Drought, human error spark peak of fire season in Highland Lakes
CONNIE SWINNEY • STAFF WRITER
HIGHLAND LAKES — Dry brush, low humidity and human error have fueled a string of brush fires at the peak of the fire season in Blanco, Burnet and Llano counties, officials say.
Fortunately, agencies report no significant damage to property and no loss of life as a result of the runaway blazes, which have been contained with the help of multiple local, state and, at times, federal firefighting agencies.
“This is the most active part of the fire season. We’ve seen everything from people discarding cigarettes and starting fires to something as accidental as doing some work and a spark causes a big grass fire,” said Granite Shoals Fire Chief Austin Stanphill. The department also provides fire protection for Burnet County ESD No. 3. “We’ve seen where a person pulls off the road because of a vehicle fire, and it starts a grass fire.”
Some of the more significant recent fires that taxed area agencies include:
• A lightning storm sparked the most recent brush fire Aug. 19 on the Texas 29 corridor adjacent to Reveille Peak Ranch outside Burnet. The blaze threatened a home, prompted several evacuations and resulted in airdrops by the Texas Forest Service and STAR Flight to contain a 50-acre blaze in high wind conditions. Agencies from Cassie, Hoover’s Valley, East Lake Buchanan and the Burnet Volunteer Fire Department assisted on the scene.
• Investigators blamed the heated underside of a broken-down vehicle, which eventually caught the car on fire, for sparking a 35-acre blaze Aug. 9 just off RR 1431 near the intersection of FM 1980, also known as Tobyville Road. The mid-afternoon fire, fed by dry conditions, raced into the adjacent brush. Volunteer fire departments from Bertram, Burnet, Cassie, East Lake Buchanan, Hoover’s Valley, Oakalla and Spicewood assisted with containing the blaze along with crews from Horseshoe Bay, Marble Falls, the Texas Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
• In the Bluffton area, a brush fire sparked on Aug. 4 eventually consumed about 500 acres and kept area agencies from Burnet, Gillespie and Llano counties busy for two weeks with flare-ups. The blaze quickly spread from RR 2241 to CR 217 in Llano County.
• Investigators charged a man for a string of grass fires Aug. 13 after a tip from an alert citizen who spotted a person acting suspiciously alongside RR 2900 between Kingsland and Sunrise Beach. Crews had responded to several blazes along the Texas 71 corridor in Llano County and RR 962 in Blanco County. Fire crews from Blanco County, Sunrise Beach, Kingsland, Llano and Horseshoe Bay were able to quickly contain all the fires, and damage was limited to a few acres at each location, according to the Llano County Sheriff’s Office. No structures were threatened. Llano County deputies located the suspect’s vehicle in Kingsland and arrested William Earl Noack, 32, on a second-degree arson charge.
One common denominator among all the recent fires is multiple agencies crossing jurisdictions to assist one another in battling back potentially devastating wildland fires.
“A grass fire can lead to houses catching on fire, vehicles. It can endanger life and livestock. It can take a lot of resources away from neighboring agencies,” said Burnet Area Volunteer Fire Department firefighter Daniel Dilworth. “For us, or for any rural fire department, it’s water shuttle. We don’t have hydrants. We’re all volunteers, so you rely on your mutual aid.
“If you have to, you can get the forest service in to assist,” Dilworth added. “This is our wildfire season, so we try to be prepared.”
Aside from the alleged arson, many causes of recent fires were reported as unintentional or accidental.
“It can be a chain going down the road causing a spark, throwing out a cigarette, a fire pit that’s not covered — it can start a big grass fire,” Dilworth said. “We’ve had two fires this month — one in Indian Springs caused by a cigarette and one in the southend of the county outside Marble Falls — that was due to vehicle fire.”
Potential relief could be in sight; however, that might not come until the fall with El Nino warming trends in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
“What that means for us, typically, this warmup of temperatures out in the Pacific, is to bring above-average rainfall for the fall and winter time and early spring and also below-average temperatures,” said Paul Yura, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the Austin and San Antonio area.
“This El Nino pattern is supposed to continue all the way into the fall and possibly even this next winter. So overall, I think we’ll stay above-average rainfall for at least the whole year.”
However, dry periods could provide a window of opportunity for wildland blazes.
“This is Texas, so we’re going to have our little droughts here and there for weeks without rainfall,” Yura said.
Those dry periods keep local agencies on high alert.
“The rains were enough to make everything grow, and now those fuels are dead, and we have a very specific fire danger,” Stanphill said. “Until we get some significant rainfall — and I’m not just talking about just a couple of showers here and there — we’re going to be looking at these conditions.”
connie@thepicayune.com