Bastrop Texas Wildfire

The Bastrop County Complex Fire has consumed more than 25,000 acres and destroyed an estimated 476 homes or structures since yesterday, Reuters reports.
The Geomac imagery below shows how tenuous the situation is in and around Bastrop remains. The red circles in the image represents actively burning fire. Orange represents fire burned over the past 12 hours. You can see active burning up to Lake Bastrop. The fire is burning on all fronts with no obvious anchor point. It is easy to see from the Geomac imagery that the Bastrop Fire has no containment.
Bastrop has a population of over 5,000. Fox News has reported 250 firefighters are working the fire as crews are stretched around the state. Simple math tells us there are not enough fire crews to protect all the structures in Bastrop. This fire will burn as long as there is wind to push it.
Civilians need to heed evacuation orders.
Note too the fire burning West of Bastrop threatening the town of Wyldwood.
Texas wildfires have reportedly destroyed 25,000 acres in Bastrop County and 476 homes — more houses than any single wildfire in Texas and more than all other fires this year combined, according to the Texas Forest Service.
Gov. Rick Perry left the campaign trail Monday in South Carolina to organize requests for more federal aid, with more than 60 new wildfires raging across the state, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Bastrop Texas Wildfire

He said officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were expected to arrive in Texas as soon as Wednesday, the LA Times reports.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen a wildfire season like this” since the 1980s, Perry said after surveying the Bastrop fire by helicopter. “We’ve got a long way to go to get this thing contained.”

Fire has destroyed nearly 500 homes across drought-stricken Central and East Texas, where at least 63 blazes are reportedly burning out of control.

A mother and her 18-month-old child were killed when flames engulfed their east Texas trailer as firefighters are struggling to contain the 16-mile-wide blaze southeast of Austin that has razed more than 14,000 acres and has reportedly jumped the Colorado River twice. NPR reports:

“When it first started we were out there, we got overran, we had to get out. We had to evacuate and it just burned everything in its path. Forest, houses, everything, cars, anything that was there was burned,” says Carolyn Laird, who is a firefighter — along with her daughter Devan — for the Bastrop Fire Department.

The worst of the wildfires that make up the blaze is in Bastrop County, NPR reports.

Black Hawk helicopters trying to douse the fire, which Texas Forest Service spokeswoman Jan Amen called “a monster,” adding that it was “zero percent contained,” Time reports.

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