As the largest wildfire in Texas history engulfed his town, Danny Phillips was left helpless.
“We had to watch from a few miles away as our neighborhood burned,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion.
In his hard-hit town of Stinnett, population roughly 1,600, families like his who evacuated from the Smokehouse Creek fire – the most destructive blaze in the state’s history – returned on Thursday to devastating scenes: melted street signs and charred frames of cars and trucks. Homes reduced to piles of ash and rubble. An American flag propped up outside a destroyed house.
Phillips’s one-story home was still standing, but several of his neighbors weren’t so fortunate.
Stinnett’s destruction was a reminder that, even as snow fell on Thursday and helped firefighters, crews are racing to stamp out the blaze ahead of higher temperatures and winds forecast in the coming days.
Already, the Smokehouse Creek fire has killed two people and left behind a desolate landscape of scorched prairie, dead cattle and burned-out homes in the Texas Panhandle.
According to Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, up to 500 structures may have been destroyed, and damage assessments are under way.
“When you look at the damages that have occurred here, it’s just gone, completely gone, nothing left but ashes on the ground,” Abbott said at a news conference in Borger, Texas.
The blaze stayed about the same size on Friday, just shy of 1,700 sq miles (4,400 sq km). It merged with another fire and is now 15% contained, up from 3% on Thursday, according to the Texas A&M forest service.
But conditions favorable for wildfires are expected to extend through the weekend in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico, according to the National Weather Service. Strong winds, relatively low humidity and dry conditions are creating conditions that the weather service said were “resulting in a significant threat for the rapid spread of wildfires”.
In the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, temperatures will reach highs of 80F (27C) on Saturday and Sunday with wind gusts up to 50mph by Sunday, according to the NWS office in Amarillo, Texas. The relative humidity will hover at 5-10% all weekend.
The largest of several major fires burning in the rural Panhandle section of the state, the Smokehouse Creek fire has also crossed into Oklahoma.
Crews will focus on the northern edge of the fire and areas around structures, the forest service said.
Gray skies loomed over huge scars of blackened earth in a rural area dotted with scrub brush, ranchland, rocky canyons and oil rigs. Lee Jones, a firefighter, was helping douse the smoldering wreckage of homes in Stinnett to keep them from reigniting when the weather starts turning on Friday and continues into the weekend.
“The snow helps,” said Jones, who was among a dozen firefighters called in from Lubbock to help. “We’re just hitting all the hotspots around town, the houses that have already burned.”
Authorities have not said what ignited the fires, but strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm weather fed them.
“The rain and the snow is beneficial right now – we’re using it to our advantage,” Juan Rodriguez, a Texas A&M forest service spokesperson, said of the Smokehouse Creek fire. “When the fire isn’t blowing up and moving very fast, firefighters are able to actually catch up and get to those parts of the fire.”
Previously, the largest fire in recorded state history was the 2006 East Amarillo Complex fire, which burned about 1,400 sq miles (3,600 sq km) and left 13 people dead.
Two women have been confirmed killed by the fires this week. But with flames still menacing a wide area, authorities have not yet thoroughly searched for victims or tallied homes and other structures damaged or destroyed.
Cindy Owen was driving in Texas’s Hemphill county south of the small city of Canadian on Tuesday afternoon when she encountered fire or smoke, said Sgt Chris Ray of the state’s department of public safety. She got out of her truck and flames overtook her.
A passerby found Owen and called first responders, who took her to a burn unit in Oklahoma. She died on Thursday morning, Ray said.
The other victim, an 83-year-old woman, was identified by family members as Joyce Blankenship, a former substitute teacher. Her grandson, Lee Quesada, said deputies told his uncle on Wednesday that they had found Blankenship’s remains in her burned home.
Joe Biden, who was in Texas on Thursday to visit the US-Mexico border, said he directed federal officials to do “everything possible” to assist fire-affected communities, including sending firefighters and equipment. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has guaranteed Texas and Oklahoma will be reimbursed for their emergency costs, the president said.
Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties and planned to visit the Panhandle on Friday.
The weekend forecast and “sheer size and scope” of the blaze were the biggest challenges for firefighters, said Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas division of emergency management.
“I don’t want the community there to feel a false sense of security that all these fires will not grow any more,” Kidd said. “This is still a very dynamic situation.”
Encroaching flames caused the main facility that disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal to pause operations on Tuesday night, but it was open for normal work by Wednesday. The small town of Fritch, which lost hundreds of homes in a 2014 fire, saw 40 to 50 more destroyed this week, the mayor, Tom Ray, said.
The Texas agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, said the damage to the region could be “catastrophic”.
Miller said individual ranchers could suffer devastating losses. But he predicted the overall impact on the Texas cattle industry and on consumer prices for beef would be minimal.
“These fires not only threaten lives and property but will also have a substantial impact on our agriculture industry,” Miller said. “Over 85% of the state’s cattle population is located on ranches in the Panhandle. There are millions of cattle out there, with some towns comprising more cattle than people.”
