DALLAS – Wildfires raging across far north Texas early Wednesday prompted evacuations, left thousands without power and forced the closure of a nuclear weapons facility as high winds, dry grass and unusually warm temperatures fueled the flames.
An unknown number of homes and other structures were destroyed or damaged in Hutchinson County, according to local emergency officials. Pantex, the main facility that assembles and disassembles the U.S. nuclear arsenal, temporarily suspended operations Tuesday night.
“We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel, from the site as a precautionary measure,” Laef Pendergraft, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at Pantex, said during a news conference Tuesday night. “But we have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these situations, that is on site and is attentive and prepared should any real emergency arise at the site.”
Pantex said Wednesday morning on X, formerly Twitter, that the plant “is open for normal day shift activities” and that all personnel were to report according to their assigned schedule.
The facility is about 27 kilometers (17 miles) northeast of Amarillo and about 515 km (320 miles) northwest of Dallas. Since 1975 it has been the main U.S. atomic bomb assembly and disassembly center. It assembled the last new bomb in 1991 and has dismantled thousands of weapons.
The governor, Republican Greg Abbott, issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties as the largest fire, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, burned nearly 1,000 square kilometers (nearly 400 square miles), according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. That’s more than double its size since the fire broke out Monday.
Officials have not said what might have caused the fire, which swept through sparsely populated counties surrounded by plains.
“Texans are urged to limit activities that could generate sparks and to take precautions to keep their loved ones safe,” Abbott said.
The weather forecast gave firefighters some hope: cooler temperatures, less wind and the possibility of rain on Thursday. But for the moment, the situation was tough in some places.
In Borger, a town of about 13,000 people about 25 miles (40 km) north of Pantex, Hutchinson County emergency officials planned to organize a convoy to take evacuees from one shelter to another as power outages and nighttime temperatures below 0 degrees Celsius (around 20 degrees Fahrenheit) were forecast.
As the number of evacuation orders grew, local and regional officials gave live updates on Facebook and tried to answer questions from frightened neighbors. Authorities asked the population to activate emergency alerts on their cell phones and be ready to evacuate immediately. Some roads had fire on both sides and resources were at capacity, they added.
People took to Facebook to ask about their streets and communities in hopes of finding good news, but often the response was that either the area had been damaged or there was no word yet on the situation.
Texas state Sen. Kevin Sparks said Canadian, a town of about 2,000 people about 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Amarillo, had been ordered evacuated. Later Tuesday, Hemphill County police urged anyone still in Canadian to take shelter where they were or in the high school gymnasium because roads were closed.
Evacuations were also ordered in nearby Miami, and schools in Canadian and Miami announced they would close Wednesday. East of Canadian, fire officials across the state line in Durham, Oklahoma, also urged people to evacuate because of the fire.
More evacuations were reported in Skellytown, Wheeler, Allison and Briscoe, according to the National Weather Service in Amarillo.