With the countryside drying up and cold weather sapping the moisture from the vegetation, Fire Chief Donald C. Morris is warning people to be especially careful with fire right now.

“There’s still a lot of fuel in the fields and on the roadsides,” Morris said this week.

By fuel, he means brush and grass that have turned brown and crisp by months without rain and several periods of freezing weather.

The chief said it does not take much to set that fuel ablaze.

“A homeless man was killed Friday afternoon in a wildfire south of Austin,” Morris said.

People need to remember that in January and February of 2008, 70,000 acres burned in Texas, destroying 60 homes and structures.

During the extended drought of 2005-06, 2.25 million acres of land burned in Texas, destroying 730 homes and killing 20 people. Two of the dead were firefighters caught in rapidly spreading wildfires, Morris said.

Morris said current conditions are similar to what they were in 2005-06.

The Texas Forestry Service reported that last weekend firefighters were battling 25-30 intense wildfires across the state.

Those were fires that involved between 300 and 400 acres, Morris said, and one of them got even larger.

Anyone who paid attention last week was aware of the problem. Beeville firemen were called out to four grass fires last week on Thursday alone.

Morris said the local department usually is successful in keeping wildfires small.

“We get on them fast,” he said. The tactic is to put trucks and men on a fire as quickly as possible and stop it before the winds spread the flames.

Protecting structures is especially important for local firemen because when buildings catch fire, people lose expensive property and sometimes are injured.

Morris stressed how easy it is to start a fire right now. One of last week’s fires was started by county workers cutting brush on County Road 407. The fire had burned an entire acre by the time the six firemen at the scene had it under control.

Another fire was started by a worker welding on a gate. That fire also burned an acre before the four men at the scene extinguished the flames.

One fire on Charco Road damaged up to 400 acres last week, according to a report on file at the C.M. “Smitty” Smith Main Fire Station. That fire was hard to stop because of heavy cover that was difficult to reach.

Assistant Fire Chief Clifford Bagwell of the Pettus-Tuleta Volunteer Fire Deparment said several area fire departments helped extinguish that fire.

Bagwell said the cause of the blaze had not been determined but something as insignificant as a cigarette can start a grass fire in minutes with conditions as they are right now.

“On any fire to which these volunteers are called, there is always the possibility of injury or death. These are people who volunteer their time to help their neighbors and the citizens need to help by being very careful during this dry period,” Bagwell said.

Beeville firemen also assisted efforts to stop grass fires in Skidmore, Papalote and Kenedy last week.

Fortunately, BVFD members have updated their brush trucks, equipping them with larger water tanks and modern foaming equipment. Converting regular water to foam makes it possible to break the surface tension on the dry grass and brush so that the water reaches inside the vegetation and smothers the flame.

That increases the efficiency of a BVFD response. But it also means that local firemen are more likely to be called out for mutual aid to other departments in South Texas.

However, Morris limits the number of trucks and men sent out of the county because a serious grass fire could break out here at any moment.

Although a burn ban is in effect throughout the county, rural residents still are allowed to incinerate household trash and garbage on Saturday mornings from 7 until 11 o’clock. But the fires must be in enclosed containers.

So far, people have been careful with trash fires. When asked if any of those trash fires had caused larger wildfires, Morris said, “Not any that were in containers, as far as I know.”

“It’s a tinderbox right now,” said Assistant Chief Bill Burris of the BVFD. With current winds and low humidity anything could spark a major wildfire.

“One day we could get high winds from the south. The next day we could have high winds from the north,” Burris said. “It’s unpredictable.”

The chief said one comment in particular bothers him. “It’s just a grass fire,” he often hears. He said people who think that way should ask the families of the 18 people and two firemen who died in Texas wildfires in 2005-06.

“People need to know that it’s not a good idea to think that a grass fire is not dangerous,” Morris said.