Texas State Parks and the CCC: The Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps

Epilogue: Inferno at Bastrop on Labor Day Weekend

This and other reports of a fire in Bastrop State Park and the fight by CCC workers to extinguish it appeared in area newspapers on March 12, 1942. The builders of the park, CCC Companies 1805 and 1811, had vacated the park in October 1939.1 Although they were not present to fight the 1942 fire, other CCC companies were nearby, most important, a company at the Lake Austin CCC camp. Superintendent C. L. Turner was therefore able to send forty-two workers to fight, day and night, “the aggravating flame, which would be put under control and then flare up again elsewhere.” Exhausted by this struggle, the Lake Austin enrollees were relieved by one hundred more sent from the CCC camp at Seguin. Bastrop mayor Will J. Rogers (unrelated to his famous namesake) praised the young men and observed, “If it had not been for these CCC boys, Bastrop state park would have burned up.”2 Some seventy years later, on Labor Day weekend 2011, the park and much of Bastrop County were again subjected to a fierce fire, which was sparked by electric power lines blown down in strong winds and which quickly became an inferno as a consequence of many months of unrelieved drought. This time, TPWD’s Wildland Fire Team, part of the State Parks Division, heeded desperate calls for help. Established by TPWD in 2005, the Wildland Fire Team consists of 160 men and women who operate or manage state parks. In addition to their primary jobs, these professionals study best practices in conservation management. To prevent fires, they regularly use controlled fires to reduce fuel loads—masses of combustible material—that help restore park habitats and protect park infrastructures. Following guidelines of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), team members meet training requirements for each level in the team’s organization— firefighter, squad boss, single resource boss, burn boss, and so on. Inferno at Bastrop on Labor Day Weekend ˜° ˛˛ 109 BASTROP—An erratic, persistent forest and brush fire, which spread over some 30,000 acres, was extinguished Thursday, after CCC-trained fire fighters had battled the conflagration for three to four days. epilogue In this photo taken only weeks before the fire, Megan, a swimming instructor from Friends of the Pines, exchanges a high-five with student Bella Simpson in the Bastrop swimming pool, Bastrop State Park. (Photo by Randall Maxwell, June 11, 2011, TxDOT) 110 Epilogue In 2011, the fire team was led by the appropriately named Jeff Sparks, and on Labor Day weekend Sparks and his family were enjoying a day with his parents at Lake Palestine in Northeast Texas. A cell phone call informed him a fire was burning at Bastrop State Park. Located a four-hour drive from Bastrop, Sparks noted that this was the fortieth such call he had received during the 2011 summer and that such calls usually reported small fires quickly extinguished by firefighting crews in local fire departments. Still, he loaded up his fire team equipment, called Austin to dispatch additional firefighters, and began driving southeast on State Highway 21 toward Bastrop. When Sparks reached the intersection with US Highway 290, still several miles from Bastrop, he proceeded through a police roadblock and almost immediately saw giant flames illuminating the night sky. Driving toward them, Sparks soon saw houses, barns, and fences burning, but no firefighters. “It was literally like driving into a war zone,” he later recalled.3 Not among those who panic easily, Sparks and his firefighters are trained in “situational awareness,” which means they size up what is going on around them and look for potential problems, safety options, and escape routes.4 Scanning the Bastrop situation, Sparks thought this fire, having already burned longer than most, might well be one of an entirely different magnitude. After making a brief stop at the park headquarters, he and other fire leaders went straight to the fire incident command center in downtown Bastrop to determine TPWD’s role in fighting the fire. He quickly realized that his fire team would be part of a massive The flames engulf a stand of the Lost Pines on Labor Day weekend 2011. (Chase Fountain, TPWD) A fire team member looks at the flames from behind the wheel of her truck. (TPWD) Inferno at Bastrop 111 effort to quell a fire that by then engulfed thirty-four thousand acres. Assigned to Division “G,” his team had the...