Hundreds flee Texas grass fires
Other fires across the drought-stricken region have charred thousands of acres in Oklahoma and New Mexico, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate.
“We don’t know where we will be today,” Oklahoma City Fire Department Major Brian Stanaland said yesterday. “At this point, we consider the whole city a target for grass fires.”
Computer models yesterday showed no rain in the foreseeable future, said Jesse Moore, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Fort Worth. He said the region’s last appreciable rain was about a quarter-inch on December 20.
The biggest fire in Texas yesterday was a 25-mile-long blaze that had blackened 22,400 acres in Eastland County, about 125 miles west of Dallas.
State officials were dispatching more helicopters and airplanes to battle that blaze near the small towns of Carbon, Gorman and Desdemona, said Texas Forest Service spokeswoman Traci Weaver.
Firefighters were close to encircling the fire, but were concerned that an expected shift in wind would complicate efforts.
Fire survey crews flying over other sections of northern and western Texas on Sunday reported the tiny communities of Ringgold and Kokomo, which together were home to about 125 people, had essentially been wiped out by flames.
Crews planned to conduct a house-to-house search for casualties in the two towns, as well as in Cross Plains, about 25 miles west of Carbon, where more than 90 homes and a church were destroyed.
In all, four deaths were reported last week in Texas and Oklahoma.
Dozens of fires blackened the Oklahoma landscape as wind gusted to 50 mph, including 25 blazes within Oklahoma City that forced the evacuations of two neighbourhoods. Altogether, dozens of wildfires swept across more than 5,000 acres of Oklahoma and destroyed at least a dozen homes.
