Texas fire live updates: Dry weather to intensify state’s largest wildfire

Ranchers face a grim task this weekend as they search miles of scorched earth to dispose of the burned corpses of cattle.

Others too badly burned and injured in the historic wildfires to survive will be euthanized.

“We’re picking up deads today,” X-Cross-X Ranch operator Chance Bowers told the Associated Press on Friday as ranch hands used a bulldozer to move dozens of blackened carcasses into a line on the side of a dirt road.

From there, a giant claw hook put them into the back of an open trailer.

Ranchers and state officials do not yet know the overall number of cattle killed in wildfires. For some ranches, the impact could be severe, though the effect on consumer beef prices is likely to be minimal.

“These cows you see dead are worth between $2,500 and $3,000 apiece,” Bowers said. “Financially, it’s a massive, massive burden on us.”

Texas is facing strong winds and dry conditions on Saturday which threaten to intensify a monster wildfire which is already the largest in state history.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire has burned more than 1.1 million acres across the Texas Panhandle and destroyed 500 structures, Texas authorities confirmed.

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.