Wildfire is now 2nd-largest in state history, triggering outages
CANADIAN, Texas — A fast-moving wildfire burning through the Texas Panhandle grew into the second-largest blaze in state history Wednesday, forcing evacuations and triggering power outages as firefighters struggled to contain the widening flames.
The sprawling blaze was part of a cluster of fires that burned out of control and threatened rural towns, where local officials shut down roads and urged residents to leave their homes. The largest of the fires — which expanded to nearly 800 square miles — jumped into parts of neighboring Oklahoma and was completely uncontained as dawn broke, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.
Authorities had not reported any deaths or injuries as of Wednesday morning as huge plumes of smoke billowed hundreds of feet above the blackened landscape. But early assessments indicated that property damage could be extensive.
Hemphill County Emergency Management Coordinator Bill Kendall described the charred terrain as being “like a moonscape . ... It’s just all gone.”
Kendall said about 40 homes were burned around the perimeter of Canadian, but no buildings were lost inside the community.
“We started getting those losses in the dark, so we didn’t really know what we had until this morning, until we could see,” he said.
The town of Fritch, with a population of less than 2,000, lost hundreds of homes in a 2014 fire and appeared to be hit hard again.
People in that area are probably not “prepared for what they’re going to see if they pull into town,” Hutchinson County Emergency Management spokesperson Deidra Thomas said in a social media livestream.
The town remained unsafe for people to return, she said.
Authorities have not said what ignited the fires, but strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blazes. Near Borger, a community of about 13,000, emergency officials at one point late Tuesday answered questions from panicked residents on Facebook and told them to get ready to leave.
“It was like a ring of fire around Borger. There was no way out ... all four main roads were closed,” said Adrianna Hill, 28, whose home was within about a mile of the fire. She said a northern wind that blew the fire in the opposite direction “saved our butts.”
Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties. The encroaching flames caused the main facility that disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal to pause operations Tuesday night, but it was open for normal work on Wednesday.
The blazes tore through sparsely populated counties on the vast, high plains that are punctuated by cattle ranches and oil rigs. The main fire, known as the Smoke House Creek Fire, had grown to more than half the size of the state of Rhode Island. It is five times larger than on Monday, when it began.
The weather forecast provided some hope for firefighters — cooler temperatures, less wind and possibly rain on Thursday. But for now, the situation was dire in some areas.
Sustained winds of up to 45 mph, with gusts of up to 70 mph, caused the fires that were spreading east to turn south, threatening new areas, forecasters said. But winds calmed down after a cold front came through Tuesday evening, said Peter Vanden Bosch, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Amarillo.
“Fortunately, the winds have weakened quite significantly,” Vanden Bosch said Wednesday. Breezy conditions were expected again Friday, and critical fire weather could return by the weekend, he said.
As the evacuation orders mounted Tuesday, county and city officials implored residents to turn on emergency alert services on their cellphones and be ready to evacuate immediately.
The Pantex plant, northeast of Amarillo, evacuated nonessential staff Tuesday night out of an “abundance of caution,” said Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration’s production office at Pantex.