Dozens of homes were destroyed and thousands of people evacuated as wildfires rage out of control across large areas of eastern Florida. And with no rain in sight, firefighters were predicting yesterday that the blazes could only get worse.
More than 35,000 people were ordered to leave their homes on Tuesday and more than 135 miles of the main north-south coastal freeway closed as the fires swept closer to coastal communities from Jacksonville in the north, south past Daytona Beach towards the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral.
Over the past month, more than 1,700 fires, many triggered by lightning strikes in Florida's extensive tinder dry pine forests, have burned across a total area of almost 400 square miles of the state.
"I don't know if you've ever seen napalm," said one resident of Mims, east of Orlando, who was forced to flee from his home yesterday. "The results of napalm, that's what it looks like out there. We could see the flames coming through the trees. My wife and I just got in the cars and drove."
The biggest concentration of fires is in the area west of Daytona Beach, where most of the evacuations have been ordered. The worst hit communities are at Ormond Beach and in the northern suburbs of Daytona Beach, where more than 30,000 people have been told to leave their homes. A further 5,000 were evacuated from homes in the Brevard area. The towns of Mims and Scottsmoor were also particularly affected.
However, the fires are affecting many other areas of the state, from Pensacola in the north-west to several areas inland from Fort Myers on the Gulf of Mexico, where several new fires were reported yesterday.
The crisis is becoming acute, even for a state that is routinely battered by summer hurricanes and in which tornados devastated several communities in the central Florida area around Orlando earlier this year. The fires also come just as the state is gearing up for its massive annual invasion of summer tourists.
"Mother nature is not co-operating," said Mr Joe Wooden, the spokesman for Volusia County emergency services yesterday.
Further south, the Brevard County fire chief, Mr Mark Francesconi, said his teams did not have enough equipment to keep the fires away from homes. "This is ugly," Mr Francesconi said. "There are houses burning right now. They're very short of resources."
The evacuation instructions provoked angry confrontations between the authorities and desperate residents. Near Scottsmoor, a man was arrested and charged with attempted murder after he drove his vehicle at a deputy sheriff who was preventing him from going to his threatened home to retrieve his boat.