Since the Labor Day wildfires of 2011, many communities have begun taking it upon themselves to make their homes safer in the event of another wildfire. One of those places is Steiner Ranch, a planned community near Lake Travis, in the Hill Country outside of Austin. Recently a group of volunteers, firefighters and residents got […]
This weekend marks a year since massive wildfires tore through Central Texas, burning more than 1,600 homes, killing two people, and uprooting countless lives. Over the course of the last year, KUT News and StateImpact Texas have been collecting stories from the people who lived through the fires and reporting on some of the causes, […]
All this week we’re bringing you stories on the 2011 Labor Day Wildfires that destroyed over a thousand homes in Central Texas. On Monday, we looked at some of the complications that led to the fire beyond the well-known heat and drought. Later today, we’ll bring you a story of a narrow escape from the Pedernales […]
While extreme heat and devastating drought have held much of the blame for the fires, there’s a bigger picture.
The Bastrop Fires from AHS Media Arts on Vimeo. For students at Stephen F. Austin High School’s Media Arts program, the one subject they all wanted to report on this year was the drought. As part of PBS Newshour’s Student Reporting Labs project, which pairs public media mentors with high school students learning reporting around […]
During Texas’ worst wildfire season on record last year, more than 16,000 emergency responders and firefighters came to the Lone Star State to help battle the blazes. Today the Texas Forest Service announced that they’re going to send some of their own to help fight the Little Bear Fire near Ruidoso, New Mexico. That fire has […]
They were part of the wildfire-fighting force that helped push back Texas’ worst year of fires in history, and now they may be leaving the state’s armada. The U.S. Air Force wants to move eight C-130s from Fort Worth to Montana. But Texas feels differently. As Era Sundar of StateImpact Texas lead station KUT reports, […]
The first wildfires of 2012 are still burning in West Texas, but the Texas Forest Service says they’re mostly contained at this point. It’s a good time to take a look back to the record season of wildfires last year. All told wildfires in 2011 burned nearly four million acres, almost three thousand homes, and […]
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved funds to help battle two large wildfires in West Texas that have been burning for more than a week. The request for the funds came from the state. The approval means FEMA funds can pay 75 percent of eligible state and local costs for fighting the wildfires. The […]
Evening Update: In a late afternoon interview the Texas Forest Service put the amount of land burned by both fires in the Livermore Ranch Complex Fire at over 23,000 acres. Reinforcements have arrived and the smaller of the two fires is now 60 percent contained. The larger fire, which continues to threaten the Davis Mountains […]
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