Around this time 28 years ago, wildfires were popping up around northeast and central Florida. It would be the start of what is now called the 1998 firestorm.
Nearly 500,000 acres burned across the state, including thousands in Duval, Columbia, St. Johns, and Flagler counties. More than 300 homes were burned.
Ray Alfred had just moved to Jacksonville from Washington D.C. to become the chief of the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department. He called it “baptism by fire.”
“It’s kind of different because I was the fire chief in Washington and we had no wildfires – government buildings, residential structures and commercial buildings, that was it,” Alfred said. “But we had no wildfires and then I came here, and I think my introduction to the Jacksonville area were the wildfires, so it was rather interesting.”
Alfred would go on to serve on the Governor’s Wildfire Response and Mitigation Review Committee that was formed to address wildfire mitigation after the firestorm of 1998. Alfred said they learned the importance of conducting prescribed burns and other wildfire fighting techniques; however, he said the most important thing they learned was how to work with other departments.
“We got introduced to mutual aid to the extent that we had never seen before,” Alfred said. “Mutual aid played a big part because now we send firefighters from Jacksonville all the way south to the counties to the south of us. And so we had to get used to that.”
Alfred would go on to serve the city as fire chief for eight years.