HELOTES — In defiance of firefighters, perplexed public officials and a mess of heavy equipment assembled to extinguish it, a fire has been burning in a brush pile the size of a football stadium in the middle of this town since Christmas. And it's not likely to die for at least a month.
Even as the fire remains contained and isolated on the brush pile, it has sent steady plumes of smoke into the city. The mayor has declared a state of emergency, calling the smoke an environmental hazard and begging for help from the state or federal government. Residents of the nearest houses, a quarter-mile away, complain of ash falling on their cars, smoky air, breathing problems and runny eyes. But other officials seem resigned that the fire will take at least a month to extinguish, and the county is offering free motel stays for anyone living nearby with respiratory problems.
The enormous brush pile, a mass of dirt and trees 70 feet tall at its peak, 400 feet long and about 100 feet wide, has been assembled over at least 15 years. From certain angles, as it disappears into plumes of gray smoke curling from flaming fissures, it looks like the peak of a very active volcano oddly plopped in the Hill Country.
A contractor told the city it would take as much as 4,000 gallons of water a minute, sprayed intermittently over a week, to smother the smoke. That's as much as 10 million gallons of water, enough to fill 500 swimming pools. But the property's on unincorporated county land, and the county is unwilling to spray that much water. The property is adjacent to an old quarry, a high school, a subdivision and some city offices. The brush pile, where wood is recycled into compost and mulch, is a byproduct, in a way, of the city's rapid growth as a bedroom community.
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