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.