Texas fire live updates: Dry weather and strong winds threatened to intensify state’s largest ever wildfire

Drone footage posted online shows a massive fire at a junkyard in Grand Prairie, Texas.

Grand Prairie is several hours southeast of the panhandle fires which have spread to 1.1 million acres.

At a news conference on Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the destruction from the fires doesn’t compare to the aftermath of other natural disasters.

“When you look at the damages that have occurred here, it’s just gone, completely gone, nothing left but ashes on the ground, so those who are affected by this have gone through utter devastation,” Gov Abbott said. “They are going through challenges that others cannot comprehend.”

About 400 to 500 structures have so far been destroyed in the fires, Gov Abbott confirmed.

“This is now both the largest and most destructive fire in Texas history,” the West Odessa Volunteer Fire Department wrote on Facebook. “It is also the second largest wildfire in U.S. history.”

An official with the Hutchinson County, Texas Office of Emergency Services said prescribed burning helped prevent this week’s fires from becoming worse.

“You can see where we did our prescribed burns previously, how, thankfully, our wildland team did that, because that saved a lot of people’s properties,” the spokesperson said on a Facebook live video. “I know we couldn’t save everything.”

Late last year, Texas officials conducted a prescribed burn in Hutchinson County, which prevented this week’s fires from spreading into the southern parts of the town of Borger, CNN reports.

Prescribed burns are fires intentionally set in controlled areas to destroy fire fuels like dried-out grass and leaves. Indigenous communities have used this practice for millennia and have long advocated for the US government to adopt it in fire-vulnerable areas.

The National Weather Service is forecasting strong winds and low humidity in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico this weekend.

These factors are favourable for wildfires and resemble the weather conditions in the Texas Panhandle earlier this week when the Smokehouse Creek fire — the largest in state history — first sparked.

The Windy Deuce fire is still burning 142,000 acres at 55 per cent containment as of Friday afternoon.

The small town of Fritch is again picking through the rubble of a Texas wildfire, a decade after another destructive blaze burned hundreds of homes and left deep scars in the Panhandle community.

Residents in and around Fritch and other rural towns fled for safety Tuesday afternoon as high winds whipped the flames into residential areas and through cattle ranches.

Fritch Mayor Tom Ray said on Wednesday the town’s northern edge was hit by a devastating wildfire in 2014, while this week’s blaze burned mostly to the south of the town, sparing the residents who live in the heart of the community.

“I said, ‘Oh Lord, please don’t come down the middle,’” Ray said.

“It’s been a rough day in Hemphill County, massive losses of ranch land (over 400,000 acres in Hemphill County alone), scores of homes destroyed, literally thousands of cattle lost and much more than can be described,” an official with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service for the county said.

A 120-year-old cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle lost about 80 per cent of its land to the fires this week, the managers of the Turkey Track Ranch said in a statement.

“Our early assessment estimates that The Turkey Track Ranch has suffered and lost approximately 80 % of our pastures, plains, and creek bottom vegetation,” the statement read. “We continue to assess the total damage to other infrastructure and the loss of livestock.”