I was reading Google News and this caught my eye in because I was driving down in that part of Florida recently, although not on that particular stretch of highway.  Basically, yesterday there was a horrible 50 car pile-up on I-4 south of Orlando.  It was almost certainly the result of fog and smoke from a nearby brush fire.  I was watching video off the Orlando Sentinel website, which had been taken by helicopter, and when the camera panned away from the accident scene and up and around the area, I could not believe how dense the fog/smoke was all over a very wide area around the highway.  How, I wondered, did the highway patrol not know there was a dangerous situation around that part of I-4?  Well as it turns out…they did.

My family in California has to deal with these killer fogs all the time and it’s something I watch for while driving cross country.  Sometimes you see visibility warnings on the highways about things like dust storms and such.  But the danger…and I really worry about this…is that you’re driving down the road and you see an approaching fog bank or something and you don’t really know how bad it is in there until you actually drive into it and then it’s too late. 

Which makes this all the more aggravating…

Warning signs began nearly 20 hours before Polk crash

The warnings came long before metal slammed into metal on a moonless, socked-in Interstate 4 early Wednesday.

Before sunset Tuesday, National Weather Service meteorologists issued a fog alert based on a scale of one through 10. Experts consider seven or higher to be risky for drivers. The forecast for north Polk County was a 10.

A few hours later, the state Division of Forestry told the Florida Highway Patrol to expect dangerous conditions because of a particularly stubborn and smoky wildfire at I-4 and County Road 557. The blaze escaped from a controlled burn meant to get rid of dangerously dry brush.

The warning was not a routine call. Only once or twice a year do forestry officials, who rely on sophisticated computer models, tell FHP to be on guard for a smoked-in highway.

In all, those and other warnings of horrendous visibility caused by smoke, fog or both were unmistakable. Yet as it turned out, FHP troopers would find little to be concerned about, and the state Department of Transportation installed just one warning sign in each direction. 

When I read this I thought, maybe they don’t get a lot of these down in Florida like they do in California.  But no…they know perfectly well what can happen down there when they get the fog warnings this time of year.  I didn’t know this…

But fire and weather experts in Florida say tons of tiny smoke particles roiling from a wildfire are a powerful magnet for water molecules. Smoke doesn’t create fog; it dramatically thickens it.

The two often go hand in hand this time of the year, Florida’s fog season. This also is the time of year for setting "controlled burns" to thin out grass, leaves and brush in forests.

So a little smoke can make a fog bank vastly more dangerous then otherwise.  And those conditions are no stranger to that part of Florida. 

I hadn’t known any of this.  Along the California coast I know to watch for fog and I just won’t drive through a fog bank I see coming off the ocean.  I had no idea it could be even worse in central Florida, well inland.

They should have closed that highway until the danger passed.  I know…closing highways creates major traffic messes elsewhere.  But they had to close I-4 anyway, when the cars and trucks started slamming into each other, and people started dying.  One trooper later said he watched a man burn to death.  They should have closed that highway.