Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission from the Sierra Club magazine.
On February 26, a tiny flame sparked a mile north of the ranching community of Stinnett, Texas. This part of the Texas Panhandle is sparsely populated—Hutchinson County has 20,000 people and roughly the same number of cows—so no one saw the smoldering patch of tall, dry grass where two county roads intersect. By the time area residents took notice of the smoke, it was too late: The fire had already spread into fallow fields and untamed barrow ditches, morphing into a monster in mere hours. By evening, the blaze—soon dubbed the Smokehouse Creek Fire—had reached 62 square miles. Firefighters were dispatched from all over Texas and beyond to try to prevent the entire Panhandle from going up in smoke.
Three weeks later, firefighters finally extinguished the Smokehouse Creek Fire and several other blazes that started around the same time. Those fires destroyed 500 structures, mostly in the towns of Fritch and Canadian, and forced hundreds more evacuations as they devoured barbed-wire fences and killed upwards of 7,000 head of cattle. The scar left on the Panhandle landscape is visible from space. Two people were killed: an 83-year-old grandmother in Stinnett who died after her home caught fire and the volunteer fire chief in Fritch, who had battled the blaze for over a week.
