Texas drought produces long, busy fire season

By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY GRANBURY, Texas — Firefighters assigned to the Texas Forest Service this year have grown accustomed to living away from wives and husbands, skipping family gatherings, missing anniversaries. PHOTOS: Texas battles wildfires They check in daily to the Forest Service’s command center in this north-central Texas town, no days off, waiting for the call that puts them into the teeth of another galloping, 1,500-degree wildfire. A typical summer wildfire season begins in June. This year, they’ve been fighting fires since early February. “I keep thinking, ‘How bad does it need to be before it gets better?’ ” said John Fugitt, a team supervisor from Greenville, Texas, who has clocked 90 firefighting days this year. “But it’s still bad.” There have been nearly 62,000 wildfires across the USA this year. No state has been hotter than Texas. A withering, two-year drought in central and southern Texas has sparked a wildfire season that has already destroyed the most structures in state history. The state has recorded more than twice as many wildfires — 13,083 — as the second-most-active state, California with 5,749, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The fires have scorched more than 660,000 acres in Texas. Only Alaska has seen more acres burn this year — 2.8 million — but those are mostly in vast wildlife preserves, where officials allow the fires to burn, said Randy Eardley of the fire center. …