Extreme winter heat and dry, whipping winds fueled a wildfire that could become the largest on record in Texas on Wednesday. The Smokehouse Creek Fire spread across an estimated 850,000 acres within two days, prompting harrowing evacuations and cutting off escapes from small towns and ranches. As of Wednesday afternoon, it was 3 percent contained.
If it continues to grow, the fire could soon surpass Texas’s largest wildfire on record, the East Amarillo Complex, which killed a dozen people as it torched more than 907,000 acres in March 2006.
The extent of the destruction was not immediately clear. Storm chasers and an electric utility reported that the fire destroyed homes in the towns of Canadian and Fritch, where firefighting continued.
“Today your Fritch Volunteer Fire Department mourns for our community and those around it,” the department posted Wednesday morning on Facebook. “We are tired, we are devastated but we will not falter. We will not quit.”
In Hemphill County, a message from the sheriff’s office Tuesday afternoon warned residents, “LEAVE NOW,” before flames shut down the highway leading in and out of the town of Canadian. Those who didn’t heed the mandatory evacuation order were left to shelter in place. Fire destroyed more than 30 homes in Canadian, Randy Mahannah, the general manager and vice president of the North Plains Electric Cooperative, said in a press release.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a disaster declaration Tuesday across 60 counties as numerous fires raged across the panhandle region. As of Wednesday afternoon, the Windy Deuce Fire was burning across 90,000 acres about 30 miles north of Amarillo and was 25 percent contained; the Grape Vine Creek Fire spread across 30,000 acres southeast of Pampa, about 60 miles northeast of Amarillo, and was 60 percent contained.
The North Plains Electric Cooperative, which serves customers in Hutchinson and Hemphill counties, said the fires burned everything in their path, including rural power lines. As many as 11,000 people were without power early Wednesday morning, and some communities issued boil water advisories after treatment facilities were idled by outages.
There were fears that the fires could reach the Pantex nuclear weapons facility — a 16,000-acre site northeast of Amarillo — and prompted the facility to pause operations and evacuate staff, with a fire crew on standby. But it later reopened for normal operations, according to the company.
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Fires ignited Monday amid record high temperatures, including 100 degrees in Killeen, 93 degrees in Dallas and 82 degrees in Amarillo, more than 20 degrees above normal high temperatures for late February. That anomalous heat helped evaporate moisture, sapping vegetation of humidity and leaving fuels ripe to burn.
As hot, dry winds blew in from the west — gusting as high as 62 mph in Amarillo as fires raged — relative humidity dropped as low as 15 to 20 percent.
A change in weather was slowing the spread of flames. Low wind speeds throughout the rest of Wednesday and light rain showers — if not snow — early Thursday could help contain some of the fires, said Samuel Scoleri, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Amarillo.
But dangerous fire weather is forecast to return this weekend. The Weather Service warned of “widespread critical weather” across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles Saturday and Sunday, when temperatures are forecast to rise into the 70s and gusts could exceed 40 mph with low humidity.
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That underscored the importance of trapping and extinguishing the flames by the end of the week.
“If there’s anything left of these fires, it could kick them back into gear again,” Scoleri said.
The fires come amid a trend toward large and more frequent wildfires on the grasslands of the Great Plains. A 2017 study found the region has seen one of the most dramatic increases in global wildfire activity in recent decades — more than tripling between 1985 and 2014.
Along with the impact of warming temperatures, one reason for that increase is the growth of trees, such as red cedar, in grasslands, said Victoria Donovan, that study’s lead author. Compared with grasses, trees allow fires to burn hotter and to spread embers farther, leading to more intense and larger wildfires, said Donovan, an assistant professor at the University of Florida.
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Before European settlement, Great Plains landscapes like the one ablaze across northern Texas would have burned every other year, on average, she said. Without that frequent exposure to fire, trees and other fuels have been able to flourish, increasing the risks to communities when fires do ignite, usually as a result of human actions.
The Texas A&M Forest Service’s records of the state’s largest wildfires go back to 1988, but nearly all of the largest blazes on record have occurred in the past 13 years.
When the Smokehouse Creek Fire grew to become the second largest in Texas history by early Wednesday, it surpassed what was long the most massive blaze the state had ever seen: the Big Country Fire in March 1988. That started as a trash fire but spread to kill livestock, burn mobile homes and destroy oil field equipment, according to a New York Times account.
Otherwise, 22 of the 32 largest fires the Texas A&M Forest Service has tracked have all hit since 2011, a year that was a historically active wildfire season across Texas and much of the Southwest. Fires in April and May 2011 account for nearly a dozen of the state’s worst blazes. Together, they burned more than 1.5 million acres.
Though it is not among the largest in Texas history, the Bastrop County Complex fire in September 2011 was also extremely destructive. It killed two people and destroyed more than 1,600 homes, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Dan Stillman contributed to this report.
correction
A previous version of this article misidentified the Texas A&M Forest Service as its fire service. The article has been corrected.
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