Wildfires Rage Across Texas
Wildfires blazing across the Texas panhandle have killed one person, burned more than 1 million acres, and forced thousands to evacuate this week. Strong winds, high temperatures, and dry conditions helped spread the fires after they began Monday, and Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties in the area. The largest fire, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, had spread over 850,000 acres—bigger than the state of Rhode Island, and the second-largest fire in Texas history—along the Oklahoma border by Thursday morning; that fire is only 3% contained. West Texas and the panhandle, where the landscape is flat and filled with drier grasses, have a much higher risk than the rest of the state of experiencing a major wildfire over the next 50 years. “It looks alarming, how quickly it is spreading,” Erin O’Connor, a spokeswoman for the Forest Service, told the Times. The dry, dead grasses in the region are the “perfect environment to support the growth that we have seen,” she said.
(New York Times $, USA Today, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Washington Post $, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC 13, Axios)
(Climate Signals background: Wildfires)
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