Texas town burned in Smokehouse Creek blaze suffered wildfire a decade ago

Residents of Fritch forced to flee after flames tore across the Texas Panhandle this week

A small town devastated by the Smokehouse Creek wildfire raging across northern Texas has been here before.

Fritch, a town of 1,800 people on the outskirts of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, was forced to flee earlier this week after flames tore through homes, fields, and cattle ranches.

Only a decade ago, Fritch suffered similar losses after a wildfire burned hundreds of homes. Fritch Mayor Tom Ray told The Associated Press on Wednesday the town’s northern edge was hit by a devastating wildfire in 2014.

“I said, ‘Oh Lord, please don’t come down the middle,’” Ray told the news agency.

The mayor estimated up to 50 homes were destroyed near Fritch, with dozens more reportedly consumed by fire in small towns throughout the Panhandle.

On Wednesday evening, more than a dozen exhausted-looking volunteer firefighters, many caked with ash and soot, gathered at the Fritch Volunteer Fire Department in the center of town. Residents had dropped off bagged lunches, snacks and bottles of water.

“Today your Fritch Volunteer Fire Department mourns for our community and those around it,” fire officials wrote in a post on Facebook. “We are tired, we are devastated but we will not falter. We will not quit.”

The Smokehouse Creek fire ignited at the beginning of this week and is now the second largest fire in US history, more than five times the size of New York City. It was 3 per cent contained on Thursday night.

The blaze grew to 1,075,000 acres on Thursday, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service, driven by a combination of high winds and very dry conditions. The fires led Texas Governor Greg Abbott to issue a disaster declaration for 60 counties on Tuesday.

Another blaze, the Windy Deuce fire, caused the temporary closure of Pantex Plant, the US’s main facility for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons on Tuesday night. The plant resumed normal operations on Wednesday morning.

The cause of this week’s fires are still unknown but around the world, larger, more intense, and erratic fires are being fuelled by extreme heat and drought. These conditions are linked to the climate crisis, caused largely by greenhouse gas emissions from decades of burning fossil fuels.

The Texas fires left one person dead. Joyce Blankenship, 83, was killed during a fire that destroyed her home in Stinnett, Hutchinson County, her relatives told news outlets.

With reporting from The Associated Press