This story asks a question that it doesn’t quite answer but is worth pondering.
There are rolling hills west of Los Angeles and stretching to the Pacific Coast covered with homes — many now charred by recent wildfires.
North and northwest of San Antonio are similar hills that make up the Texas Hill Country. They too are covered with homes as the region’s population grows, especially with retirees and other homebuyers. Some seek the quiet life, and others just want a home with “a Hill Country view.”
But do they face the same vulnerabilities as homes in California?
The Texas A&M Forest Service reports that many of these Texas homes in the hills are served by volunteer fire departments, which means longer response times to an emergency. Forest Service Spokeswoman Dayziah Petruska said it could take up to an hour for some of these departments to arrive on the scene of a wildfire in a remote area. She said the long response time could be the same for her agency in some spots of Texas.
She said forest service experts constantly access fire weather conditions where wildfires could break out at any time and stage equipment and personnel accordingly. “Based off fire weather, we staff in different areas of the state, with that being our own employees,” she explained. “And then we also bring in — whether it be out-of-state or Texas Intrastate Fire Mutual Aid System. So, those are structure firefighters who have been trained to do wildland firefighting.”
Petruska said Fredericksburg is a hub where heavier equipment is kept at the ready for Hill Country fires.
So prevention is important. She explained that residents in those hilly communities can take important preemptive steps to protect their homes from a wildfire.
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Petruska added that fire also travels faster up hills, and cedar trees are a particular concern — they’re full of resin and are very combustible.
She said it’s important to control the number of embers that could be created by a wildfire. Those little smoldering chunks of vegetation or debris can become airborne and spark another fire where they land, sometimes far away.
There’s some useful information for homeowners who need to be aware of wildfire risks, but it doesn’t get into the question of how likely is such a thing to happen somewhere in Texas. I don’t have an answer to that either, but I am reminded that the biggest and most destructive wildfire in state history was the Bastrop fire of 2011, which is to say in recent memory. Here’s a reminder of what that experience was like, from someone who was affected.
[Alice] Traugott, who was 63 at the time of the fire, was at H-E-B buying deli meats when her husband called to tell her they were being evacuated from their home, and to meet him at the Roadhouse restaurant on Texas 21.
She left her groceries on the conveyor belt of the checkout counter and drove straight to her husband, to find him with their four dogs in his truck, a few of his musical instruments, her kindle and jewelry.
“And that’s all,” Traugott said, a mother of four sons.
They spent the next two nights at a Holiday Inn, which did not take long to reach capacity.
“I was aggravated because I thought, ‘Oh this is stupid,’ because I thought the firemen would put the fire out,” Traugott said. “I had no concept of what a wildfire was … I thought the firemen would put the fire out because that’s what firemen do, they put out the fire. I didn’t understand what a wildfire was.”
A couple days later, residents who were asked to evacuate were told to go to a local middle school. A large map of the county was hung on the wall of the school’s gymnasium, and a firefighter was telling people whether their home was burned or not.
Donning clothes she had been wearing for the two days, Traugott approached the firefighter and gave him her address.
“He looked at the map and he said, ‘I’m sorry, your house is gone,’” Traugott said. “And I said ‘get out.’ I couldn’t believe it.
“People say it’s just stuff, you know. It’s just your house, it’s just your furniture. But it doesn’t feel that way at first. It feels like you almost don’t know who you are, or what you’re supposed to do, where you’re supposed to go.”
She returned to her 3-acre estate a few days after the fire passed it, equipped with a mop, rags and pail full of soap, thinking she would just have to clean her house.
“There was nothing left,” Traugott said. “There was nothing to clean, there was nothing to scrub. There was nothing to sift. It was down to the tad, down to the cement slab. There was nothing left, and I kept thinking: where did the refrigerator go? Where did the washer and dryer go? Where’s the bathtub?
“It was just unrecognizable rubble and ash, that’s all that was left — and that’s when I realized what a wildfire is.”
As big and bad as that fire was, it’s nowhere close to what’s happening now. I don’t know what the risk is here – 2011 was also a year of record drought, which was certainly a contributing factor – but it will never be zero. I’d like to see a story that gets into that, if only as a reminder. In the meantime, I just thought it was worth remembering what had happened here, not that long ago. If you want to do something now, a portal of verified fundraisers for people affected by the fires is here for anyone who might like to make a donation.