Posted on 5/11/2007, 3:32:57 PM by dawn53
Just a quick question. We're in Tampa Bay...the smoke is awful. We have some family members who were going to visit Disney this weekend and wondered if there's heavy smoke in the Kissimmee/Orlando area?
yes, my brother called yesterday and said it was so think they had to put their headlights on in the daytime
thick too!
I am headed to Orlando this weekend so I called my friend in Orlando this morning and he said there wasn’t any smoke today. The winds could always shift though.
I live in Tampa. It was extremely smoky this morning but seems to be clearing up now.
Depends on which way the wind is blowing. Right now, the Tampa area is hit bad from smoke. But it is not local brush fires. It’s fires from near the Georgia border that’s producing the smoke here. You can see the smoke in satellite weather photos.
http://www.weatherunderground.com/satellite/vis/1k/US.html
zoom and pan in on the FL.GA area and you can see there are several point sources for the smoke that is flowing down to central FL.
That’s the problem, it can always change. This morning it was clear here. Then about 9 or 10 the smoke started to come in and it’s thick, thick, thick, right now.
My niece and her family are headed to Disney for a few days and one of the kids already has a cough, so you hate to think of having them out with the smoke being bad. I guess they’ll have to play it by ear.
Epcot, I guess, is the park with the least amount of exposure to outside. Once you get in a building you can stay there for a long time.
A lot of smoke across most of north Florida and extending over parts of the Panhandle.
I have to go to Lakeland this weekend for my son’s lacrosse tournament. Since it is close to Tampa and Orlando I imagine it is bad there too.
I’m not sure how health it is to be running and breathing in all this smoke.
In Central Florida, the smell of smoke is common with sporadic breaks, a bit of haze comes in now and then, actual ground-obscuring smoke is more rare. Your friends will experience smoke in Kissimmee but it will not be a major problem. I’m living it every day and know wherein I speak.
I’m in St Augustine, an hour south of Jacksonville in the NE corner of the state. The local Jax weather calls for winds from the northeast picking up during the course of the day and blowing the smoke in this area to central and south Fla.
The Tampa Bay TV stations are advising everyone not to go outside unless it is really necessary.
Yeah, it’s thick and smelly. I went outside with the dogs (that was a feat in itself getting them to go outside with the smoke being so thick)...and I came back in with some throat irritation.
Disney World is a smoke-free zone.
Here’s the URL of a neat webcam showing a construction site in downtown Tampa. If you look at archived pictures from earlier today, the smoke is quite thick.
http://novare.oxblue.com/element/
Also, a couple of vacant buildings caught fire a few weeks ago. Look at the archived pictures for March 5th at 11:24PM. In the upper right corner you can see a small fire on the roof of a building (started by burning embers from a nearby burning building). 12 minutes later at 11:36PM the building is totally engulfed. This may inspire people who hear a fire alarm in their building to get out as quickly as possible!!!
St. Pete here. Wasn’t too bad this morning but began to move in around 10 and now VERY heavy smoke. TV says will last til about 4 pm.
Not too bad in Ocala today, though it seems to worsen after sun down. According to the local news, tropical storm Andrea is parked off the Florida coast (”sitting and spinning,” said the local weatherman without cracking a smile) and recirculating the smoke over the state. What a bummer.
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