“I was devastated but still very hopeful, praying that it wouldn’t be too bad,” she said.
Then the wind-swept smoke got even thicker, small debris flew by and orange bursts appeared. Robles knew the house, and everything in it, was turning to ash.
The Eastland Complex fire — made up of three smaller wild fires in Central Texas — has incinerated more than 45,000 acres of land since sparking Thursday, destroying hundreds of homes and killing a deputy sheriff who was helping evacuate residents. Deputy Sgt. Barbara Fenley, 51, was evacuating homes in Carbon, the Eastland County Sheriff’s Office said, when, due to poor visibility and deteriorating conditions, she steered her vehicle off the road and into flames.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) declared a disaster in 11 counties affected by the blaze. Smoke on Friday drifted into skies above Houston, some 300 miles away. Only 15 percent of the fire was contained as of Saturday afternoon, officials said.And conditions could worsen. Large swaths of Texas — from the Dallas and Fort Worth suburbs in the east to Lubbock in the north and Odessa and Midland in the west — are suffering extreme drought conditions. Meteorological officials expect winds from the arid southwest to kick up Sunday and Monday, fueling the fire’s spread.
The National Weather Service on Saturday posted a “critical” fire weather outlook for nearly all of West Texas, half of New Mexico, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska.
“When it’s as dry as it is out here and as windy as it is, that really allows that fire to spread, and that’s what we’ve seen with the Eastland Complex,” Adam Wiley, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service field office in San Angelo, Tex., told The Washington Post.
Rapidly warming temperatures around the globe threaten to exacerbate wild fires, international climate experts say, lengthening fire seasons and making the blazes more harmful.