TX Firefighters Make Some Progress; Bracing For High Winds, Low Humidity Starting 4/25

[hatrack]

(Reuters) - Hundreds of weary firefighters were racing against the clock on Sunday, pushing back massive brush fires that have destroyed near-record swatches of Texas countryside. Fire fighters were hoping to make as much progress as possible before low humidity and strong winds set the stage for more potential flare-ups late Monday and Tuesday.

"We have gotten rain, but more importantly, we have gotten moister air, and that has been very, very helpful," Marq Webb, a spokesman for the Texas Forest Service, said on Sunday.

Webb said the amount of acreage burned in Texas in 2011 is almost at the record level set in 2006, when nearly 2 million acres were burned by wildfires. So far this year, more than 1.8 million acres have burned. "We're only in April, with some of the worst wildfire months still to come," he said. "We will certainly break that record."

Rudy Evanson of the National Park Service, part of an army of more than 450 firefighters who are working to beat back the PK Complex fire west of Fort Worth, said that although the area got rain Saturday night, "it didn't last long enough to get the dirt wet."

EDIT

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/25/us-texas-wildfires-idUSTRE73K7WY20110425?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2Fenvironment+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Environment%29

[kentauros]

1. I've read in the Texas paper, The Statesman, that firefighters

are setting backfires. I don't know at what point they started doing that, but I noticed that bit of news was missing from the Reuters story. My guess is that most news agencies either don't understand the practice like most of the population, or don't think it's important enough to report (and again, not understanding the practice.) I haven't yet found any news source talking about it in depth, so it's unknown how effective the technique has been so far.

Here's the section in The Statesman about the wildfires, with that amazing first photo captioned in reference to backfires:

Texas Wildfires


Frank Cianciolo MCDONALD OBSERVATORY

Backfires were set in attempts to halt the spread of the fire in the mountains surrounding the McDonald Observatory. Here, the high terrain glows orange, with the Hobby-Eberly telescope in the lower right.

[Viking12]

2. How dare you blame this on climate change!

:crazy: