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Texas is battling the largest wildfire in the history of the state and the second largest on record in the US, as a series of blazes ripped across the state’s north-west in unusually dry conditions after a warm winter.
The Smokehouse Creek fire, which broke out on Monday, had spread to cover more than 1.1mn acres by the end of the week, surpassing the massive East Amarillo Complex fire in 2006, which scorched almost 1mn acres.
The West Odessa fire department said the fire was the second largest in US history. The area of land affected so far is exceeded only by the 1825 Miramichi fire, which burnt 3mn acres in eastern Canada and the state of Maine, according to a list compiled by the Western Fire Chiefs Association.
It was one of dozens of fires that spread across northern Texas and neighbouring Oklahoma this week, driven by strong winds and unseasonably dry and warm conditions.
The number and intensity of fires across tropical South America have also been unusually high in February.
“Nearly everywhere in the world we’re seeing more extreme weather conditions conducive to fire,” said Stefan Doerr, director of Swansea university’s Centre for Wildfire Research.
These fires are becoming more difficult to contain due to a combination of high temperatures, high winds and low humidity for extended periods of the year.
The Texan fire was only 3 per cent contained on Thursday, with some snowfall and a dip in temperatures helping to stop the spread, but winds were expected to pick up again at the weekend, making firefighters’ task more difficult.
At least two fatalities were confirmed, the Associated Press news agency said, and cattle and property across vast stretches were destroyed. Pantex, the country’s main centre for dismantling nuclear weapons, evacuated all non-essential personnel on Tuesday, as a blaze spread to the south of the plant. By Wednesday staff returned and the plant was operating as normal.
The Texas forest service said on Friday that it expected warmer, drier, and windier conditions to fuel the blazes through the weekend, ahead of a cold front on Monday. It noted that large fires had a “high resistance to control” where the grasses were “subjected to well above normal temperatures and critical wind speeds”.
Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of US wildfires in recent years. In the past half-century, three years have seen more than 10mn acres of land burnt, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Each of these — 2015, 2017 and 2020 — occurred in the past decade.
The US is on track to record its warmest winter this year, with snowfall well below normal levels in the north-east and Midwest. Ice cover on the Great Lakes has fallen to a historic low.
A series of towns in the northernmost region of Texas, known as the Panhandle, issued evacuation and shelter in place orders. Videos posted on social media showed locals fleeing on smoke-clad highways and cattle stampeding from the blaze.
Tens of thousands of people were left without power on Wednesday, although some had this restored by Thursday, according to the data aggregator poweroutage.us.
The latest scientific report on weather conditions, exacerbated by the El Niño effect involving the warming of the Pacific Ocean, said the peak fire season for wildfires in South America had been extended, including in the Amazon region where fires normally peak in September and October.
Estimated carbon emissions from fires in Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia during February were the highest recorded on the Copernicus fire monitoring database, which covers the period since 2003.
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