least where they were last year, if not worse,” Palm Coast Fire Chief Mike Beadle said April 12. “This afternoon is going to be a nice Florida day, the kind of weather a lot of us moved here for. … But in our world, it’s not a good day. The humidity is too low, and it’s too windy.”
Cypress Point brushfire
Within about 12 hours of the Daytona North fire, flames flared to two stories high in an 8.44-acre wooded area around 10 a.m. April 12 in one of Palm Coast’s busiest shopping areas. About 40 firefighters and other personnel were working to control the blaze and ensure that no structures were threatened.
Traffic was blocked on Cypress Point Parkway from Pine Cone Drive to Belle Terre Parkway to allow access for firefighters. A fire hose was stretched across four lanes of Cypress Point in the late morning, as one crew of firefighters sprayed smoldering palmetto stumps near the sidewalk on the south side.
Another crew used a drip torch — a gas can filled with a mix of gasoline and diesel fuel and capped with a wick — to burn underbrush in a controlled fashion.
“It’s called a forest fire, but that’s a misnomer,” said Timber Weller, information officer for the Florida Forest Service. “All that’s burning is brush. Once that’s gone, there’s not enough energy for it to catch a tree on fire. It’s like trying to start a campfire with a log and a match.”
Beadle said the Cypress Point Parkway fire, near Walmart, began to “spot over” into the backside of Putter Drive to the south, but it was quickly contained. Still, smoke might linger in the area for at least a week.
“The county helicopter is up,” he said around noon April 12. “Forestry has made fire lines. … We’ve got crews inside the fire, working on hotspots … (and) we’re just about done with the burnout.”
Weller said the cause of the Cypress Point fire is unknown, but one thing is for certain: It wasn’t started by lightning. And in Florida, he said, that’s the only natural cause of fire. “We don’t have volcanoes,” he said.
That means, the fire must have been man-made. There was no indication as of April 12 that the fire was caused by arson, but the case remains under investigation, which is standard procedure. Even when lightning is in the area, investigators still attempt to locate the origin strike.
“That way, arsonists can’t get the idea that they can set fires during lightning storms and get away with it,” Weller said. He said 80% of fires every year are caused by humans. One accidental cause of a fire occurs when a driver pulls over to the side of a road to make a call or check a map. The catalytic converter underneath the car can be 1,000 degrees. When it touches long grasses, it can cause a fire. (Grass can catch fire at 600 degrees, he said.)
Weller added that the Cypress fire is in a bad location on one hand because it’s a high-traffic area. But on the other hand, it’s a good area because the fire is surrounded by parking lots, a canal and a two-lane road. “Usually, we have to make the road ourselves (in the woods),” he said.
“We ask residents that if they see flames, absolutely call (911) immediately,” Beadle added. “But if it’s smoke, chances are we know about it. We’ll be monitoring this area for quite some time.”
Drought index: 552 of 800
Drift smoke from the Columbia fire, on the Baker County line, brought visibility down to less than two miles in Jacksonville April 9, prompting health officials to issue a health advisory in the area. In Flagler, the drought index is 552 of 800, compared to Columbia County’s index of 433.
In Bunnell, the index mean is 584, with 41% of the district in the 600 to 700 range.
“We just need rain,” Beadle said. “Little things we take for granted (like barbecue debris) could actually cause us some problems. But with the support of the community, we’ll be able to take care of everything.”
Beadle added that crews still have bottled water donated last year by residents, but if fire season continues toward a similar threat level this year, workers might be requesting power drinks.
“We don’t have the fire problems that Volusia has, but our numbers are in the danger range,” said County Communications Manager Carl Laundrie. “The scale is zero (totally saturated) to 800, which is Death Valley desert-type conditions.”
Volusia County’s drought index is 621.
Weller added that Flagler County is prepared for the fires this year, thanks to years of experience. When fires raged throughout the state in 1998, there was a time when all 67 counties had active fires, he said, and Flagler was the only county government in the state to purchase a firefighting helicopter as a result. Communications between agencies are also improved.
‘It was something pretty scary’
One person who will sing the praises of firefighters for a long time to come is Crystal Martin. The April 11 fire that threatened her home is still a vivid memory.
Martin said that when she was told to evacuate, she threw some things in her Jeep and drove to the home of a sympathetic neighbor who had been evacuated just a year earlier for a fire. “We’ve lived here about four years, and there have been two fires on our street,” Martin said.
Firefighters rushed around the street. They stood in her backyard and sprayed the fire for hours, protecting her home. A helicopter pulled buckets of water from the lake at the Hidden Trails Park playground to douse the flames.
Martin said her boyfriend recently dug a ditch with a tractor to help with drainage on their fence. It wasn’t meant as fire protection, but she said the fire reached the ditch and didn’t move any farther, except for one scary moment.
“It came over the fence and got a tree,” she recalled. “It was behind us and around us. It was something pretty scary.”
Shortly after settling in to the neighbors’ house, Martin went back into her own home briefly to retrieve some money in case they needed to stay at a hotel for the night, and she found that the house was already full of smoke. She had not left a moment too soon, which was especially good for her infant. Two months earlier, the baby had pneumonia and had stayed in the hospital for a week.
Martin’s other daughter, Kyleigh, was also troubled by the fire.
“I had them in the car, with the air on circulate,” Martin said. “Kyleigh kept saying, ‘Is our house going to burn down, Mommy? I like our house. I don’t want to move.’”
The family also has two dogs, one of which ran away more than once during the fire and dug under fences, trying to escape.
As much fear and anxiety as she felt April 11, Martin was relieved April 12, after it was essentially over and she was back in her own home. She had one thing on her mind: “The firefighters — I don’t even know how to thank them.”
RADIO DAZE
Flagler County received a delivery of 50 radios at 10 a.m. Wednesday, April 11, at the Emergency Operations Center in Bunnell. The radios were part of a Public Safety Interoperable Communications grant to provide better communications to fire and rescue units in the county and other agencies.
The grant was created by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 and awarded Florida a total of $42,888,266. Flagler was awarded $253,000.
According to officials, the radios will enhance communications with fire workers in St Johns, Putnam and Volusia counties, Jacksonville and the Florida Division of Forestry.
