Daytona Beach firefighters worked through the night to put out a 40-acre brush fire. The fire burned an area near the Halifax Medical Center, Volusia Mall and the Terrace Nursing Home.
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Firefighters worked well into the night to attack the stubborn fire from above, flying into thick smoke in the dark to keep the flames away from a nursing home and Halifax Medical Center.
"It's not easy up there. It's quite a bit unusual that we fight fire with a helicopter at night," said Chief Pilot Glen Wenzel, Flagler County Emergency. "The people on the ground were in danger."
The dangerous fire burned 40 acres of a heavily-wooded tract of land between the Volusia Mall and the hospital. It is land so treacherous, the Daytona Beach Fire Department had to abandon a brush truck when it got bogged down and couldn't be moved quickly enough as the strong wind moved the fire line ever closer.
Meanwhile, the heavy smoke overcame one of an army of firefighters on the scene, as the Division of Forestry cut a swath of land around the fire to keep it from spreading any more.
"It's almost like a dried Christmas tree, if you can imagine how flammable a dried Christmas tree would be," Wenzel said.
The injured firefighter is going to be okay and no personnel were seriously hurt. Early Tuesday morning, firefighters returned to the brush truck they had to abandon. They said it has been destroyed. It was the department's only heavy brush truck and now they're going to have to replace it as fire season is just getting underway.
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