By Laura Matthews: Subscribe to Laura's RSS feed
September 6, 2011 4:44 PM EDT
Wind-fueled Texas wildfires have consumed 852 homes within two days and more than 1,000 have been destroyed in the past seven days, officials say.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has said more than 100,000 acres have burned in his drought-stricken state. He took a break from the campaign trail on Monday to return to Texas to oversee the firefighting efforts.
"I'll be real honest with you I'm not paying any attention to politics right now," Perry told ABC News. "There's plenty of time to take care of that. People's lives and their possessions are in danger. That's substantially more important."
The largest wildfire is currently running rampant just east of Austin and burned at least 600 homes and blackened 30,000 acres, according to reports.
Tom Boggus, director of the Texas Forest Service, told CBS'' "The Early Show" that as of Tuesday morning there has been no containment of the fire.
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"We've been in a defensive mode for a couple of days now, and really all you can do is get people out of the way, protect homes where you can, and make sure our firefighters are safe," Boggus has said in the interview. "But today, the winds have died down so we can probably be much more aggressive, and we hopefully can get some containment on all these fires in the Austin area."
Texas Forestry Services officials were fighting 63 new fires on Sunday on more than 32,000 acres, which included 22 new large fires.
More than 3.6 million acres, or 1.5 million hectares, in Texas have been scorched by wildfires since November. About $5 billion in damages have been done to the state's agricultural industry, according to reports.
Here's more update from the Forestry Service
Wildfire update - Sept. 6, 2011
Current situation:
- Yesterday Texas Forest Service responded to 22 new fires for 7,544 acres, including 10 new large fires.
- In the past seven days Texas Forest Service has responded to 181 fires for 118,413 acres.
- It appears that in the past 48 hours, more than 700 homes have been destroyed. As better assessments come in, we will continue to update the situation report.
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