Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
A perfect storm of meteorological conditions left Gillespie County particularly vulnerable to fire, and last Saturday afternoon a large blaze broke out near Crabapple Road, about eight miles north of Fredericksburg.
The county sheriff’s office reported that Highways 16 and 1631 were closed on Monday because of the fire, which started on Saturday afternoon.
Leo and Liz Tynan have a home perched overlooking a canyon on Highway 965, otherwise known as Enchanted Rock Road.
“My wife and I were just walking out of the front door of the house to go down to San Antonio," Leo Tynan explained, "and what struck me was just this giant plume of smoke. And out here, living in the country, you're always sensitive to that.”
That far out in the country, help with a wildfire is not as close as it might be in the city.
The first picture he took already suggested a massive fire, and it was taken about a half hour after the fire started. The fire was due east from the Tynan house, and fortunately, the winds blowing out of the west were blowing the fire away from his property.
“We know several people who live over in that direction, and one of our friends who lives over there, we knew was working in town that day, and we knew that he kept his dog at his house during the day, when he's gone,” he said.
The Tynans rushed over to that friend’s house to find that the fire was a little south, and his dog and home were not in danger. While they were there, they realized the home had an extra quality to it.
“[F]rom his promontory — he lives on a hilltop — we got a pretty commanding view of the fire there,” Tynan said.
The house is on a ridgeline overlooking the valley where Crabapple Creek meanders.
“From where we were, we could see that it wasn't a single fire that was advancing along. There were multiple fronts that were developing on it,” Tynan said. “What was happening is the wind was probably carrying embers a good distance out ahead of it, and you could see literally explosions along the horizon when it would hit into dense cedar areas where the trees would just explode, and you could see that in multiple places, just marching off toward the east.”
The video Tynan shot showed the wind-driven fires bounding across rugged ranches and near quiet country homes.
“There was one plane that was probably a scout plane that was circling it, but none of the aerial tankers had arrived yet,” he said. “Looking at it, we thought, 'there's no way that ground crews are going to get this thing under any kind of control without some aerial support.' And sure enough, after about 30 minutes, they showed up.”
Tynan added that high winds and rough topography made the idea of fighting the fire by hand incredibly dangerous: “The conditions to be on the ground were terrible. In the rugged ravines where it was, getting in there to try to fight it by hand or bulldozer and truck would have been impossible."
A major problem was all the fuel laying around on the ground. Tynan said that between the current drought killing off trees, and the winter storm four years ago that killed thousands of others, there was plenty of dead wood waiting for an ember from a backyard cookout, a careless cigarette, or some other spark. Some people mulch dead trees, but many simply burn them.
“Burning is the cheapest and the quickest and can be done safely when there's been plenty of rain and the countryside is green, and you can easily control big brush pile burns that way,” he said.
Leo Tynan took TPR on a tour of the region. The route passed miles of parched and occasional smoldering landscape and two separate staging areas where firefighters were gathering materials to make a move.
Tynan also visited a pond about 50 yards off the road where a dark green military helicopter appeared, dipped down and filled up its bag with water, then flew away. In the distance, there was more smoke.
“All of a sudden, there’s a flare-up of some brush that has re-ignited and is sending up a pretty good plume of smoke,” Tynan said, describing what he saw. “The winds are picking up now from the south, and the helicopter has been called in to drop some water, so they’re definitely still putting out hotspots where the fire is reigniting.”
Due to that shift in winds, 30- to 40-foot flames billowed up within a few hundred yards of an already charred area.
Tynan said dozens of landowners with cattle trailers have moved cattle and horses in the path of the flames to safer areas.
