Notes on Texas' wildfires

Texas has really caught heck this year, what with their drought and then all the wildfires, for sure. With this, I thought there were a few notes worth mentioning today. First is that the current set of wildfires aren't considered to have been from arson, thankfully, but instead, horribly and ironically are blamed on the tropical depression that has dumped so much water on so much of the Eastern part of the country: "The wildfire currently raging in Texas’s Bastrop County near Austin is the single worst blaze in the state's history: it has burned 1,000 homes so far, more than any previous fire in the state. The fire—one of at least 63 currently burning in the state—has scorched 100,000 acres so far, fueled, in part, by strong winds from Tropical Storm Lee...The fires have been fanned by winds from a tropical depression that hit the southern United States over the weekend and have flared across ground left tinder dry by a summer drought, killing at least two people." Then, as though that's not bad enough, there's this: "'There will be more flare-ups with the cool air,' a spokeswoman for the Texas Forest Service (TFS) said Monday, referring to a predicted drop in temperatures later this week." That's all those poor people down there need. More: "In Bastrop county, scene of the biggest Texas fire, officials said at least 500 homes had already been destroyed, a state record for a single fire. 'We're not fighting this fire at this point. We're just evacuating people,' assistant fire chief Rod Stradling told local media. Mark Stanford, the TFS fire chief, described the fires as 'catastrophic.' 'It's a major natural disaster,' he told The Austin American-Statesman newspaper, as new fires hit a huge swath of central Texas. A TFS official told Fox News that the situation was 'unprecedented.'" For a bigger overview of Texas' burning year: "Since the beginning of the wildfire season, Texas has dealt with over 20,900 fires that have destroyed more than 1,000 homes and burned 3.6 million acres, according to local and state officials. It's bad and not getting better anytime soon, tragically and unfortunately. Link to original post: http://news.yahoo.com/texas-wildfires-see-perry-leave-campaign-trail-011951290.html; http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/06/texas-bastrop-fire-photos-videos-of-blaze.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29