Fire Destroys 3,500 Year-Old Tree

The Daily:

Mother Nature claimed one of her oldest living specimens yesterday in a freak fire that destroyed a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree towering over central Florida.

Known as “The Senator,” or simply “The Big Tree,” the hollowed-out majestic timber, standing at 118 feet tall, ignited before dawn. Firefighters watched helplessly as the oldest tree east of the Mississippi — and the fifth oldest in the world — blazed and then collapsed in a heap of flaming embers.

Seminole County investigators first pronounced the Big Tree Park fire suspicious. But as the day wore on, state arson inspectors determined the inferno was not deliberately set but rather was caused by a curious confluence of natural events described as being either a weeks- old lightning strike that smoldered until combustion occured, or friction caused by buffeting winds that ignited a spark and erupted in flames.

“I’m flabbergasted myself,” Seminole County Fire Rescue spokesman Steve Wright told The Daily yesterday. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said of the freak circumstances.

The American Forestry Association bored a small hole in The Senator in 1946, determining the tree was approximately 3,500 years old. That means it sprouted about the same time that biblical history has Moses talking to God via a burning bush, and when Greece was in its pre-Homeric Bronze Age.

3,500 years old.  Wow.  Friction caused by buffeting winds that ignited a spark and erupted in flames?  That sounds somewhat far-fetched.