September 4, 2011, I worked at a ranch outside of Spicewood, Texas.
The sky in Central Texas is big and blue. The clouds are often threads or bunches of cotton straight from a Bob Ross painting. That morning was no exception. Nature had been kind to me. She had sent me some road runners to watch, as they chased insects along the dirt paths. The temperature was already closing in on 100-degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds harsher than it was. September in Texas is bearable compared to August. The thing about Central to West Texas is, it’s a dry heat and you get used to it.
The ranch was more of a resort, than a working ranch, and I was lucky to have found a job there. I had decided to take a ride along the ranch trails to look for fallen tree limbs or brush that needed clearing. The gas-powered cart was loud and cranky on the asphalt roads and dirt trails. There was a strong wind today and it felt good to ride through it, but there was something on the wind that had caught my attention. It was the smell of burning Spanish Cedar and it was odd to have that odor at this time of day, especially in the dry season.
Central Texas had been in a drought for several years. In a good year the Pedernales River flowed right up to the ranch. The boat docks that would typically be bobbing up and down as boats and jet skis roared past, were overgrown with tall grasses. The Pedernales, once a hub for the wealthy and well off middle-class, was a cracked land and a trickle of muddy water. The gas cart roared to the top of a ridge where I caught site of the smoke. It was a tendril of black in the distance and the start of a very long 24-hours.
The Pedernales or Spicewood Fire burned for 11-days, consumed 6,500 acres, and burned down more than 60 structures.
It was put out on the 15th of September, but it burnedin the ashes for more than six months after. That day the fire had caught us by surprise. I radioed the office and told them what I had seen. I drove to the fence line to investigate, thinking maybe it was a controlled burn. The smell grew stronger as I neared the fence and the sound of crackling and chewing was loud in my ears.
Ten-minutes later the volunteer fire department showed up. I took one of them to the top of the ridge where I had first noticed the smell and the smoke. He wanted to see more so we descended into the steep culvert below. The path had changed from asphalt to concrete slabs and the cart bounced up and down the incline. I noticed the air had become thinner and there was thick, grey smoke, where twenty minutes ago there was none. As we reached the bottom he had seen enough. I made a sharp turn to go back up to the ridge. The thin air was now being sucked out of the culvert by the fire. I stomped on the gas and the cart coughed and threatened to stall, but kept moving. The cart was sluggish on the climb, but we made it to the top and headed back to the office.
Our supervisor and his father had been volunteer fire fighters in the county for a combined 60+ years. He had grown up wanting to be a fire fighter with the City of Austin or Bastrop County. Without a degree, his experience of fighting fires alongside his father since he was 12, was disregarded. After he conferred with the fire fighters on duty, we moved our personal vehicles to the volunteer firefighter's satellite station and returned to prepare to save the ranch's structures and kept animals. We gathered up all the fire extinguishers on the ranch, secured the buildings, shut off gas valves, moved animals into the barn, and cleared brush away from vital infrastructure.
When the fire encroached on the ranch, we fought back. Our supervisor had filled a 100-gallon tank on a rigged trailer with Dawn dish detergent and water. The trailer was hooked up to the gas cart and we rushed that little cart around extinguishing the flames as soon as they appeared at the parched grasses and shrubs next to the houses of ranch staff and those of the owner. Dawn dish detergent mixed with water removes oxygen and heat from the fire triangle (heat, oxygen, fuel) and puts out the fire. Helicopters roared overhead with massive bladders full of water in tow. The fire department plowed onto the ranch with brush fire trucks from the 1980's and tanker trucks.
We had stayed at the ranch to save the kept animals and structures. By the late afternoon the fire had encroached upon our road and the sky was midnight black. The only visible light was from the fire itself, a window into hell. We made the decision to run. We piled into the cab of the Supervisor's F-150 and sped out onto the main road. Once we got to the stop sign there were only two ways to go, left or right. We went to the left and the fire seemed to swallow the truck. The rubber seals that lined the windows began to melt. Bright orange heat whirled around us, baked the cab's interior, and leapt a hundred feet into the sky. The truck lurched into reverse and sped back to the office. We sheltered as best we could, about 200 feet from 2,000 gallons of propane in above ground tanks. The supervisor had gone onto the roof with a ground connected hose. He sprayed the roof to keep it from igniting. We collectively prayed the propane would stay in its tanks.
The fire had yet be contained. The news on the radio told us the fire had spread to the outskirts of Austin, 30-miles away. It had made its way about 5-miles from my apartment, where my family was. I called them and told them to evacuate.
In the evening the fire had, had its fill of the ranch and moved on. Our Supervisor had come down from the roof and told us all to get into his truck, we were making another run for it. He took another way this time, over land that was black and crunched beneath his tires. We drove over barbed wire that had once divided property lines. Past homes that had stood only hours before and across properties I hadn't realized were next to ours. We made it the volunteer satellite fire house, a couple of miles down the road. It had managed to withstand the heat. The short grass around it had burned. Our cars were still there, but partially melted. My tires had remained inflated, but were distorted from the heat. The snow white fenders had turned a brownish yellow.
The roads leading into Austin, 30-miles away, had been closed by the police. I drove West to Marble Falls, then another 60-miles into Austin. I stopped along the way to get gas at a local mom-and-pop gas station. The owner was at the pumps. He had manually raised the price of gas to $5 a gallon. When I asked him, isn't that price gouging? He laughed and said, yes it is.
I was fortunate to return from Mosul, Iraq in 2007 and left the Army after 8-years as Military Police. I don't proclaim to be a particularly brave person. I tend to do my job, regardless of what's going on around me (artillery, explosions, etc). A brush fire is probably the most frightening natural disaster I have ever been through. It takes on a life of its own as it superheats the air and alters the very weather around it. It's unpredictable nature can incinerate an entire neighborhood and leave a single home untouched. It was either luck or fate those propane tanks didn't blow.
What struck me the most was the suffering of displaced families who had lost their homes because they were unable to get the resources to save them. I had seen enough suffering families in Iraq; barefoot children running across piles of rotting garbage warning G.I.'s of IEDs for candy, broken homes, and communities living out of the rubble of war. It left me wondering if there was anything I could do to help families better prepare themselves for what's to come.
Sources of Reference
Lee, H. (2012). 2011 Pedernales Wildland Fire Rules as Accidental. Travis County Fire Marshal's Office.
Mashhood, F. (2011). Spicewood Neighbors Look Out For One Another. Austin American-Statesmand.
Ulloa, J. (2012). Report: September 2011 Spicewood wildfire likely sparked by power lines. Austin American-Statesman.
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