[ad_1]
A vast and growing wildfire, one of several burning in the Texas Panhandle, has now become the largest in recorded state history, burning more than a million acres, devastating cattle ranches, consuming homes and continuing to burn. of control.
The sparsely populated area is home to most of the state’s livestock – millions of cows and calves, steers and bulls – spread across ranches whose size and lack of roads can make it difficult for people to travel and make it easier for fires to start.
Wildfires are nothing new to Panhandle ranchers, many of whom know how to transform their pickup trucks into makeshift fire trucks to fight the fires that periodically burn.
But never before had anyone seen a fire like the one named Smokehouse Creek. It turned on on Monday, and until Thursday it was still burning uncontrollably. So far there have been two deaths related to the fires.
Ranchers have been forced to watch as the grasslands their livestock depend on for food have been transformed into a blackened expanse. Thousands of cattle may have already died or been so injured in the fires that they would have to be killed, state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said.
Even those whose livestock survived have been forced to struggle to find a place to eat. Miller said a rancher he knew had 1,500 head of steers but “no grass or water” and was in a desperate situation.
“He’s looking for a place to relocate his livestock,” he said, using trucks to move them. “He will have to go to another state, Kansas, Nebraska or Wyoming.”
The economic cost of the wildfires was still unclear. Miller said that about 85 percent of approximately 12 million head of cattle in Texas they are found in the Panhandle, but most of them remain concentrated in feedlots and dairy farms. Those operations, he said, were largely unaffected by the fires.
The most affected ranchers were those with large holdings where cattle roam lands that can extend to tens of thousands of acres.
“It’s just my prediction, but 10,000 will have died or we will have to euthanize,” Miller said. “It’s sad. A lot of those cattle are still alive, but their hooves and udders were burned. It’s just a very, very sad situation.”
One of those ranchers, Jeff Chisum, said he was still assessing how many of his 600 cows had been lost. He had come across the remains of some and others that needed to be buried.
“It’s hard to see,” said Chisum, whose ranch is north of the city of Pampa and directly in the path of the largest fire. Almost his entire 30,000-acre ranch was burned.
On Facebook, his wife, Leigh Chisum, said she had been “led by calves that were alone in the black, desolate pastures with dead cows scattered along the roads.” And she added: “Many have lost a lot.”
In addition to ranchers, residents in towns like Fritch and Canadian dot the landscape, small communities oriented around the land and local churches, lost houses and just about everything else.
Joyce Blankenship, an 83-year-old woman who lived outside the town of Stinnett, died in her home when fast-moving flames hit Tuesday.
One of her sons, Paul Blankenship, tried to run to her as soon as he learned through Facebook that the fire had “jumped the road” and began to engulf the area around their home. But the roads were already closed. The fire was too much.
“She was a good mother and kept us fed,” said Blankenship, 65, whose family has lived in the area since 1958. “She loved us.”
A second woman, Cindy Owen, 44, died from burns after flames surrounded her company truck while she was driving home to Amarillo from Oklahoma on Tuesday, her sister said.
“The fires came very close to her, they were coming fast, and she jumped out of her truck because she was afraid it would explode,” said the sister, Melissa Owen. “When she came out of it, the fire overtook her and she was burned from head to toe.”
Ms Owen said her sister was on a work assignment when she encountered the fire. “What bothers me is that the company knew about it and they still sent her” on the trip, Owen said. Her sister was taken to a hospital in Oklahoma, she said, and she died early Thursday morning.
At a church in Fritch that has served as a shelter, 7-year-old Emryn Nixon sat hugging her teddy bear alongside her father, mother and three younger siblings. Her house had been consumed by flames.
Her mother, Allie Matthews, 23, said the only thing she could identify in the smoldering remains of the house that had been in her husband’s family for nearly half a century was a metal sign that belonged to Emryn. The 7-year-old girl said her grandmother “fell on her knees” when she saw the house was gone.
“I feel very sad for my Nana because all her memories were in that house,” she said.
Despite light rain and snow falling in some areas Thursday, the Smokehouse Creek Fire was only 3 percent contained, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. So far, the fire has burned at least 1,075,000 acres (more than five times the size of New York City) and has surpassed the size of the state’s previous largest wildfire, in 2006.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known, but on Thursday a utility, Xcel Energy, said in a regulatory filing that it had received a letter from a law firm on behalf of property insurers warning that it faced possible liability for related damages. with the fire.
Firefighters deployed across the state were working with limited time to battle wildfires before stronger winds and warmer, drier air were expected to return to the area over the weekend.
Forecasters said firefighters could be helped Thursday with weaker winds and colder temperatures, which were expected to be in the 30s and 40s. But Edward Andrade, senior forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Amarillo, said the light rain probably wouldn’t be enough to put out the fires.
Strong winds of around 30 miles per hour were expected to return Saturday and temperatures were forecast to climb back into the 70s. Those conditions are likely to continue Sunday and could accelerate the fire’s spread and hamper firefighting efforts, Andrade said.
The rugged terrain of the Canadian River Valley, where the fire started, was another major obstacle for firefighters, because fire trucks cannot traverse some of the area’s cliffs, valleys and steep hills.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire, combined with other nearby fires, spanned at least 11 counties early Thursday and spread into Oklahoma.
Blankenship, whose mother died in the fires, said the last time he saw a fire like the one that ravaged his area was about 20 years ago. During that fire, she said, she was able to drive to her mother’s house to look for her, and barely made it after struggling to find the turnoff to her house.
“The smoke was so intense that I couldn’t find the turnoff, and at that moment the fire crossed the road and almost reached my jeep,” he said. “But I managed to get there and get my mom out of there before everything burned.”
He tried to do the same on Tuesday. But he could not.
Juan Yoon and Ivan Penn contributed with reports.
[ad_2]
Source link