Cops: Teen arsonists sought over Texas wildfire

Police in Texas were hunting three teenagers after a wildfire caused $1.4 million in damage in an Austin suburb, officials said.

The blaze destroyed nearly a dozen homes and caused the evacuations of 500 people in Leander, according to residents and media reports. Investigators were treating the wildfire as arson.

Dawn Camp, 33, a fire evacuee from Leander near the Austin city limits, hadn't heard the phone ring and didn't know it was time to flee her home until she smelled smoke and walked out the front door to see her neighbor's home burning.

"Fire was raining down on my yard," she said.

Story: Rising death toll in Texas wildfires

She grabbed her children, put them in the car, and started down the road. A block later, she jumped out and gave the keys to her 18-year-old daughter, who spirited her younger siblings, ages 8 and 10, to their great-grandmother's house.

Camp then walked home to coax her cats, Bugbite and Moonshine, out of the house. But police were in her yard.

"They wouldn't let me back in," she said, standing outside a shelter at Rouse High School in Leander. Walking along a main street through the quiet subdivision, Camp said the smoke was so thick she couldn't see or breathe.

Slideshow: Wildfires scorch Texas (on this page)

A passerby picked her up, and she rejoined her family. Later, a relieved Camp reported that she was able to see her house ? and both the home and the cats were fine.

"I saw some houses that were burned, but our little half of the street was fine," Camp said. The cats "were thirsty, but they were wonderful."

The wildfire in Leander had been extinguished by Tuesday afternoon.

There were also signs that firefighters were gaining ground on the Bastrop County wildfire, which has destroyed more than 600 homes and blackened about 45 square miles.

The Texas Forest Service said Wednesday that the blaze was 30 percent contained.

Agency spokeswoman April Saginor said lighter winds have helped and that the weather conditions mean Wednesday "should be a good day for" those battling the wildfires.

The Bastrop blaze is the most severe of the more than 180 wildfires reported in the past week across drought-stricken Texas.

"It is certainly a remarkable fire in terms of evacuations and the number of homes that have burned," Ken Frederick, spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, told Reuters.

Altogether, fires in Texas have destroyed a total of more than 1,000 homes and caused four deaths, including the two at Bastrop, marking one of the most devastating wildfire outbreaks in state history.

Governor Rick Perry said Tuesday that a 100-member search team would begin to comb the area around Bastrop for more possible victims Wednesday morning.

Video: Gov. Rick Perry: Wildfires have been ?devastating? (on this page)

He deployed Texas Task Force 1, the state's elite search team, to help local authorities. The team includes a dozen search dogs.

Texas Task Force 1 was also sent to New York following the Sept. 11 attacks and to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Perry cut short a presidential campaign trip to South Carolina to deal with the crisis. On Tuesday, he toured a blackened area near Bastrop, about 25 miles from Austin.

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"Pretty powerful visuals of individuals who lost everything," he said after the tour. "The magnitude of these losses are pretty stunning."

The governor would not say whether he would take part in Wednesday evening's Republican presidential debate in California, explaining that he was "substantially more concerned about making sure Texans are being taken care of."

But campaign spokesman Mark Miner said in an email later in the day that Perry planned to be there.

Story: For GOP, debate is where expectations meet reality

Perry, a favorite of the Tea Party movement who has made a career out of railing against government spending, said he expects federal assistance with the wildfires. He also complained that red tape was keeping bulldozers and other heavy equipment at the Army's Fort Hood, 75 miles from Bastrop, from being put to use. Fort Hood was battling its own fire, a 3,700-acre blaze.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration has approved seven federal grants to Texas to help with the latest outbreak, and "we will continue to work closely with the state and local emergency management officials as their efforts to contain these fires."

About 1,200 firefighters battled the blazes, including members of local departments from around the state and crews from out of state, many of them arriving after Texas put out a call for help. More firefighters will join the battle once they have been registered and sent where they are needed.

Five heavy tanker planes, some from the federal government, and three aircraft capable of scooping 1,500 gallons of water at a time from lakes also took part in the fight.

"We're getting incredible support from all over the country, federal and state agencies," said Mark Stanford, operations director for the Texas Forest Service.

The disaster is blamed largely on Texas' yearlong drought, one of the most severe dry spells the state has ever seen.

Interactive: Texas drought (on this page)

The fire in Bastrop County is easily the single most devastating wildfire in Texas in more than a decade, eclipsing a blaze that destroyed 168 homes in North Texas in April.

Texas Forest Service spokeswoman April Saginor said state wildfire records go back only to the late 1990s.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44420224/ns/weather/

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