The Smokehouse Creek Fire that broke out on Monday has since extended to 1.1 million acres, making it the largest in Texas history.
According to KFDA-TV, Cindy Owen was in Pampa for work when she got stuck on the road, surrounded by fire.
She left her vehicle and was burned, KFDA says. Owen was taken to a burn center in Oklahoma City where she died.
As of Friday, the fire located in Hutchinson County was about 1.075 million acres and remained just 5% contained, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. Lampposts have been melted, power line posts are split in half and homes and properties have been reduced to charred remains.
"This is now both the largest and most destructive fire in Texas history," the West Odessa Volunteer Fire Department wrote on Facebook. "It is also the second largest wildfire in U.S. history."
The nearby 687 Reamer Fire that started in the same county has now "burned into this fire," the Forest Service said. A map from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service shows that the merged blazes, as well as the nearby Windy Deuce fire, stretch nearly halfway across the Texas Panhandle. As of Thursday night, the Windy Deuce Fire had reached an estimated 142,000 acres and was 55% contained.
And the spread may not be over. The agency said Thursday that "the potential for wildfire activity will increase again" this weekend "due to strong winds and dry fuels."
"Strong winds and warm temperatures have resulted in grasses drying across many portions of Texas," Wes Moorehead, Texas A&M Forest Service Fire Chief said, further warning those celebrating Texas Independence Day on Saturday to refrain from using fireworks or doing other activities near dry grasses that could support wildfire activity.
Michelle @LoneStarLeft wrote: The federal government has now taken over the fire efforts in the panhandle.
No worries. This too is bad for Joe Biden's reelection.raison de arizona wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 9:50 pmMichelle @LoneStarLeft wrote: The federal government has now taken over the fire efforts in the panhandle.
Ferocious winds continue to thwart firefighters across a broad swathe of Texas on Sunday where the second largest wildfire in US history is only 15% contained after six days.
As of Sunday morning the Smokehouse Creek Fire has so far scorched almost 1.1m acres – 1,700 sq miles – across the Texas Panhandle in the north of the state, as well as tens of thousands of acres in Oklahoma.
It stretches over an area larger than Rhode Island, making it the largest and most destructive wildfire in Texas history. Several other smaller fires also continue to burn across the panhandle, including the Windy Deuce fire which has razed 142,000 acres but is 60% contained.
Critical fire weather conditions are expected to continue through Sunday as south-westerly winds gust to 50mph and humidity drops below 15%, according to the National Weather Service (NWS) in Amarillo.
It’s unclear what started the fires, which have been burning since Monday, but dry grassy vegetation, strong winds and atypically warm temperatures have helped them rapidly spread and combine to make larger fires, making it extremely difficult for firefighters to contain the blazes.
Further north, the NWS warned that way above average spring-like temperatures were contributing to a critical fire weather threat in the central and southern High Plains region.
Firefighters in the Texas Panhandle scrambled Monday to contain massive wildfires that have already scorched a record-breaking 1.3 million acres in the Lone Star State and forced the evacuation of an entire town.
The Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest in the state’s history at more than 1.1 million acres, continued its march east toward Oklahoma, with firefighters rushing to contain it before winds are forecast to pick up again Monday.
As of Sunday afternoon, the Smokehouse Creek fire was 15 percent contained, and two others were at least 60 percent contained. Authorities have not said what ignited the fires, but strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed them.
The National Weather Service (NWS) projected strong winds of up to 15-20 mph Monday for the region surrounding Amarillo, Texas.
Canada’s emergency preparedness minister is warning that this year’s wildfire season will be worse than the record-breaking season of 2023, when thousands of fires burned tens of millions of acres and set off massive plumes of smoke that enveloped major U.S. cities, including New York and Washington.
This year’s fires could be especially bad in two of the country’s most fire-prone provinces, where nearly 150 of the blazes that started during last year’s season are still burning this winter, under snow-covered ground.
While so-called “zombie fires,” a term recently popularized in the Canadian media, are an annual phenomenon in parts of the country, never have so many fires been reported in a single winter, raising fears that many of them may flare up again above ground.
The “zombie fires” persist during winter because porous peat and moss ground cover in northern areas act as underground fuel for them.
A Texas fire chief whose small town was among the hardest hit last week by historic blazes sweeping across the Panhandle died Tuesday while fighting a structure fire, authorities said.
Fritch Fire Chief Zeb Smith was the first at the scene of the fire and died from his injuries after being transported to a local hospital, the Hutchinson County Office of Emergency Management said in a statement.
It was unclear how the fire began or whether it was related to wildfires that firefighters are still trying to extinguish across the Panhandle, which includes the largest wildfire in Texas history.
The announcement came hours before Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was expected to meet with firefighters in Canadian, another town that's experienced heavy destruction.
An official has said that Fitch's northern edge was hit by a devastating wildfire in 2014, while last week’s blaze burned mostly to the south of the town, sparing the residents who live in the heart of the community.
Xcel Energy admits it was ‘involved in ignition’ of Texas’s Smokehouse Creek fire
Electric utility company acknowledges it appeared to play role in the largest wildfire in modern US history
Erum Salam and agencies
Thu 7 Mar 2024 12.07 EST
Last modified on Thu 7 Mar 2024 12.10 EST
The electric utility company Xcel Energy admitted on Thursday that it appeared to have played a role in Texas’s Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest wildfire in modern US history.
“Based on currently available information, Xcel Energy acknowledges that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire,” it said in a statement on Thursday.
Xcel said it has been cooperating with investigations into the wildfires and conducting its own review of the incident.
It also encouraged people who have lost livestock or had property damaged in the fire to submit a claim to the company through its claims process.
But Xcel rejected claims that it was negligent in maintaining and operating its infrastructure, contradicting a lawsuit against it by a homeowner near Canadian, Texas, whose house was destroyed in the fire. In the lawsuit, Melanie McQuiddy claimed the fire was started by one of Xcel’s fallen utility poles.
She is also suing Southwestern Public Service Company, Osmose Utilities Services, and a Georgia contractor responsible for inspecting wood utility poles, alleging the companies “failed to properly inspect, maintain, and replace” the pole in question, which then “splintered, and snapped off at its base”, igniting the fire.
Xcel also faces a lawsuit in Colorado, where a fire in 2021, the Marshall fire, killed two people and destroyed nearly 1,100 homes.
First came the Maui wildfires. Now come the land grabs: ‘Who owns the land is key to Lahaina’s future’
As ‘disaster capitalists’ text survivors with offers to buy their ruined homes, a land trust is trying to help residents keep them
Nina Lakhani in West Maui
Fri 15 Mar 2024 15.00 CET
Mere days after wildfires tore through Maui last August and leveled the historic town of Lahaina, community organizers warned that longtime residents were vulnerable to predatory land grabs.
And they were right. As search and rescue teams painstakingly combed through the scorched ruins, traumatized survivors began receiving texts, voice messages, and letters from speculators and realtors offering to buy their burnt-out homes.
“Week one, we knew that whatever happened we would have to protect the land because they would be coming for it,” said Autumn Ness, who moved to Maui from Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which led to mass displacement.
The Lahaina fire killed 100 people and razed 1,200 buildings, mostly residential properties, displacing around 11,000 residents, mostly working-class families. The trauma was compounded by a stark financial reality: most homeowners were underinsured, and many still had mortgages to pay on houses that would take several years to rebuild.
Some survivors lost their homes and jobs, and found themselves stuck in hotels unable to find affordable long-term rentals as tourists returned to the island. The Red Cross and Fema asked survivors whether they’d consider moving off island, which many found deeply offensive and insensitive.
But desperate people do desperate things – which is why investors often swoop in after major disasters like fires and hurricanes. Communities end up excluded from reconstruction plans, and old residents get priced out as neighborhoods are gentrified or transformed in some other irrevocable way.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... land-trust
I remember seeing those from the office (up in a tower). At first I wondered what was happening until I realized the location (a forest preserve) and checked online.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest blaze in Texas history and one of the largest in the country has been contained nearly three weeks after it broke out due to a falling electrical poll.
Officials with the Texas A&M Forest Service, the organisation that normally manages wildfires, reported the news in a “final update” social media post on Saturday. The blaze burnt more than 1 million acres of grassland in the state’s panhandle region.
Separately, the Windy Deuce Fire, which incinerated more than 100,000 acres, is also under control, meaning that it has been stopped from spreading. The blazes have transitioned back to local units who will continue to monitor for developments.
alert, but if we have a beef shortage now and prices go up, will the Rs blame that on Biden too?
they never knew that TX raises cattle, so it must have been the Ds 
