{
  "title": "Wildfire Risk in Bastrop County, TX 2026 | Satelife",
  "description": "Bastrop County wildfire risk analyzed with satellite data: the 2011 Complex Fire that started in Tahitian Village, Lost Pines fuel, one-way-in access, and a real property report. Check your address.",
  "image": "https://satelife.ai/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/bastrop-county-locator.png",
  "canonical": "https://satelife.ai/wildfire-risk/texas/bastrop-county/",
  "content": "[Home](/)›[Wildfire Risk](/wildfire-risk/)›[Texas](/wildfire-risk/texas/)›Bastrop County\n\nBastrop County, Texas · 2026\n\n# Wildfire risk in Bastrop County: the subdivision where the _fire started_\n\nThe 2011 Bastrop County Complex destroyed 1,696 structures, killed two people and burned for 55 days — still the costliest and most destructive wildfire in Texas history. One of its three ignition points was Tahitian Village. We ran a Satelife report for an address on Tahitian Drive: 46 / 100 composite, a fire-history layer at 95 / 100, and exactly **one independent approach route** to the parcel.\n\n[Get your Bastrop County wildfire risk PDF →](/#cta) [See the Tahitian Village case study ↓](#case-study)\n\n![Satellite locator map headed “Wildfire risk — Bastrop County, Texas”, with the county boundary outlined, Elgin and Smithville marked, and a flame icon on Tahitian Village, one of the three ignition points of the 2011 Bastrop County Complex Fire](/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/bastrop-county-locator.webp)\n\nBastrop County on satellite imagery — the Lost Pines belt along the Colorado River, with Elgin and Smithville marked and the flame icon on Tahitian Village, where one of the three 2011 ignitions occurred. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nLocal context\n\n## The most destructive fire in _Texas history_\n\nBastrop County sits thirty miles east of Austin, on the Colorado River, and holds something no other part of Texas has: the **Lost Pines** — an isolated island of loblolly pine roughly a hundred miles west of the main East Texas pine belt, a relic stand growing on deep sand that holds enough moisture to keep it alive. It is beautiful, it is why people move here, and it is a closed-canopy conifer forest with houses inside it.\n\nOn **4 September 2011**, at the end of the driest year in Texas record, Tropical Storm Lee pulled hard northerly winds across Central Texas. Trees went into Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative distribution lines at three separate places — along Schwantz Ranch Road west of Texas 21, in Circle D Ranch, and in **Tahitian Village** — and the three fires merged into the Bastrop County Complex.\n\n-   **1,696 structures destroyed**, the great majority of them homes.\n-   **Two fatalities.**\n-   Roughly **34,000 acres** burned, over **55 days**.\n-   About **$350 million** in insured property damage — the costliest wildfire in Texas history.\n-   **96% of Bastrop State Park** — a 6,565-acre National Historic Landmark built by the Civilian Conservation Corps — burned.\n\nThe county has not been left alone since. The **Hidden Pines Fire** (October 2015) burned more than 4,500 acres near Smithville, started by a spark from a mower on dry grass and running for nearly two weeks. The **Rolling Pines Fire** (18 January 2022) began as a 150-acre prescribed burn inside Bastrop State Park, escaped, and forced evacuations; the mapped perimeter that Satelife's fire-history layer reads records **1,049 acres**. Two of the three most significant fires of the last fifteen years started with an ignition source nobody would have called exotic: a power line, a mower, a planned burn.\n\n![A Bastrop County resident stands looking at the burned remains of his home after the September 2011 Bastrop County Complex Fire swept through the area](/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/bastrop-2011-aftermath.webp)\n\nBastrop County, 13 September 2011 — a resident looks at what is left of his home. Source: Patsy Lynch/FEMA, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Home_destroyed_by_Bastrop_County_complex_fire_\\(311-MAD-51537\\).jpg) (public domain).\n\n![Satellite image of the dark burn scar left across the Lost Pines east of Bastrop, Texas, by the September 2011 Bastrop County Complex Fire](/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/bastrop-2011-burn-scar.webp)\n\nThe burn scar on 12 September 2011 — the Lost Pines, seen from orbit. Source: NASA Earth Observatory (Jesse Allen, Robert Simmon, EO-1 team), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastrop_Fire_Scar_12_Sep_2011.png) (public domain).\n\nSources: Texas A&M Forest Service fire investigation · Texas Parks & Wildlife Department · NIFC / WFIGS fire perimeters (via the Satelife fire-history layer).\n\nTerrain & fuel\n\n## A pine forest with _streets cut into it_\n\nTahitian Village is a **1,150-hectare** subdivision on the bluffs south of the Colorado River, platted in the 1970s across the Lost Pines and never fully built out. Satelife's community-scale analysis grids it into **357 zones**. On satellite imagery the pattern is unmistakable: a dense curl of residential streets threaded through timber, with built and unbuilt lots interleaved, so that a house frequently has standing forest on two or three sides rather than a neighbour.\n\n![Satellite view of the Tahitian Village boundary south of the Colorado River in Bastrop County, Texas, showing the subdivision's curling street network cut through pine timber with many undeveloped wooded lots between houses](/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/tahitian-village-boundary.webp)\n\nTahitian Village on current satellite imagery. The road network is the clearest signal that a community is here at all — the canopy runs continuously across built and vacant lots alike. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nThat structure is what the report's layers pick up separately. The **AI vision read of the parcel scores 76 / 100** — the second-highest layer in the report — flagging mature trees on or immediately bordering the property, including trees near the front and side approach, over maintained groundcover that stops short of a full defensible-space envelope. Terrain reads **40 / 100** on the bluff-and-drainage relief above the river; the thirty-year ERA5 fire-weather climatology reads **59 / 100**.\n\nThe layer that reads _low_ is the interesting one. Vegetation/fuel scores **27 / 100**, because the LANDFIRE fuel-class mix within 100 m of this parcel is dominated by urban and barren classes rather than timber — a direct consequence of the 2011 burn and the fifteen years of regrowth since. Fifteen-year-old loblolly is not the fuel bed that burned in 2011. It is also not nothing, and it is getting older every season.\n\nEvacuation\n\n## One road in, and a _thirty-metre_ chokepoint\n\nThis is the measurement that zone maps cannot make. Satelife rebuilds the access picture from the current road graph and OSM-mapped fire stations, at both parcel and community scale. At the parcel, the road-access layer for Tahitian Drive returns **one independent approach route**, with the first bottleneck effectively at the property line. At community scale the 1,150-hectare boundary does better — but not cleanly:\n\n24independent road exits from the analyzed Tahitian Village area\n\n14.9analysis zones per exit route (357 zones / 24 exits)\n\n30.7 mnarrowest single-point failure detected on the modelled network\n\n5.5 minmodelled fire-truck drive-time from Bastrop Fire Station 2\n\nRead those together. Twenty-four exits sounds like resilience until you note that the community's risk concentrates into hotspot zones the model can reach in **2.0 to 7.6 minutes**, and that the whole network narrows to a single **30.7-metre** point. A chokepoint that width is a road that stops working the moment one vehicle fails on it, or the moment fire runs the vegetation on both shoulders. Suppression reach itself is genuinely good: four stations within the search radius, the nearest 1.6 km away.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for Tahitian Drive, Bastrop: suppression reach and egress table showing four stations within radius, nearest district town Bastrop at 6.4 minutes, one independent approach route with the first bottleneck about 0.0 km out, and nearby fire stations from Bastrop Fire Station 2 at 1.6 km and 2.8 minutes to Smithville Fire Department at 14.5 km](/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/report-road-access.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Road access: suppression reach & egress, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, Tahitian Drive, Bastrop TX 78602 (July 2026). Drive-times are modelled on the public OSRM road graph and OSM-mapped stations; volunteer stations are frequently untagged in OSM and would shorten local response. Decision support, not an evacuation plan or a guaranteed response time.\n\nFire behaviour\n\n## What a _rebuilt_ burn scar scores\n\nBastrop County is the clearest Texas example of a pattern the composite score cannot express on its own: a place whose _history_ is extreme and whose _current fuel bed_ is not. The report's fire-history layer for this parcel returns **95 / 100** — the highest layer in the whole report, driven by recurrence. The USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model, which reads the fuel that is standing there _now_, puts the probability of flame lengths exceeding four feet at **28.1%**, and above eight feet at **0.0%**.\n\n95fire-history layer — recurrence, the report's highest\n\n28.1%modelled probability of flame lengths over 4 ft\n\n27vegetation / fuel layer — regrowth, not mature timber\n\n24hazard layer — backfilled from USFS WRC; Texas has no FHSZ map\n\nFour feet is the operational threshold at which hand crews stop being able to attack a fire directly. A 28% chance of crossing it, on a parcel where the mature pine has not yet returned, is the model saying _this is the quiet part of the cycle_. The Lost Pines are a fire-adapted system; they came back after 2011 because that is what they do. The fuel load returns with them.\n\nThe 2011 fire did not make Tahitian Village safer. It reset a clock. Every season since has been the fuel bed rebuilding toward the condition it was in on 3 September 2011 — and the houses went back first.\n\nCase study\n\n## One address on Tahitian Drive, _scored today_\n\nWe ran a full Satelife wildfire-risk report for a property on **Tahitian Drive, Bastrop TX 78602** — inside the subdivision where one of the 2011 ignitions occurred, inside the regrown Lost Pines. The composite: **46 / 100 — Moderate tier**, at 0.86 confidence, from eight independently-scored and weighted layers.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for Tahitian Drive, Bastrop: per-layer contributions showing Fire history 95, Vision (imagery) 76, Fire Weather 59, Terrain 40, Vegetation/fuel 27, Hazard 24, Road access 10 and Fire-spread sim 5, each with its weight](/images/wildfire-risk/bastrop-county/report-per-layer.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Per-layer contributions, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, Tahitian Drive, Bastrop TX 78602 (July 2026). Composite 46/100, Moderate tier, scored under the United States (usa\\_generic) adapter.\n\nWhat drives the score:\n\n-   **Fire history: 95/100, weight 20%.** The heaviest contributor. The mapped-perimeter sample for this parcel returns six incidents, most recent 2026, including the 1,049-acre Rolling Pines perimeter of January 2022.\n-   **AI vision analysis: 76/100.** The model reads the parcel's own street-level and overhead imagery and finds mature trees on or immediately bordering the lot, including near the drive approach, over maintained lawn — separation that exists but does not close the defensible-space envelope.\n-   **Fire weather: 59/100.** Thirty-year ERA5 climatology of the Canadian Fire Weather Index at this location.\n-   **Hazard: 24/100, weight 30% — the largest weight in the report.** Not a Texas hazard rating, because Texas does not publish one: the layer is backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model. It is the single biggest reason the composite reads Moderate rather than High.\n-   **Road access: 10/100.** Strong suppression reach — one approach route, but a station 1.6 km away.\n\nA parcel in the subdivision that ignited the most destructive fire in Texas history scores 46 / 100 — because thirty percent of the composite is a hazard-zone layer that Texas has no map to fill. The per-layer breakdown is not a footnote to the score here. It _is_ the answer.\n\nThe report pairs the score with a prioritized plan for this parcel: audit defensible space annually before fire season, and verify access-route width and gate clearance. The second one carries unusual weight in Tahitian Village — it is the same 30.7-metre geometry the community analysis found, restated at the scale of one driveway.\n\nInsurance & real estate\n\n## Texas gives you _less paperwork_, not less risk\n\nA Bastrop County homeowner faces a different regulatory landscape from a Californian one, and almost every difference cuts against the buyer. There is no Fire Hazard Severity Zone map to look your address up on. There is no statutory wildfire-mitigation discount comparable to California's SB 1060. The Texas Property Code §5.008 Seller's Disclosure Notice does not ask the seller to disclose a wildfire hazard designation, because there is no designation to disclose — and Texas is a non-disclosure state for sale prices on top of that.\n\nWhat does exist is the **Texas FAIR Plan Association** — the residential insurer of last resort, created by the legislature in 1995 and writing policies since 2002, and administered under the Texas Department of Insurance. You become eligible only after being declined by at least two carriers actively writing residential property insurance in Texas, and you are ineligible if you hold or have been offered comparable coverage. It writes fire, lightning, smoke, explosion, windstorm and hail among other perils, and like every last-resort mechanism it is narrower and dearer than the admitted market it replaces.\n\nThat structure puts the burden of proof on the property owner. Where a Californian can point an underwriter at a regulation, a Texan has to point at evidence. A dated, parcel-level record of what the vegetation, the structure and the access actually look like is the practical substitute — and the thing most likely to keep a Lost Pines address in the admitted market.\n\nSources: Texas Department of Insurance · Texas FAIR Plan Association · Texas Property Code §5.008.\n\nRisk reduction\n\n## What Bastrop County homeowners _can actually do_\n\nThe defensible-space framework does not change at the state line: Zone 0 (0–5 ft, ember-resistant, nothing combustible against the wall), Zone 1 (5–30 ft, lean-clean-green), Zone 2 (30–100 ft, reduced fuel). In a regrown pine subdivision the highest-value work is unglamorous — clearing the ember-catching zone against the structure, and widening and clearing the single approach route so that an engine coming in and a family going out can pass each other. Texas A&M Forest Service runs the state's Firewise USA and community wildfire protection planning programs, and Bastrop County has been a repeat case study in post-fire mitigation for FEMA since 2011.\n\nThe comparison that sharpens the point is our [Hutchinson County](/wildfire-risk/texas/hutchinson-county/) page, 500 miles northwest in the Panhandle. Fritch: composite 59 / 100 High, four-foot flame probability **71.4%**, one fire station, hotspot drive-times of 0.3 to 3.0 minutes. Tahitian Village: composite 46 / 100 Moderate, four-foot flame probability **28.1%**, four stations within radius, hotspot drive-times of 2.0 to 7.6 minutes. Fritch's problem is a fuel bed that is loaded right now and one engine to meet it. Bastrop's is a fuel bed that is reloading, on a road network that has already failed once under evacuation. Same state, opposite mitigation priorities.\n\nCoverage\n\n## ZIP codes we cover in Bastrop County\n\nSatelife runs address-level wildfire reports across every ZIP code in Bastrop County. The ZIPs below are the Lost Pines and Wildland-Urban Interface communities we are asked about most. One caveat that is the whole point of what we do: the risk score is computed for **your parcel**, not the ZIP, so two homes on the same street can land in different tiers. Find your area, then [run your address](/#cta).\n\nZIP code\n\nCommunity\n\nWhy it is on the map\n\n78602\n\nBastrop (incl. Tahitian Village)\n\nLost Pines WUI; Tahitian Drive case study, 2011 ignition area\n\n78957\n\nSmithville\n\nSoutheast Lost Pines edge along the Colorado River\n\n78621\n\nElgin\n\nNorth-county blackland prairie and grass fuels\n\n78612\n\nCedar Creek\n\nFast-growing Austin-side WUI inside the pine belt\n\n78650\n\nMcDade\n\nRural post-oak savanna north of Highway 20\n\n78659\n\nPaige\n\nPine and post-oak between Bastrop and Giddings\n\n78953\n\nRosanky\n\nSouth-county ranchland and mixed timber\n\n78662\n\nRed Rock\n\nGrass and cropland fuels on the county’s southwest edge\n\nZIP areas per USPS. Texas publishes no statewide fire hazard severity zone map; Wildland-Urban Interface framing per Texas A&M Forest Service.\n\nWhere to go next\n\n## Bastrop County wildfire risk _in context_\n\n[Texas wildfire risk The statewide picture: no hazard map, three fire regimes, 2026 season](/wildfire-risk/texas/) [Hutchinson County wildfire risk Panhandle grassland, Smokehouse Creek, Fritch case study](/wildfire-risk/texas/hutchinson-county/) [Travis County wildfire risk Austin’s juniper WUI, Steiner Ranch, Lakeway case study](/wildfire-risk/texas/travis-county/) [El Dorado County, California The Caldor comparison: a burn scar with worse egress](/wildfire-risk/california/el-dorado-county/) [Create a wildfire evacuation plan Zones, egress routes, refuge areas](/wildfire-evacuation-plan/) [How Satelife calculates wildfire risk Data sources, score composition, honest limits](/wildfire-risk/methodology/) [Run a wildfire risk report PDF + score + mitigation plan](/#cta)\n\nFAQ\n\n## Frequently asked questions about _Bastrop County wildfire risk_\n\nIs Bastrop County a high wildfire risk area?\n\nIt carries the most destructive wildfire record in Texas. The 2011 Bastrop County Complex destroyed 1,696 structures and killed two people — still the costliest wildfire in state history. A Satelife report for a Tahitian Drive address returns a 46 / 100 composite in the Moderate tier, but the fire-history layer for that parcel reads 95 / 100 and the USFS model puts the probability of flame lengths over four feet at 28.1%. The county is not high-risk on paper because Texas has no hazard-zone map to be high on; it is high-risk on recurrence.\n\nDid Tahitian Village burn in the 2011 Bastrop fire?\n\nYes — and it was one of the places the fire started. The state’s case identified three ignition points for the complex: along Schwantz Ranch Road west of Texas 21, in Circle D Ranch, and in Tahitian Village, all traced to trees driven into Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative power lines by the northerly winds Tropical Storm Lee pushed across Central Texas on 4 September 2011.\n\nWhy is there no fire hazard severity zone for my Bastrop County address?\n\nBecause Texas does not publish one. California’s CAL FIRE Fire Hazard Severity Zone map has no Texas equivalent, so Satelife’s hazard layer falls back to the U.S. Forest Service Wildfire Risk to Communities model — the report states this explicitly on its hazard page. For the Tahitian Drive parcel that backfilled hazard layer reads 24 / 100, which is why the composite lands lower than the county’s history would suggest.\n\nHow many ways out does Tahitian Village have?\n\nThe Satelife road-access layer for the Tahitian Drive parcel finds one independent approach route, with the first bottleneck essentially at the property. At community scale the picture is better — 24 independent road exits serve the 1,150-hectare Tahitian Village boundary — but the analysis still detects a 30.7-metre chokepoint on the modelled network. In a fire that moved through this subdivision in 2011, that geometry is the number that matters.\n\nCan wildfire mitigation lower my Texas homeowners premium?\n\nTexas has no statutory mitigation-discount mandate equivalent to California’s SB 1060, so any credit is a carrier-by-carrier underwriting decision rather than a legal entitlement. That makes documentation more important, not less: a dated, parcel-level record of defensible space and home hardening is what an underwriter can act on, and it is what keeps a property in the admitted market instead of the Texas FAIR Plan.\n\nScores and evacuation figures on this page are drawn from Satelife wildfire-risk reports generated on 25 July 2026 under the United States (usa\\_generic) adapter: a property report for Tahitian Drive, Bastrop TX 78602, and a community analysis of the Tahitian Village boundary. Texas publishes no statewide fire-hazard-severity map, so the hazard layer is backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model; the fire-history layer reads mapped NIFC/WFIGS perimeters, and the certified national history has no coverage at all at this parcel — the 2011 Bastrop County Complex perimeter is absent from it, so the 2011 figures on this page come from Texas A&M Forest Service and TPWD sources instead. Drive-times are modelled on OSM-mapped stations and the current road graph. Satelife reports are informational decision support — not a substitute for official evacuation orders, state or federal hazard determinations, or an insurer's underwriting judgement.\n\n## What does _your parcel_ look like, layer by layer?\n\nIf you own or are buying in Bastrop County — Tahitian Village, Circle D, Cedar Creek, Smithville, Paige or Elgin — get the address-level answer: PDF, per-layer score, and a prioritized mitigation plan.\n\n[Start with your address →](/#cta)\n\n[![PRR](/images/prr.png)](/ficha-de-website-voucher-satelife.pdf)\n\n© 2024–2026 Satelife, Lda. All rights reserved.\n\nSatelife reports are for informational purposes only and do not constitute insurance, financial, or legal advice."
}