Texas wildfires
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It's dry as a tinder box down here after 2+ years of continuous drought. The 35 mph winds on the west (alas, the dry) side of T.S. Lee were too much yesterday and things spun out of control. Fire fighting and emergency resources are stretched mighty thin at the moment. Several new fires cropped up today to join those from yesterday, mostly uncontained at this point. We have friends and family in Bastrop County (just east of Austin) who escaped a 16-mile long fire physically unharmed, but lost their homes and all their belongings other than what they could shove in their cars.
Here is a link to some videos of the fires around the area. KXAN (kxan.com) is the local station with the best coverage of the ongoing situation.
Here's a map of the fires around Texas.
[Update: New fires and more evacuations in Bastrop County today just announced by KXAN. Yesterday saw 14,000 acres burned and 5000 people evacuated from just that one fire. 300 homes were destroyed. The fire is so big the government folks are now calling it a "fire complex".]
Comments
Perry's prayers for rain are all well and good, and I'm
certainly joining in... but I really wish the state government would start looking into an experiment performed back in January in Abu Dhabi in which ionizers were used to artificially generate rain.
It's time for extreme measures in Texas. This drought cannot continue. If the rain won't come on its own, we can make it come.
Thanks for that link
Whatever they're doing brings to mind the HAARP experiments (too foily?).
Here is another picture of the fires east of Austin, taken from a hill ("Mt. Bonnell") near the center of town.
Apocalypse Now.