Your long post and links are stunningly irrelevant to anything I have said about the fires. And everything I have said about the fires is correct, and I used a quote from Perry as the basis for my statement that they have run for months. I thought they'd been going most of the summer, but I learned from Governor Perry's words in the link in #43 that they've been a problem since December of last year.
Try not to put so much effort in irrelevant posts.
We have been in a drought for almost 2 years. What you seem to be missing is that this weekend, due to the effects of the tropical storm in the Gulf, extreme drought, and cold front, winds have been whipped up and fires are breaking out all across the state.
I live in a suburb of Houston. When I step outside my house, there is smoke in the air. You can smell the burning/ash all over my part of town. This did not happen until Sunday/Monday/today. While we may have had a small grass fire here and there, it is the scope of the fires—literally across the state—which has us Texans praying for rain.