Five years ago Sunday, a small fire sparked around the Circle D-KC Estates north of Bastrop, when winds shook a few loblolly pines into a string of electrical lines. The fire quickly turned into a monster that burned 34,000 acres in Bastrop County. It torched 1,660 homes, killed two people and injured 12 others.

The Bastrop County Complex Fire is deemed the most destructive wildfire in Texas history.

Today, the event has become a marker for how people in Bastrop County talk about time: before and after the fire.

A tinder box of pine needles and timber, the Lost Pines is no stranger to wildfire. The county had spent years building a first-class emergency management office after large fires in 1984 and 2009 burned a total of 3,000 acres. Officials trained firefighters in the incident command system, outfitted them with proper personal protective equipment and developed a Community Wildfire Protection Plan.

Even though the state was experiencing exceptional drought that September 2011 and 42 other wildfires were burning by Sunday afternoon, Ronnie McDonald, then the county judge, wasn’t thinking about fire when he woke that day.

He went to church as usual, then packed his car after lunchtime to drive to College Station to see Texas A&M play Southern Methodist University — but instead he was called to the emergency operations center for a fire.

"We anticipated, OK, we’ll be here 30, 40 minutes, get it under control and be on the way," McDonald said. "When we arrived in the office, it was something totally different."

The call arrives

Mike Fisher had woken up early to a power outage in Elgin. Winds were picking up in Bastrop County as Tropical Storm Lee struck the Louisiana coast over the weekend.

As Fisher drove, he heard reports over the radio of fires in Travis, Lee and Caldwell counties, he said. Fisher, a fire chief as well as the county’s emergency management coordinator, thought something didn’t seem right. The typical early burn window is just after lunchtime. It was only 10:30 a.m., and fires were sprouting up everywhere. At 1 p.m. he activated the emergency operations center.

At 2:21 p.m., the call came in. Sparks had ignited in the trees on Cardinal Lane and flames were spreading fast, according to the county’s fire study.

Standing in the operations center on Loop 150, Fisher and McDonald had a feeling of dread.

"We were informed that this is not a fire that we are fighting to put out. This is a fire where we are fighting to get people out of the way," McDonald said.

Within 13 minutes, the county had begun emergency evacuations. A second fire was reported on Schwantz Road at 3:30 p.m., and then a third in Tahitian Village at 5 p.m. By nightfall, 5,000 people had been evacuated, and the firefight was underway.

Thirty-six days of flames

Resources were mobilized from across the state, including from the Texas Railroad Commission, Texas A&M Forest Service, Texas Department of Public Safety, state health services and county officials. There were so many groups that people had to work from the tailgates of their trucks in the emergency management office’s parking lot until Bastrop opened its convention center Monday morning to house the incident command center.

By Tuesday, downtown Bastrop became a small village of its own. Insurance adjusters set up tents along Texas 71. Area churches handed out supplies to people in need. In the background, plumes of smoke billowed above the buildings. The sky was darkened to permanent night.

On the Sunday the fire began, Vickie Faye Keenan was found dead in her home. The next day, Michael Troy Farr was found in his driveway, clutching his toolbox. Every day, Fisher expected to turn up more bodies. He sent Texas Task Force One with cadaver dogs to search neighborhoods. Beside them, Karen Ridenour of the Forest Service and a small team went mailbox to mailbox, street by street, listing GPS coordinates for homes that had burned. Every day, officials posted the addresses on the door of the convention center.

"I realized how helpless I was in that situation," McDonald said. "But also how powerful we were as a community."

There were plenty who were angry, Fisher said. Some have still not been made whole, according to the Bastrop County Long-Term Recovery Team. But a sense of resiliency was visible, even in those early days, the group said.

"Saving lives was the unifying purpose," McDonald said. "We really didn’t have any room for strife and discord."

On Oct. 9, 36 days after the blaze ignited, it was completely extinguished. By the end, it had spread across 16 miles and 34,000 acres and burned 96 percent of Bastrop State Park. Estimated losses topped $200 million.

A community rebuilds

When it was over, McDonald rested. He stopped taking calls and questions and gave himself the space to get better, he said. Then he asked himself: "How do we recover?"

That process had already begun before the flames were extinguished. County officials, spiritual leaders and other community representatives had crafted a recovery plan that was approved by the Commissioner’s Court Sept. 26.

"It wasn’t perfect. But it was a place to start," Fisher said.

Bastrop County was awarded public and individual assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the disaster. It would cost $20 million just to clean up debris, $5 million of which the county had to match. It didn’t have that kind of money, officials said.

Unexpectedly, the Lower Colorado River Authority cut the county a check and work began. At the time, the Bastrop County Long-Term Recovery Team, which today helps the uninsured and underinsured with disaster recovery, was barely in its infancy. It was still fighting to understand its mission: to help the ones who had the very least. But so many had nothing.

Slowly, the organization discovered its purpose. It went on to rebuild 133 homes burned in the fire. Early in the recovery, McDonald left office to run for Congress. Bastrop County auditor Jim Wither took over, then County Judge Paul Pape, who has since overseen the influx of millions of federal and state dollars to help repair and to help stave off future disasters.

The Legislature gave a special appropriation of $4.9 million that was used to remove dangerous trees, repave roads and launch a fuel mitigation program. A $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will finance erosion-control projects, four new emergency shelters, a radio tower in Smithville and expanded evacuation routes.

"We will rebuild, and we will make life better," Pape said. "We don’t want to live our lives in the shadow of disaster."

Bastrop State Park is still a graveyard for dead pine trees that will never come back to life. But between them, more than 1.5 million seedlings have been planted. Five years later, some of those new loblollies stand 15 feet high. The forest will rise again, park Superintendent Jamie Creacy said. And not so long from now either.

"I used to say at the time that God was going to give us beauty for the ashes, that something great was going to come out of this," McDonald said. "There has to be a reason."