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A light drizzle is falling on the Big Cypress National Preserve as a small alligator scurries across a dirt access road and into the thick brush to the east.

Across the way, a doe is nibbling on green blades of grass that already have poked through the blackened earth. And down the road, off in a small pocket free of vegetation, stands a man in a dirt-covered yellow jacket who takes the last drag off his cigarette and twists the butt into an empty can of Red Bull.

Brannen Carter, 35, has spent the past week of his life rushing around the 729,000-acre preserve after traveling to Florida from his home in Boise, Idaho.

Tall and lanky, with a dusty goatee, Carter is one of 384 firefighters and support staff from across the United States to descend on Southwest Florida to combat a more-than 60,000-acre fire that erupted in the preserve in early May.

Carving fire lines with shovels and axes, Carter and his fellow Boise-based teammates, Conn Dial, 36, and Jeffery Hopkins, 29, have been surprised at how hot the Big Cypress fire is. Brown or green, everything burns hot in the Everglades.

All three men have left their families behind to fight the fire, but there is no place they would rather be. Whether battling a wall of fire under the blazing Florida sun or mopping-up hot spots in the rain, fighting fires, they say, is an addiction.

“Every 6-year-old boy wants to be a firefighter,” Carter said.

The firefighters in the Big Cypress typically start their days with briefings around 7:30 a.m. and work until the job is done, whether that is 8:30 p.m. or midnight. For every two hours of work they are supposed to get one hour of rest, Carter said.

Since the fire erupted, firefighters have swamped the hotels in Everglades City, Port of the Islands and Naples, officials said. Still, even when they’re in their hotel room, the fire is always calling.

“You can smell the smoke and it lifts you up,” Hopkins said.

Four weeks of fire

It’s been more than four weeks since lightning strikes started fires in the preserve.

On May 4, staff firefighters began battling five fires both north and south of Interstate 75, officials said. The fires to the south were contained and died down within the first 10 days, but the thick vegetation and palmetto trees on the north side of the preserve were quickly consumed by flames.

As the days passed, the Strickland fire, a few miles from the Collier-Broward county line, and the Midrest fire, a few miles east of State Road 29, continued to grow. By May 15, the fires in the preserve had scorched more than 17,000 acres.

“Fire happens here all the time and we welcome fire because it’s healthy for the ecosystem,” Big Cypress Deputy Superintendent Pedro Ramos said. “This year, because of the extreme dry conditions, we have become a little more worried than we have in the past. We have become more aggressive.”

Because of the locations of the fires, officials were cognizant that they needed to keep the fires contained to the preserve so as to protect their neighbors; the Seminole Indians to the north and residents of Golden Gate Estates to the west, Ramos said. There also was private property on the preserve that needed protection, most notably a number of homes on the Strickland fire’s eastern flank in an area called the Sanctuary, he said.

Normally, because of the preserve’s philosophy, firefighters don’t use bulldozers or other fire management tactics that will permanently scar the land.

“This is the fragile Everglades ecosystem,” Ramos said. “The last thing we want to do is disturb and destroy the land.”

But because they needed to protect private property, Ramos said preserve officials deviated slightly from their normal management plan.

“That persuaded us to take some management actions that we wouldn’t normally take, including putting dozers on the ground.”

For the good part of a week, firefighters from the preserve, and federal, state, county and tribal land management agencies, actively fought the infernos, officials said. Every day they conducted a fire complexity analysis. On May 9, preserve officials decided they needed outside assistance to contain the fire, and called in a national incident management team.

Nationwide, there are 17 incident management teams comprised of employees from a variety of federal and state agencies, said Art Wirtz, a spokesman for the Southwest Incident Management Team, which now is overseeing the fire in the Big Cypress. The teams respond to any type of emergency, including earthquakes, fires, floods and tornadoes.

National incident management teams have been called out to assist after such events as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Wirtz said.

The first incident management team, which was from the Northern Rocky Mountains, worked on the fire for two weeks, leaving May 26. The Southwest Incident Management Team then took over. The staff of the incident management teams working the Big Cypress blaze include logistic experts, medical employees, meteorologists and fire behavior specialists, Wirtz said.

Along with the incident management teams, hundreds of firefighters from across the country were called in to work the fire lines and battle the blaze.

By Friday afternoon, the Strickland and Midrest fires had burned together and scorched 60,228 acres — an area more than four times the size of the city of Naples. The fire was about 65 percent contained when the rain started Friday.

It is the largest inferno in the Big Cypress National Preserve since flames tore through more than 155,000 acres in 1981.

On Friday, firefighters continued to create fire lines with hand tools, using burn-out operations, and by using existing trails, officials said. Helicopters dropped water to control the flames and dropped Ping-Pong balls filled with incendiary potassium permanganate on areas they were trying to burn out, officials said.

As of Friday, the total cost to fight the blaze was about $5 million, Ramos said.

Even with the fire covering as large an area as it currently does, that doesn’t mean flames are raging across the entire 60,000 acres, Ramos said. Less than 3 percent of the fire is burning at any time, he said.

“The outlook is real good, as long as it continues raining,” Ramos said. “We are talking about a fire that is 26 miles long. We will simply not be able to put that fire out until the rain comes. We simply need Mother Nature’s help.”

Heat, fuel and oxygen

Fire needs three components to exist — heat, fuel and oxygen, said Charles Holbrook, a public information officer with the Southwest Incident Management Team. The firefighters on the line, he said, are all trying to eliminate one of those components.

The border around the fire is currently divided into 12 segments, and firefighters are actively working on each of those segments. Since its beginning, firefighters have been controlling the direction of the fire, Holbrook said.

“It has never gone anywhere the superintendent of the preserve did not want it to go,” he said.

On Friday afternoon, on an access road just to the east of S.R. 29, Mike Creach, of Prescott, Ariz., oversaw the activity of a gyrotrack, a large machine similar to a lawn mower that chews up anything in its path. The gyrotrack was widening the fire line to the west of the blaze by reducing the fuels in its path.

Creach, who is tall and has a salt-and-pepper mustache, has been traveling the country fighting fires for about 27 years. This is his first trek to Southwest Florida.

“It’s beautiful,” Creach said. “I’ve never seen this part of Florida right here. It’s really wild.”

The hard, physical work catches up to firefighters after about a week, Creach said, adding that they are supposed to take a break every six hours.

“We always have to show them on our time card, whether we take them or not,” he said.

In fact, the firefighters want long hours, Creach said, and aren’t happy when their days are cut short. Firefighters generally get time-and-a-half for every hour they work after the first eight hours per day.

“They want to make money,” Creach said. “The more hours they get in, the more money they make.”

The pay-range for firefighters and staff working on the fire ranges from $11 to $50 an hour, with camp crew members at the lower end of the pay spectrum and incident commanders at the top, Holbrook said. Line firefighters make about $20 an hour, he said.

But as nice as the overtime is, the firefighters generally love what they do.

Carter started fighting fires while in the U.S. Air Force and spent eight years in that role, he said. It was a job he loved, but the long hours took a toll on his personal life.

“Firefighting is what ruined my first marriage,” Carter said.

After he remarried, Carter took about five years off and worked a variety of jobs, he said. Ultimately, with his new wife’s permission, he got back into firefighting. From the beginning of June until October, Carter said he will see his wife for only about 20 days.

“I’ve been a hot roofer. I’ve been a bartender. I’ve been a carpenter,” Carter said. “I get up in the morning to go to a fire and I haven’t kicked rocks once.”

Despite the long hours and time away from loved ones, Carter said he plans to continue fighting fires like the blaze in the Big Cypress until he retires or can no longer physically handle his tools.

“The job itself is rewarding,” he said. “To get paid to come out here and to give something back, I couldn’t write a better script.”