Faster than a wildfire

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Wildfires in Texas.

Back in February, volunteer fire departments from across the Texas Panhandle joined state and federal emergency agencies to battle what would become the nation’s second largest wildfire – The Smokehouse Creek Wildfire. Four separate blazes merged to burn just over one million acres.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Two people died. While tragic, that number is well below average for a fire that size and in a region with the same population. How did forecasters and emergency responders work to prevent casualties? WORLD reporter Bonnie Pritchett visited the Panhandle to find out, and brings us our story.

FIRE FIGHTER: Here she comes.

BONNIE PRITCHETT: On February 27th, fire surrounded Canadian, Texas on three sides.

FIRE FIGHTER: Look at that ugly beast. At least this is one of the fingers.

The day before, abundant dry grass and wind gusts up to 60 miles an hour fed the beast bearing down on Canadian.

Kris Hogan is the town’s volunteer fire department chief.

KRIS HOGAN: And by then I'd done called told then get everybody back to town because we're going to make a stand in town. And then, I kinda need to back up a little bit, whenever I got into Canadian they were evacuating town.

Then he noticed the firestorm heading toward Highway 60, the lone evacuation route.

HOGAN: That's whenever I called Brant on the radio and said, “Hey, we got to shut this evacuation off. We got shut it off now. They're gonna get caught on that four lane out there.”

SOUND: [WIND AND FIRE]

The remainder of the town’s 3,000 residents were told to shelter-in-place at the high school.

A hundred miles to the southwest at the Amarillo office of the National Weather Service, Doug Weber monitored satellite imagery of the unfolding disaster. He’s the senior forecaster and fire weather program manager.

DOUG WEBER: There was a point where we were like we could see it on satellite. It's burning. The city itself is now showing up on the hotspot…

But Weber and his colleagues weren’t helpless bystanders.

They were using an updated fire alert system that integrates new satellite technology with more efficient inter-agency collaboration. That gets boots on the ground a lot faster.

WEBER: Old satellites used to take 15 minutes - was a standard volume scan. So, I’d get an image. I'll see the next image in 15 minutes.

A rapid scan took 7 minutes.

WEBER: That's not fast. The new satellite’s baseline is five minutes. And we have multiple sectors that give a higher resolution than our baseline where they focus in on a localized area. And that is one minute.

So, every 60 seconds forecasters receive new information about a fire. Exact geolocation of life-threatening blazes are sent to partner agencies who assess the situation and decide whether to ask the National Weather Service to issue an alert.

AUDIO: It’s go time, boys. Alright.

Wildfires are a persistent threat in the Southern Great Plains region that includes West Texas, Eastern New Mexico, the Oklahoma Panhandle and the Kansas Plains.

Lots of grass. Low humidity. High winds. And it doesn’t take much to get a spark.

Meteorologists have a name for the region.

TODD LINDLEY: The Southern Great Plains Wildfire Outbreak.

That’s Todd Lindley. He’s the science and operational officer at the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma.

LINDLEY: It's an outbreak of wildfires that are associated with a single weather system over the Southern Great Plains.

He helped develop the new system that Oklahoma’s been using since 2022. It still needs scientific review, but the anecdotal evidence is encouraging. When compared to a 2019 fire, response time dropped from 82 minutes to 9.

LINDLEY: We actually modeled the fire spread. And we know that on average, a dangerous fire on the southern plains will spread about three to six miles per hour. You could say that, you know, in the amount of time it used to take to issue these warnings, a fire could easily spread six to seven miles, which is a considerable distance.

Once emergency managers have the hot spot information, they collaborate on whether to issue a fire warning and request the National Weather Service to do it.

Doug Weber at the Amarillo office of the National Weather Service Photo by Bonnie Pritchett

Doug Weber introduced the new system to agency partners in the Texas Panhandle – in early February.

WEBER: Little did we know two weeks later, we were going to have this massive event.

SOUND [PUMP TRUCK]

SOUND: [FIRE PUMP TRUCK AND WIND]

The day of the outbreak Scott Brewster had eyes on four Panhandle fires. He’s Canadian’s chief dispatcher.

SCOTT BREWSTER: I'm also signed up for the hot spot alerts and that everybody gets them at once. We were also swamped with calls from the Lefor fire because it was it was actually the first day on Monday that was the main concern was the Lefor fire…

SOUND: [WIND]

On Tuesday those concerns shifted with the wind. A Northern blew in.

AUDIO: Yeh. She’s about to jump that road.

The almost 15-mile wide, and 40-mile long, wildfire heading east quickly became a 70-mile wide blaze moving south toward Canadian.

The Amarillo National Weather Service continued sending updates – and watching satellite images as the fire surrounded the town. Here’s Doug Weber again:

WEBER: There’s no longer evacuations, you’re now shelter-in-place, and I'm thinking to myself, how many people are we going to possibly lose to smoke inhalation that didn't get out or, God forbid, if that if the city gets a lot of it burned...

Thankfully, it didn’t.

Some homes burned, but no lives were lost.

Federal officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledge the system’s life-saving potential in the Southern Great Plains. In June they will begin evaluating it for expansion nationwide.

As local forecasters and emergency managers assess the system’s effectiveness during the Smokehouse Creek Wildfire, Weber already sees a glimmer of hope even in the loss.

WEBER: And I'm so heartbroken for the two lives that were lost. Because any day we lose a life, it's a tough day for us in the office, because it’s our goal. But over a million acres burned. The burn scar is as big as the Dallas-Forth Worth Metro area, and we only had two fatalities.

Audio of on-the-ground firefighting comes from Thomas Beal with the Perryton Volunteer Fire Department.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Bonnie Pritchett in Canadian, Texas.

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