It’s February.
Multiple wildfires scorching the Texas Panhandle had merged as of Thursday morning, creating the largest wildfire in state history at more than one million acres burned.
The forest service said the largest of the fires, the Smokehouse Creek fire in Hutchinson County, was an estimated 1,075,000 acres and 3% contained as of 9 a.m. Thursday. The 687 Reamer fire, which stood Thursday at roughly 2,000 acres, burned into the Smokehouse Creek fire, the service said.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to deploy additional state emergency resources, just one day after he issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties. Evacuations were ordered in Canadian, Glazier, Double Diamond, Arrowhead Addition, Maverick Village, Alibates, McBride, Mullinaw and Harbor Bay.
The forest service also raised wildland fire preparedness to level 3, expecting wildfire activity will increase over the next several days.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told The Dallas Morning News Wednesday the fires had already killed up to “tens of thousands of head of cattle” and closed at least 13 school districts.
“It’s really bad,” Miller said. “It’s going to get worse.”
Crews from across the state have traveled to the Panhandle to help contain the fires, including 15 firefighters with the Fort Worth Fire Department, who said they could stay as long as two weeks.
Officials haven’t declared a cause for the cluster of blazes, but the region has experienced unseasonably warm temperatures, dry conditions and gusty winds.
In Texas, denial:
https://www.newsweek.com/map-climate-change-denialism-us-state-1874412
That denial map is from 2019. I wonder what the interim weather events may have done in the past five years to rearrange that.
They probably didn’t rake well enough /s