When Miami-Dade Fire Rescue District Chief Steve Blackford arrived in Flagler County in northern Florida on July 4, 1998, one of his first priorities was to set up a communications system. So he went through the proper channels. He asked Flagler County of ficials to ask state officials for 20 cellular telephones. A county commissioner at the Flagler emergency operations center handed him a phone. Just one. A single cell phone to set up and run the state's response to fires ravaging the county.

Blackford spent the next four hours getting the phone working – and he had no idea where he was going to find the other 19 he needed.

Blackford was among 23 command-level firefighters from South Florida dispatched to Flagler County to set up an incident command center to get a handle on the disaster – a disaster unlike any officials in Florida had ever faced: raging wildfires that were threatening, and even consuming, urban areas; fires that forced the evacuation of an entire county.

Ten fire officers from Palm Beach County, one from Delray Beach, nine from Miami-Dade, one from the City of Miami and two from Coral Gables began arriving in Flagler County on July 4, the day after the evacuation. Joe Myers, director of the Florida Divisi on of Emergency Preparedness, said he was glad he had people like the South Florida crew he could call on.

"(That) night to me was one of the more difficult periods," Myers recalled one week later. "I've been in emergency management for 24 years. I'm the only person who's been a director in two states. I've been through lots of evacuations." But the evacuation he was about to coordinate was unlike any ever anticipated in the state plan, which is designed for hurricanes.

About 70, 000 people were evacuated in several counties on July 2. The following day, the U.S. Forest Service had bad news about Flagler County, which had two major fires raging at opposite ends of the county and a third threatening from another county.

"The Forest Service walked into our office at 8 o'clock and said that we have a potentially catastrophic event," Myers recalled. "That's exactly how they put it. If that fire coming from Putnam County continues the way it's going, that fire is going to ge t in between that northern fire and that southern fire, and we were going to have a fire storm which we've never dealt with."

The storm would be over the town of Bunnell. And with fires to the south, north and west, and the ocean to the east, they were in a position to close the normal evacuation routes. Despite complaints from residents who spent hours on the roads trying to ge t out of Flagler, the evacuation went rather smoothly. Only one man died, a nursing home resident who suffered a heart attack.

When the command staff members arrived the next day, they found two officers from another county coordinating the entire state fire response. Those two men were trying to organize hundreds of firefighters called in to make sure no houses burned while the U.S. Forest Service got the wildfires under control. And the local firefighters, 118 of them, had been fighting the fires for a month and needed a break.

"When a local authority has a disaster, they'll beat themselves into the ground trying to do it themselves," Palm Beach County District Fire Chief Terry Croke explained as he drove up a deserted, smoky Interstate 95 to Bunnell the following day to join th e command staff. Often, one or two people are left making all the decisions, Croke said.

"In one second, somebody will be asking where to put the ice or how many meals they need and the next that same person who had to answer those questions will be sending out five brush trucks to save a neighborhood," Croke said.

The command staff had been dispatched from Brevard County to the south. In Brevard, the staff members supplemented what the local officials were already doing. In Flagler County, they found a different kind of disaster, a disaster so complete it taxed the local resources not just to their limit, but beyond it.

Before the fires, Flagler County didn't have a central fire department. Two of the three towns, Flagler Beach and Palm Coast, had career departments with 18 professional firefighters between them. The remainder of the fire stations were staffed by some 10 0 volunteer firefighters.

When the fires broke out, sheriff's deputies and paramedics were pressed into service to drag hoselines and dig ditches. Local citizens got together to feed the firefighters. When they showed up at the emergency operations center with truckloads of food, officials sent them out to the fires with it because the firefighters weren't coming in.

"When you weren't out on the line fighting the fire and you weren't sleeping, you distributed food," explained Rich Weizer, the county's emergency spokesman and a paramedic who fought fires alongside the volunteers.

When the county was evacuated and state assistance began to flow in, the local firefighters continued battling the fires, many of them refusing to be relieved. Even the supervisors stayed on the front lines. When he arrived on July 4, City of Miami Distri ct Fire Chief Frank Rollason took over as the incident commander for the state's response.

Like the rest of the command staff, Rollason had worked during Hurricane Andrew. Most of the officers had worked the Valu-Jet crash in the Everglades. Some, as part of a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) urban search and rescue team, had worked t he Oklahoma City bombing.

It was hard to know what Flagler County needed. In the event of a hurricane, the state is prepared to assist a county that can't respond to the disaster because it's too devastated.

"We have rapid-impact-assessment teams designed for hurricanes," Myers said. "The agencies go in and assess what the impact has been, then work with the county, advise the county on what they need. In a fire situation, we couldn't do the assessment becaus e we had a moving target."

The officers figured out what needed to be done. They divided up the tasks into a classic incident command system. Everyone on the command staff had a specific duty. The idea is to set up a system that is organized enough to coordinate a massive amount of work.

"Everybody knows their job and gets it done," said Miami Dade Fire Captain Ed Berry.

Repeatedly, the command staff encountered local fire crews who refused to be relieved, so several of the command officers took over logistics, like communications. One group planned operations; others set up a staging center to carry out those plans as we ll as to distribute wildland firefighting gear that the Forest Service had brought in – most of the Florida firefighters wore structural bunker gear that is too cumbersome for wildfire fighting.