Much work remains 3 years after devastating Bastrop fire

Sept. 07--BASTROP -- Kicking up the sandy soil that makes this area hospitable to its famous loblolly pines, Jesse Garcia drove a small bulldozer down a cleared path on a 140-acre lot along Texas 21 on Friday morning.

On either side of him were thousands of charred loblollies -- "like a bunch of black toothpicks sticking up," as one of Garcia's co-workers put it -- that were burned in the 2011 Bastrop County Complex Fire.

"It is very strange to look at," said Garcia, who is supervising a crew of loggers from Go Green International.

The company this year began clearing the estimated 1.5 million dead trees in Bastrop's Lost Pines -- named for their curious disconnection from the loblolly forest that covers much of the southeastern United States -- at no charge to property owners. At its new $27 million facility in nearby Paige, Go Green turns the wood into pellets and then sells them to a biofuel plant in Liverpool, England.

There are enough dead pines in the area to keep Go Green busy for 10 years, said Mike Fisher, Bastrop County's top emergency management official.

Coordinating with Go Green is one of many projects related to the 2011 fires that Fisher is still coordinating -- and one of the few that come at no cost to taxpayers.

As the anniversary passed for the largest wildfire in Texas history -- the Labor Day 2011 blaze that consumed nearly 34,000 acres, destroyed 1,700 homes and left two people dead -- Fisher said his days are still dominated by work related to the disaster.

"We don't remember what we used to do," said Fisher, who expects to be working on the fire for at least three more years.

Projects that Fisher's office is only in the early stages of managing include:

--The construction of three emergency shelters, at $1.5 million each.

--A new $2.6 million radio tower to fix emergency communication problems that became evident during the fire.

--A $4 million effort to clear fire fuels such as mesquite trees and small oaks.

--New evacuation-route roads, which could cost $4 million.

--A new $4.45 million fire station.

Fisher stressed that the budget figures are still early estimates. Funding for the projects is coming primarily from federal agencies, with a few state grants and local matching funds.

One part of the recovery that is drawing to a close is the effort to find housing for people who lost their homes in the fire and didn't have insurance or couldn't get aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

That was the mission of the Bastrop County Long Term Recovery Team, a nonprofit that raised about $3.5 million and found volunteers to build 127 houses over the past three years, according to Executive Director Janice Butler.

Five more houses are being built, but after that, the organization is "winding down," Butler said. Only about 50 percent of the houses that were destroyed have been rebuilt, she said, but the rest of the victims whom her group has contacted either moved away or declined help.

Going forward, the recovery effort should be less about physically rebuilding the community and more about emotionally healing it, she said. Many of the people her group helped said they had experienced depression and high levels of stress since the fire, according to Butler.

"If we're just building their house now, they've been living in unknown or substandard housing for three years," she said. "I don't hear people that are angry anymore. For most people, it's a sense of acceptance. They say, 'This is all I have, and this is all I'm going to have.' "

Go Green founder Dennis Parker's logging companies have cleared forests for oil fields in Midland and Colorado. But when his mother's house in Bastrop burned down in 2011, he decided to put his vocation to a new use.

"We were at a meeting with the Lost Pines Recovery Team immediately following the fire, and we realized there was no Plan B," said Parker, who lives in Austin. "There's no way people could afford to do this on their own."

Private tree removal usually costs about $300 per tree, he said. So he and his wife, Shea Menchaca, who is a 50 percent owner of Go Green, came up with a plan to do it for free -- and hopefully make a profit.

They built the Paige plant, which opened this year, to turn the pine logs into fuel pellets.

Aside from working with the county to seek permission from property owners to remove the trees on their land, Go Green has received no government aid, Parker said.

Parker declined to provide details about Go Green's finances but said the company will be profiting on its $27 million investment in Paige "soon."

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