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AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Texas Gov. Rick commodore sought additional federal support in battling wildfires across his drought-parched land as a woodland brightness gutted at least sextet homes on Sun and threatened hundreds more in Austin, the land capital.

An estimated 1.5 meg acres of tinder-like brush and grasslands hit gone up in flames in Texas since Jan 1, most half of that during the time hebdomad lonely under whatever of the driest conditions in Texas history.

Some 220 homes in all hit been lost, according to a honor free on Sun from commodore to President Barack Obama requesting a federal hardship declaration.

One protector was killed on weekday in Eastland, Texas, most 80 miles south of Fort Worth.

"As wildfires advise to anger across our state, Texas is reaching its capacity to respond to these emergencies and is in need of federal assistance," the governor said in a statement.

Flames hit blazed most fiercely for the time pair of weeks in West Texas, where a dozen wildfires hit charred thousands of acres of open rangeland and prompted ranchers to advise hundreds of thousands of kine to safer pastures.

Fires hit also unnatural hundreds of agricultural Texans from their homes across the state. But Austin, in south Texas, marked the maximal and most hard populated municipality settled in harm's way so far.

By Sun afternoon, the brightness there had scorched 80 acres of oak and juniper woodlands in the south crossway of the capital, an Atlantic called Oak Hill, flanked by residential subdivisions and a accord college.

Six to 10 homes were destroyed within hours of the fire's occurrence on Sunday, and most 100 more were evacuated as two U.S. Air Force load planes dumped blast retardants over the area, connected by a water-dropping helicopter.

"It does hit the chance to intend into the canopies of those trees and display whatever pretty beatific burning lengths," Texas Forest Service spokesman Jim Carse told Reuters. "There's hundreds of homes, individual different neighborhoods, that are in the Atlantic that are threatened."

It was not directly country how the blast started.

About 160 miles absent in north-central Texas, the municipality of Strawn, accumulation 764, was evacuated as a 1,000-acre wildfire closed in on the area. More than 30 homes in the Atlantic already were destroyed during the time week, blast officials said.

The brightness onward on Strawn was conception of a assemble of fires that burned 45,000 acres around Possum Kingdom Lake and then merged. Wind-whipped flames had managed to move portions of the lake, blast information officer Steve Deffibaugh said.

(Reporting by Elliott Blackburn; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by saint Bohan)

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