The rapid growth of raging wildfires in the Texas Panhandle has been staggering. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties Tuesday as the blaze forced widespread evacuations. On Wednesday, the Texas A&M Forest Service said the fire had grown to rival the largest in state history.
Very high winds and very dry conditions Monday provided “the perfect set up” for the fires, said Samuel Scoleri, a forecaster at the National Weather Service Amarillo office. Some areas in the Panhandle recorded winds upwards of 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour), with even stronger gusts. There is usually a lot of wind in the area, and it has been intensely dry with relative humidity at 20% or even lower in some places.
“We just had very windy conditions on top of very, very dry situations,” Scoleri said.
The Texas blaze is representative of a growing trend of wildfires intensifying and moving faster than ever.
The largest of the latest Texas fires — the Smokehouse Creek Fire — grew Wednesday from about 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) to more than 1,300 square miles (about 3,400 square kilometers), the Texas A&M Forest Service said.
The speed at which the fires are spreading is “definitely not standard,” said Melissa Toole, administrative associate at Texas A&M Forest Service.
Flames the height of a one-story building can burn the length of a football field in one minute, said Leighton Chachere Gibson, a communications specialist at Texas A&M Forest Service.
The East Amarillo Complex Fire in 2006 burned over 900,000 acres (3,600 square kilometers) in the same general location.
Wildfire outbreaks are common in the region at this time of year, Gibson said.
Scoleri said dry winters are fairly standard in the area, but that temperatures were unseasonably high on Tuesday — in the 70s rather than the 50s and 60s as is more common.
“It kind of just feels out of the ordinary, considering at the top of the month we had places get almost half a foot of snow down south,” he said.
Wednesday is the day to wrangle these fires. Winds are forecast to be light — under 10 mph (16 kph) — until the late evening. On Thursday, some help could come in the form of light rain in the morning.
But Scoleri warned of a “deja-vu weather pattern,” with strong winds returning over the weekend, although likely not as intense as on Monday on Tuesday.
The Texas A&M Forest Service said the Smokehouse Creek Fire was about 3% contained as of early Wednesday afternoon.
When a fire is contained, it is surrounded by a fuel break, which is an area that contains no burnable substances — usually a dirt trench that has been dug using heavy equipment such as bulldozers.
Containment is a measure of that barrier as well as officials’ confidence that fire won’t cross the line when winds pick up.
A fire is controlled when any incendiary threats to containment lines have been mitigated. The barrier stops the fire’s progress and prevents it from reaching homes or properties outside the containment line.
A wildfire is declared out when there is no smoke or fire activity.
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