BELL COUNTY, Texas — After a brutally how summer with almost no rain and extreme drought conditions, the clouds have finally been rolling in.
There might not be anyone happier than the plants in Central Texas.
”Those roots were starved and they needed water,” said Master Gardener with Texas A&M Central Texas, Rachel Glass.
“As soon as they got water it tells the plant, 'Yay, now we can be green again,'."
There has been some nice green growth around the area that has actually caused people to dust off their lawnmowers.
”In a normal time, I mow every week,” Glass said.
“It can get up to two feet, three feet tall — the prairie grass.”
A couple feet of growth in a week has Central Texas firefighters concerned.
”The season we’re going into is where we start to get these winter rains and fall rains — the vegetation starts to grow back up again but in Texas, that doesn’t last long,” said Driver and Firefighter with Temple Fire and Rescue, Josh Simon.
“When that starts to dry out, the bad thing is, the temperatures start to cool down, but the humidity starts to fall.”
This causes a high risk for wildfires.
”Blessing and a curse, there’s a lot of unburned fuel,” Simon said.
“You may see some additional greening up, but there’s still a lot of vegetation that’s left over from when the summer droughts happen, and we didn’t get that stuff burned off.”
Summer isn’t the only fire season in Texas.
”You still have those humidity levels that start to fall in the Wintertime, and then we get a whole other season that gets sparked with wild land fires, grass fires, brush fires — all of those,” Simon said.
Temple Fire and Rescue says the area will be in a burn ban until mid-October — a ban they are urging the public to follow, because even green grass can catch on fire.
