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Firefighters Battle Cantonment Brush Fire; Highway 29 Closures Result
February 6, 2026
A portion of Highway 29 in Cantonment was closed in both directions on Friday due to a large brush fire. The fire is now contained.
Highway 29 was closed in both directions from North Tate School Road to Kingsfield Road. By 2:25 p.m., Highway 29 northbound was reopened, and southbound was reopened by about 2:10 p.m.
According to Escambia County Fire Rescue, the fire started as a small outside fire that got out of control at a nearby home.
Multiple fire stations and the Florida Forest Service responded. Forestry had multiple bulldozers to help contain the fire. The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office assisted with traffic control and road closures.
Photos for NorthEscambia.com, click to enlarge.
Comments
2 Responses to “Firefighters Battle Cantonment Brush Fire; Highway 29 Closures Result”
The deputy’s primary job at a scene like this is containment and safety, not traffic engineering. By blocking the road, he’s ensuring no one wanders into a hazardous area or a crime scene. The traffic light is already a calibrated tool designed to move cars; having a deputy try to ‘hand-wave’ a massive line of cars through a light usually just creates confusion and increases the risk of a T-bone accident in the intersection.
People forget that a deputy standing in the middle of a major intersection is a massive safety risk to the officer and the drivers. If the lights are functioning, the system is working as intended. Expecting one person to manually outperform a synchronized light system during a crisis is unrealistic—the bottleneck isn’t the light, it’s the fact that a major road is closed. No amount of arm-waving changes the physics of merging three lanes into one.
The Sheriff’s Office is there to manage the incident, not to act as a personal valet for every driver. Once the roadblock is established, it’s on the drivers to use their GPS or their common sense to find an alternate route. Complaining that a deputy isn’t ’speeding up’ a red light is just venting frustration at the wrong person for a situation they didn’t cause.
We just came through that area. It’s a mess! The sheriffs office is not assisting with traffic flow at all! They’re just blocking the road!