IF
YOU CAN ʼ T GET OUT,
Whatʼs That Smoke? FEBRUARY 2021
By Michael Heller Water LIFE editor Last month we were driving out to Englewood on our weekly ‘paper route’. When we turned off Flamingo onto SR 776 the air was thick with smoke. A new development on the north side of the road had piled up acres of cleared pine trees, and were burning them. Burning landscape during the clearing phase of development is just like burning sugar cane... it’s the way we do it in Florida - not a good way, but the way we have always done it. You and I can’t burn our yard waste outside, only the sugar business and developers can do that. My wife and I talked about the bad part of ‘burning’ for a while and then the conversation took a turn right into the past. ‘Do you remember....’ I started, and my wife stopped me cold: ‘I know, you and Kenny...’ she was right about the story I wanted to tell - 37 years together will do that for you, but here’s the story anyway! In the mid 70s, I was working for a builder in Palm Beach County. My job was to coordinate the land development and the ‘bottom end’ construction in Sandalfoot Cove, a new single family home development off US-441 on the edge of the Loxahatchee Wildlife Preserve. The area was first developed into an orange grove. Then it was developed into a
F OLLOW U S
mobile-home golf course community and when I came on it was evolving into a community of single family homes. We were expanding into a new section of uncleared land. In the process, the developer buldozed everything flat. Then the palmetto were sifted out and the big pine trees were piled up and burned. The trees were downed months before. Now they were pushing them together with big dozers, splitting and cracking them for two full days. The pile was probably 40 feet high and half-a-football-field around when my co-worker friend Kenny O’Leary and I were given the task of getting a fire started under it. “Take the fuel truck and saturate it with diesel’ one of the dozer operators told us... we were both in our late 20s.... it seemed like a good idea. We followed his advice. We drove the fuel truck around the pile, first pumping fuel with a hose and then later splashing buckets of diesel deep into the pile. Then the dozer guy showed back up with a pick up truck loaded with old tires. “Scatter these around and put some diesel in them before you light it,” he advised and we followed his advice again. He must know how to do this. When it was all done and ready for a match, we wrapped a rag around a stick and soaked it in some more diesel. It was hard to light, but we got it lit and tossed it into the pile .... and it went out. We tried several more times without any luck. By then it was late, so we decided to
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Heading to Englewood, on 776 near Flamingo, the smoke was thick last month.
get it lit in the morning. The next morning Kenny and I went out to the field armed with a gallon of gas. We wrapped another stick with a new rag and put a few drops of gas on it. We knew how volatile gasoline was... but just to be sure we splashed the rest of the gallon on the front side of the pile. We were back 40 or 50 feet when Kenny wound up and pitched the burning stick underhand, softball style, at the pile. Everything turned yellow. The force of the explosion knocked us both backwards onto the ground. The heat was intense we scrambled backwards on our butts to get away, but the heat was nothing compared to the smoke that followed. After the flash, the sky went dark. A huge umbrella of thick black smoke, rolling and burbling with fire-lit edges,
billowed upwards. Rubber smoke and diesel rose into the air and kept rising. It smoked heavily for at least a half hour.... before the sherriff arrived. We knew Officer Fred. He was one of the good ol’ boys from the Palm Beach County S-O. He got out of his cruiser and just shook his head. “We had a call from the airport,’ he said. “They thought a plane had gone down!” By then a group of other workers had left their job sites and come over to see the fire. Lee Hagerman, the big Honcho of the whole project, dove up in his blue Buick Skylark, chewing on his trademark cigar stub. He made eye contact with us, gave me his squinty stare, and drove off. The fire burned for a week. I think the carbon footprint for the entire state of Florida grew by one full size that day!