A fire burns in the wooded lots west of Hawk Road Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011 near Diana, Texas. Texas is in the midst of one of its worst wildfire outbreaks in state history. A perilous mix of hot temperatures, strong winds and a historic drought spawned the Bastrop-area fire, the largest of the nearly 190 wildfires the state forest service says erupted this week, killing four people, destroying more than 1,700 homes and forcing thousands to evacuate. (AP Photo/The Tyler Morning Telegraph, Sarah A. Miller)Imagine your anguish if your home burned. We don’t even want to think about such a possibility.
So try to conceive what it must be like for the people who lived in the roughly 1,600 homes that have now been destroyed by wildfires in an area around Bastrop, Texas, outside Austin.
Tens of thousands of acres in Texas have been scorched — so far — by fires throughout the state.
Worse still, more than a dozen people around Bastrop have not been accounted for, though authorities hold out hope that they were simply out of town when the fires struck.
“It’s all gone,” one victim who lost his home lamented in an Associated Press article.