PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WMBB) — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made his way back to Bay County on Sunday to give more updates for the Adkins Avenue and Bertha Swamp Road wildfires.
The Bertha Swamp Road wildfire grew to 9,000 acres on Sunday.
“That’s a big boy, and it’s raging very quickly… It’s moving,” Gov. DeSantis said. “If you look where it’s moving, the smoke is way ahead of it, so it creates a lot of challenges in a number of different respects.”
Gov. DeSantis said many agencies around the state are in the Panhandle to help with the effort, including the Florida National Guard.
“Within two hours of being on the ground, they had their Bambi buckets, which are basically water buckets that they’re using to offload water onto the fire source,” General James Eifert with the Florida National Guard said. “They’re doing outstanding work to this point in just the hours that they’ve been up. There have been hundreds of thousands of gallons of water dropped from these helicopters onto the fire.”
While the first responders are helping the community, the community is helping the first responders. Health professionals have been right by their sides.
“We have had some of our first responders that have suffered injuries, unfortunately, from both a physical and a mental capacity,” Gov. DeSantis said. “[We] want to be able to help folks.”
The governor said even though it’s a serious and dangerous situation in Bay County, he’s proud of everyone’s effort.
“There were unfortunately some houses that would be lost in a given neighborhood, but then there would be all these other houses that were right there that were saved,” he said. “We appreciate everybody’s effort to be able to protect people’s property, and to be able to protect people’s lives.”
View the full Sunday press conference.
