Day 61: The Turtles Fight a Fire

This picture is a little ridiculous, like all of my pictures, but it was inspired by a pretty serious subject. Central Texas has been in extreme drought conditions all year and recently we've had wildfires popping up left and right. Last week a massive fire started between Bastrop and Smithville that has so far covered about 45 square miles and destroyed somewhere between 600 to 1000 homes. I have a lot of family that lives in that area and they've all been evacuated. They still aren't sure if their homes are still standing.

Monday another fire started North of Austin in a neighborhood. It was close enough to my mom's house that ash was raining down into her backyard. Several other fires have been reported around the area and while I was drawing this picture an apartment building a few miles from where I live caught fire. Luckily that was a small fire and easily contained, but this whole situation is out of control. You can constantly see a haze all around the city. I told my wife when we were driving back from the store on Monday that it looked like we were living on Mars because of the red sky caused by all the smoke.

Hopefully the fires will be contained and stopped, but they're afraid the massive Bastrop area fire will get worse before it gets better.