Posted 3/15/2006 05:49:00 PM by Douglas

"This is the worst-case scenario of what we hoped wouldn't happen," said Warren Bielenberg, a Texas Forest Service spokesman.

Holy crap, when is this going to stop? When it hits the Rio Grande? The entire Panhandle is on fire apparently. 900,000 acres on fires catches some attention now and again:

"It's like Armageddon out here," McLean-area rancher Bill Bryant said.

"We hauled - I don't remember - 15 to 18 calves that were dead. They just get into a corner and the fire consumes them."

Worse than the dead were the dying.

Cattle without ears.

Tails amputated by fire.

Eyelids melted shut.

Ranchers had no choice but to put the burned cattle down.

"Imagine your worst nightmare, and it can't even come close to this," said Brad Overstreet, a hand on the Taylor Ranch.

Fire killed four horses in a pasture on the ranch six miles north of Alanreed.

"All the horses were dead when we found them," Overstreet said. "They didn't have a hair on them.

"It's the worst thing you've ever seen in your life."

I can't even imagine how horrible this is. That's not only a suffering animal, it's someone's livelihood.

One aspect I'd like to explore in all of this is the ego of Rhode Island. As the smallest state, do you think they get tied of being everyone's whipping boy when it becomes necessary to describe something big out west, we have to pick on the nation's smallest state back east?

At first, the Panhandle grass fires were "half the size of Rhode Island", then that got upgraded to "2/3 the size of Rhode Island." The scorched area is quickly approaching the entire state of Rhode Island, and then what? I propose that for disaster contingencies, a new unit of area. The RI, approximately equal to 990,398.4 acres (1547.5 miles²) to be used when a crap load of land is destroyed, we used the nation's smallest state as a measuring stick, so that a 0.75RI or 1.25RI is readily understood.

Because after all, if 0.9 RI burns down in Texas, that just means that 1.0 RI in New England doesn't really matter, anyway.