One recent morning I biked through the parks at the east end of Lady Bird Lake. I saw kindling, not a park.
Grass cured to straw. Standing and leaning dead trees, gray and barkless. Cut limbs jackstrawed into piles taller than my handlebars. All of it sits between the East Riverside-Oltorf and Montopolis neighborhoods and the river.
The 90,000-acre Ross Fire west of Fort Worth burned for weeks and destroyed over 150 structures. Numerous other fires have raged throughout the state this season. The Texas A&M Forest Service says fuels across Central Texas are critically dry and that September fire potential is high. Travis County’s burn ban runs through September 29 – in unincorporated areas. It does not cover the parks I rode through.
Austinites think fire is a Hill Country problem starting at the cedar and canyons west of MoPac. That belief may prove expensive. Austin ranks fifth among American cities for wildfire vulnerability y número uno outside California. Fifty-one percent of the city’s habitable land now sits in an elevated-risk zone.
The wildfire transmission mechanism isn’t mysterious. Dry grass carries a fire fast and low, but grass alone burns out. Dead wood raises fire temperature and holds it long enough to set living trees alight. Once the canopy goes, the fire throws embers that can travel a mile and a half. The river below Longhorn Dam is much narrower than that, and hence no barrier at all.
City Hall already knows the neighborhood is at risk. In March 2025 it closed a 37-acre encampment near Ben White and Montopolis, citing high wildfire risk, after the fire department answered 35 fire calls at that spot in a single year.
So why is the fuel still there?
Because prevention is a lousy political product. It costs money now, in public, and its payoff is a fire that never happens. Nobody holds a press conference for a fire that never happened. Suppression, by contrast, produces heroes, helicopters, and federal reimbursement. Central Texas has run this experiment. The 2011 Labor Day fires destroyed 57 homes in Travis County and 1,700 in Bastrop County.
Austin’s ledger tells the same story. In January 2025, the City Council authorized a vegetation-management and prescribed-burn contract worth up to $7.5 million. It funded $200,000. This August, the Council added $200,000 for a grinder because hauling dead trees out of city parks costs too much.
But that is also an opportunity. If hauling the wood is the expensive part, stop paying to haul it. Sell it.
I have no stake in any firewood company but I do have a stake in East Austin not burning.
H-E-B sells a bundle of kiln-dried mixed hardwood for about $8. The label says it comes from East Texas. Austin trucks firewood 200 miles across the state while paying to grind up the hardwood lying 4 miles from City Hall. Wood a contractor gets for nothing is wood worth carrying out.
I have no stake in any firewood company but I do have a stake in East Austin not burning.
Put the dead wood out to competitive bid. Let contractors keep what sells – nicely seasoned oak and pecan – and deliver the punky hackberry to the city’s new grinder. Bar work on oaks from February through June and require that cut oak stay on-site until seasoned, so that fighting fire does not spread oak wilt.
This proposal doesn’t require prescribed burns, clearing living trees, or a fight over whether fire belongs in a riparian bottomland. Just cut and remove the dead wood. Start along the river, where a fire could jump into neighborhoods this city has spent 30 years promising not to forget.
The dead wood in those parks is either an asset or an accelerant. Austin is currently paying to keep it the second one.
Robert E. Wright is the author of History and Evolution of the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, co-author of “Why California Keeps Burning: How Misguided Insurance Policies Fuel Wildfire Risk,” and a professor at the University of Austin.
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This article appears in September 25 • 2026.