The Texas Tinderbox: Drought and Wildfires Plague Texas

Texas is a tinderbox--dry, windy, and ready to explode in a burst of flame.

According to the Texas Forest Service , October of 2010 to April of 2011 was the driest seven-month period recorded in Texas history. Volunteer Texas firefighters and the Texas Forest Service are currently responding to 17 large fires that have burned over 145,633 acres as of their latest update on June 22, 2011. The Bearing Fire in Polk and Trinity counties has burned 20,222 acres, and it's still only 60% contained in spite of an hour of rain the day before. Two homes and six hunting cabins were lost in the fire.

The Dyer Mill fire continues to roar through Grimes County, Texas. Residents were evacuated from 1800 homes on June 21, 2011. The fire has already consumed 32 homes and 80 homes are immediately threatened as frantic homeowners watch helplessly from evacuation shelters. The fast-moving fire, three miles east of Whitehall, had burned through 5280 acres at the time of this publication.

According to Jason Curry, Public Information Officer with the Texas Forest Service, a Type II Management team arrived on June 21, 2011 to coordinate firefighting operations on these two fires and the Power Line Fire, which burned 3500 acres, though the Power Line Fire is nearing 100 percent containment. The three fires are referred to as the East Texas Complex and they are managed through the coordinated efforts of two inter-agency fire management teams.

"The purpose of the Type II Management Team is to free up time for the firefighters to battle the fires," Curry said. "We have people from around the country on these teams who work on managing these fires, ordering and directing crews to certain areas and planning long rage objectives. We also have experts on fire behavior."

Curry explained that although the East Texas Complex currently has 230 firefighters, managers, and other personnel with access to two Blackhawk helicopters, but most of the work is done with bulldozers and fire engines.

The reason for the use of bulldozers and fire engines, according to Texas Forest Service Spokesperson Lee McNeely, is that the fire crews are not using water, though they do have access to some water for firefighting use.

"Most of the time, when fighting fires of this size, we fight the fire with fire," McNeely explained. "It makes no sense to use water on a fire burning 7600 acres. It would take too much water. We build a fire break around the fire and burn it through so the fire has no fuel to continue forward.

Bluebell bud opening into a flower « Portraits of Wildflowers

I haven’t been back to any of the three bluebell colonies I recently found on the prairie in northeast Austin, but I’ll take you back to something I saw when I visited the third of them. As the bud shown here began unfolding, it revealed a portion of the flower’s bright yellow, fuzzy-looking, two-lobed stigma. The two patches of orange below it are anthers. Each of the five elongated purple tubes surrounding and towering over the yellow and the orange would soon unfurl into a broad petal. For an earlier stage in the process, see last week’s photograph of a bluebell bud ; for a later stage, see the recently posted photograph of fully open flowers .

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman

(The website of The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has more information about bluebells, also called bluebell gentians and prairie gentians.)

I have mixed feelings about your pictures. On the one hand, they are drop-dead gorgeous, and make me glad to be alive on this planet, and in possession of eyeballs. And on the other, you are rapidly making me dissatisfied with my Surprisingly Good point-and-shoot camera (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS5, as it happens). Because that’s what the budget will allow, for now. Grrrr. =)

I’ve seen only a few white ones this year but haven’t photographed any. Three years ago there was a large colony on the east side of I-35 north of Howard Lane, adjacent to the funeral home on that big swathe of Pflugerville prairie; the colony included a good number of white ones and I took lots of pictures of both colors. I went back last year and couldn’t find a single plant! I have no idea what happened. I found nothing there again this year, so I’m particularly grateful to have come across the three smaller colonies I’ve reported in recent posts. I remember going to the Granger site with you maybe four years ago and photographing a purple bluebell there.

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