The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning Monday for Central Florida as crews battled a 120-acre wildfire in northern Lake County that has been worsened by wind conditions.<\/p>\n
The NWS station in Melbourne said the warning was for Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Lake, Volusia and Okeechobee counties because low humidity and gusty northeast winds in the region may produce a \u201chigh fire danger.\u201d The warning will take effect Tuesday and last from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.<\/p>\n
Any fires that develop during this time are expected to spread rapidly and outdoor burning is not recommended.<\/p>\n
Fire rescue crews in Lake County have been battling a wildfire near Umatilla for several days. It has now reached 120 acres and was at 65% containment as of Monday evening, according to a spokesperson from the Florida Forest Service.<\/p>\n
The spokesperson said the fire had been nearly contained over the past several days until wind caused it to spread, worsening once it reached a swamp. A helicopter is dropping water on the fire to cool it down and fire rescue crews are still working to establish containment lines around the blaze.<\/p>\n
Three homes have been evacuated and people are being asked to avoid the area. The cause of the fire is still being investigated, according to the spokesperson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning Monday for Central Florida as crews battled a 120-acre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[112,28,30,29,2174,114,266,115,109,17824,221],"class_list":["post-239788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-lake-county","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-social","tag-umatilla","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}