Over the weekend 10 different wildfires formed across North Central Florida due to lightning strikes. They formed in Alachua, Marion, Levy, Gilchrist and Putnam counties and ranged from 1 acre to 80. They are all mostly contained now.
The only remaining impacts are smoke to some roadways, particularly along NE 39th avenue in Gainesville near the airport and state road 200 near county road 484 in Marion county.
These type of wildfires formed from lightning strikes are nothing out of the ordinary and are actually very common in our area this time of year. Ludie Bond of the Florida Forestry Service says, “lightning doesn’t always strike where the rain is falling and we had a lot of that this past weekend. The lightning was occurring in areas that did not receive rain therefore we had an uptake in our lightning caused fires.”