BOB AND Margaret Austin stared at the hills in the distance, where towering plumes of white and black smoke stretched across the blue horizon. They had survived the flames of a wildfire but had no idea if their house had been as lucky.
At about 11am on Monday, a state trooper told the couple that they had 15 minutes to evacuate. They filled their two vehicles with her grandmother’s jewellery, his firearms and their mortgage papers and photo albums, along with a puppy and a kitten. They realised later that they had left behind the urn with Bob Austin’s mother’s ashes.
“Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time,” said Austin (62). “You think of a thousand things after you’ve left.”
The couple had fled the most destructive wildfire in the history of Texas, a vast blaze that has destroyed 550 homes in Bastrop County in central Texas and killed two people since it began on Sunday, one of a series of wildfires that have broken out around the state in recent days.
By Tuesday afternoon, the Bastrop fire continued to burn as dozens of evacuated residents from outlying subdivisions sought aid at Bastrop Middle School, which officials had turned into a shelter.
“You look at people’s faces around here, and it looks like they’ve been in a war,” Bob Austin said, leaning against a school wall as American Red Cross workers and evacuees walked in and out of the cafeteria.
In the past seven days, the Texas Forest Service has battled 181 fires, which have burned more than 118,400 acres in central Texas and elsewhere, like Montgomery County, officials said. Since November, firefighters have responded to nearly 21,000 fires that have destroyed more than 1,000 homes and ravaged more than 3.6 million acres, an area roughly the size of Connecticut.
Over last weekend, dozens of new fires ignited, as high winds from Tropical Storm Lee and the dry conditions caused by the state’s severe drought fuelled fast-moving flames.
About 2,000 firefighters, including those from the Texas and US Forest Services as well as teams of municipal firefighters, were at work. Air tankers and helicopters, including military BlackHawk helicopters, tried to douse flames with water scooped up from ponds.
The worst fire by far has been the one in Bastrop County, roughly 30 miles east of Austin. It has destroyed more homes than any other single wildfire in state history, gutting 550 residences and forcing about 5,000 people to evacuate as it has burned through 34,000 acres, according to the Texas Forest Service.
Previously, the most destructive wildfire was one that broke out in April in Palo Pinto County, west of Fort Worth, that destroyed nearly 170 homes.
“These fires are serious and widespread, and as mean as I have ever seen, burning more than 1,000 homes since this wildfire season began,” Gov. Rick Perry said on Tuesday after an aerial tour of the damage in the Steiner Ranch subdivision west of Austin, where a still-uncontained fire had consumed 125 acres and destroyed 35 homes.
Perry cut short a presidential campaign trip to South Carolina on Monday to return to Texas to deal with the wildfires. Shortly after arriving back, he visited with evacuees at Bastrop Middle School. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, also visited the school on Tuesday.
In Bastrop, normally a tranquil city of 7,200 along the Colorado River, the flames have come within a few miles of downtown, and people stood on the side of the road taking pictures of a skyscraper-sized tower of smoke that dominated the horizon. Officials said the bodies of two unidentified people were found on Tuesday.
The Austins stayed overnight at a hotel but came to the middle school Tuesday seeking information. Nobody was able to confirm for them if the house where they had lived since April in the Tahitian Village subdivision had survived. – (© 2011 New York Times News Service)