Hurricanes and wildfires pose major threats. Marion County has an answer.
Hurricanes are a way of life in Florida from June to November – the state’s official hurricane season – so it’s not surprising that federal disaster management officials say our community is at higher risk of damage from such storms than 97.3 percent of the nation’s other counties.
What might be surprising, though, is those same officials say we are at even greater risk – if only slightly so — of being struck by wildfires, based on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Risk index.
Of course, hurricanes typically have greater impact on greater numbers of people because of their threat to infrastructure, namely downed power lines, roadways blocked by trees and flooding and public safety inaccessibility to residents’ homes and businesses in a storm’s immediate aftermath.
So, the bad news is hurricanes and wildfires are a sometimes-deadly part of life in Florida every summer and fall. The good news – really good news — is that Marion County has created organizations and response plans built on multi-agency collaboration and cooperation that calls for them to respond with speed and numbers to minimize the threat to human life and property.
It takes an army
FEMA assessed the threat of various natural disasters in each of the nation’s 3,144 counties, including Marion. Each county is ranked based on how each type of disaster in its confines compares with the other 3,143 counties across the land. For example, Marion County has a greater risk of wildfires than 99.2 percent of the rest of the counties in America. The National Risk Index lists the following disaster threats as “relatively high” here. In order:
• Wildfires (99.2 percent)
• Lightning (97.6 percent)
• Hurricanes (97.3 percent)
• Tornadoes (96.4 percent)
• Preston Bowlin has been emergency management director for Marion County since 2017. It’s been a busy time for the 35-year public safety veteran – he’s been a firefighter, a paramedic and a law enforcement officer along the way – as climate change makes hurricanes bigger and wetter.
“We’ve pretty much activated every year since I’ve been here,” he said from his office inside the county’s Emergency Operations Center, or EOC.
Bowles said his office and its six dedicated employees are “constantly assessing” natural disaster threats, including some the average citizen may never think of.
For example, Marion County has the second greatest incidence of sinkholes in Florida, behind No. 1 Pasco County on the Gulf Coast.
And flooding, which once was relatively insignificant as a threat, has forced the EOC to monitor areas of the county “as events get larger.” As Bowling points out, Dunnellon is just 12 miles from the coast and is surrounded by two rivers.
And the hurricanes are larger, stronger, wetter and more unpredictable.
“The frequency of them has changed,” Bowlin said. “And also, before when they said it was a Cat 3, it was a Cat 3. Now, like with (Hurricane) Michael, it went from a tropical storm to a Cat 5 in 24 hours.”
“So, I don’t ever take it for granted anymore. I always prepare for two categories higher than what they’re forecasting.”
And that preparation involves hundreds of people, dozens of public and private organizations and, of course, rapid-fire response from all.
Yes, Bowlin’s EOC has just six employees assigned to it. But in times of disaster, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office has 16 employees who, under Bowlin’s leadership, act as an “incident management team” and jump in when the EOC is activated. They help, with among other things, deal with state officials on such matters as establishing staging areas for out-of-town utility trucks.
Beyond the Sheriff’s Office, of which the EOC is a department, Bowlin has a small army of people to help his agency get the message out on what to do, where to go and how to find help.
“My mind is always geared to how do you get the message out, how do you get reliable messaging out,” he said.
Maybe Marion County’s most impressive cadre of disaster response helpers is its 450-member Community Emergency Response Team members. CERT members, who are signified by a vest and helmet during disasters, are volunteer citizens who undergo background checks and ongoing training in emergency management and search and rescue.
“If we get a hurricane, they can take care of themselves and their communities,” Bowlin said, adding that the county has always had CERT teams but now has grown the number and training of its members.
A second group, which Bowlin calls “our last line of defense for communications,” is the county’s Marion Emergency Radio Team, or MERT. It is a team of 35 ham radio operators who are located around the county and in each local hospital. He said they train weekly and can activate in less than an hour
“They’re a well-oiled machine,” Bowlin said.
But the EOC team goes beyond those under Bowlin’s supervision, the volunteers and other governmental agencies. He said when a hurricane strikes, businesses like Publix and Walmart have representatives on hand. The area’s restaurants are included as well. So are groups like the United Way, the Salvation Army and the school system, which provides shelter space.
Even the Florida Horse Park and the World Equestrian Center are key cogs in the county’s response to a hurricane. The Horse Park, for its part, has repeatedly served as a state-sanctioned staging area of recovery teams, including out-of-town power trucks and public safety vehicles. During hurricanes Helene and Milton, Bowlin said there were 250 ambulances among the vehicles gathered at the Horse Park. WEC, meanwhile, has served as a staging area of the Florida National Guard during hurricanes as well as shelter for more than 1,000 horses.
Some say we’re ‘a safe haven’
Despite hurricanes affecting our community on an annual basis, the analytics firm Climate Alpha, using artificial intelligence, found Ocala one of the safest places in Florida during hurricanes – significant considering 40 percent of all hurricanes hit the state. The finding led to an October 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal, “Why this Florida city is a safe haven from hurricanes.”
What Climate Alpha found was that only Lake City and Tallahassee in the northern regions of the state had a lower risk of coastal flooding and high winds from the storms. Ocala, located in the center of the state, had the lowest risk among cities on the peninsula.
Forests and wildfires
While hurricanes may take a greater toll in property damage and lives disrupted in our community, the greatest natural disaster risk in Marion County is wildfires, according to FEMA. With 367,000 acres of Ocala National Forest land and tens of thousands of acres of state forest and public park lands in the county, the risk of a wildfire getting out of control is omnipresent.
Hence, FEMA has deemed Marion County at greater risk of wildfire than 99.2 percent of the counties across the nation.
The two leading causes of wildfires in Marion County are, No. 1, homeowners burning yard waste and, No. 2, lightning strikes, said Dr. Ludie Bond, public information officer for the Waccassassa Forestry District of the Florida Forest Service. The Waccassassa District includes Marion, Alachua, Levy, Putnam and Gilchrist counties.
Wildfires are part of living in Florida, especially during this time of year when it is so dry. In the first three months of 2025, there have been 1,096 wildland fires in Florida, consuming more than 51,000 acres.
Bond said while wildfires occur on a regular basis, they are not necessarily becoming more frequent or bigger – even with climate change.
What has gotten bigger is the population, with people moving closer and closer to wooded areas.
“In Marion County, with all the development you have, there are so many communities up against the wooded areas,” Bond said.
As a result, the impact of a wildfire is often assessed not by its size or even its likelihood to grow, but rather on its potential to consume houses or businesses, or to interrupt traffic on area roads.
Bond said Marion County is especially susceptible to lightning strikes, and that contributes mightily to the number of wildfires that break out here.
“Marion County has the lion’s share of lightning strikes,” she said. “You all pop off a lot of lightning strikes during the summer months.”
As for wildfires ignited by homeowners burning yard waste, Bond noted people must pay close attention to a yard fire because it only takes one ember to ignite a wildfire. She noted that if someone is planning to burn yard waste, any burn pile larger than 8 feet across requires a permit from the Florida Forest Service.
“They just won’t pay attention if it’s windy,” Bond lamented.
“People come to Florida to live and enjoy the outdoors, and we want them to. But they need to behave responsibly.”
Ironically, Bond said more development actually helps contain the size of some wildfires because development usually means land surrounding development has been cleared of most trees and vegetation and roads have been built in and out of neighborhoods, creating man-made fire breaks.
That said, more development has made it harder for the Florida Forest Service to conduct prescribed burns, which are important for limiting wildfires in prone areas and enhancing habitat for a range of wildlife.
“It’s getting more and more difficult in Florida to conduct prescribed burns because development has increased the number of people who are negatively impacted by them,” Bond said.
Unified firefighting effort
Marion County has not seen any catastrophic wildfires in recent years, and there is a reason for that.
A little history. Back in 1998, Florida experienced a devastating wildfire season that resulted in more than a half million acres burning and hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, including $300 million worth of timber alone.
With so much of Florida burning and Marion County so heavily forested and growing in population, former Marion County Fire Chief Stuart McElhaney and former Florida Forest Service administrator Gary Beauchamp got together and decided there was strength in numbers. They gathered the various public safety agencies that would be needed to fight a major wildfire and formed the Marion County Multi-Agency Wildland Task Force.
Included among the Task Force’s members are the Florida Forest Service, Marion County Fire Rescue, U.S. Forest Service, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Marion County Emergency Medical Service, the Florida State Park Service, Ocala Fire Rescue, the Dunnellon Fire Department, the St. Johns Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
It not only brought more manpower to fighting wildfires, but it also provided an impressive fleet of firefighting equipment that a single agency could not muster alone, Bond said. The U.S. Forest Service, for instance, has a helicopter base in the Ocala National Forest. The Florida Forest Service, meanwhile, has bulldozers, brush trucks and three helicopters at Ocala’s airport. Marion County has brush trucks and hundreds of wildfire-trained firefighters, and the Sheriff’s Office has a helicopter with a “Bambi Bucket” that allows us to dump water on a wildfire, if needed.
Together, the agencies provide different expertise and different equipment.
“We each have our distinct roles,’ Bond said.
And together the Task Force has limited major wildfires in Marion County.
The Task Force meets once a year before fire season to review the wildfire outlook and the weather forecast, to review its effectiveness during the previous year, run down who has what resources and make sure any needed interagency agreements are in place.
Calling McElhaney and Beauchamp the “founding fathers” of the task force, Bond said the multi-agency approach to wildland firefighting has become a national model because it incorporates seamless training, communication and coordination in times of crisis and creates a “unified command.”
“It has been a very successful model,” she said. “The effectiveness of the immediate response has improved, too. We have some of the best firefighting in the nation.”
