Evacuees flee Texas wildfires, carrying what they can
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In Bastrop County, Texas, the site of the most destructive of the state’s many fires, it’s obvious why so much land is ablaze. Grassy medians and residential lawns have browned and yellowed, the result of little rain and weeks of scorching temperatures. More than 600 houses in this area have been destroyed.
Judy Leek, 66, lives on 120 acres in a parched area called Cedar Creek. For some time, the retired physicist said, residents were barred from having water features and from watering their lawns more frequently than every five days.
‘We’ve been in this horrible drought,’ she said Tuesday. ‘If you flicked a cigarette or a spark flew, you could start a fire.’
On Monday, one finally ignited near Leek’s Turkey Track Ranch. The wind roared. Gray and white smoke clouded the sky. Ash rained down. Leek thought of all the oaks and cedars on the property that flames could easily chew up.
‘That’s when I decided the horses had to go,’ she said, though she had to leave two calves behind.
By midday, Leek had scooped up her legal and financial papers and some photos and toiletries. She packed her own wedding portrait and those of her two daughters. She evacuated to her church a few miles away, where a few dozen people are camped out. She returned a few more times to the ranch, where she grabbed plans of her two-story, white limestone home in case she needed to rebuild it.
On Tuesday, she tried to grasp all that had happened in the past day.
‘It’s so hard to concentrate, to have a clear mind, a clear focus,’ she said while walking her dog, Baylor, and her daughter’s dog, Sheba, outside the church.
‘It’s always the unknown that scares you,’ chimed in a fellow dog-walker.
In the distance, white smoke billowed into the sky. Leek stopped walking, but the dogs tried to charge ahead.
‘It’s OK, guys,’ she told them. ‘Your world has been turned upside down.’
View Texas fires in a larger map
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-- Ashley Powers in Bastrop, Texas