Power Lines Reported to Be Cause of Historic Wildfire in Texas
Thousands of cattle died in the blaze, and ranchers face the daunting task of taking care of the survivors.
While I was on vacation, a massive wildfire claimed over one million acres in the Texas panhandle. Following an investigation by the Texas A&M Forest Service, it is reported that power lines may have sparked the Smokehouse Creek wildfire.
According to Juan Rodriguez, a public information officer with the service, investigators have completed their investigation into the cause of the Smokehouse Creek fire and the Windy Deuce fire, Texas Standard reported.
“In this case, we saw winds that were over 60 and 70 miles an hour. And so when the winds are doing that, driving down the roadways, you can just see power lines just bouncing up and down,” Rodriguez said. “It’s bound to cause one of these power lines to fail or something like that. So, you know, one of them or some of them may have fallen or just got out just due to the sheer wind.”
In a statement shared Thursday, Xcel Energy acknowledged “that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire.” PEOPLE has reached out to the energy company and Rodriguez for comments.
Following the news, I noted many troubling aspects of this disaster. To begin with, in addition to the devastating impact on Texans, the fires killed over three thousand cattle.
Officials surveying the damage said more than 3,600 cattle have died since the fires – some of which are still burning – spread through multiple counties and into Oklahoma, destroying hundreds of homes and killing at least two people. The number of dead cattle is expected to double or triple in the coming days as land is inspected and animals are euthanized because of burn injuries and trauma, Sid Miller, commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture, told USA TODAY.
“It’s a ghastly sight,” Miller said, recounting hundreds of cows lying dead on smoldering fields. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
…Texas is home to 11 million livestock animals, 85% of them in the panhandle, the country’s most prominent region for beef production, Miller said. The mass deaths probably won’t affect the price of beef around the nation, but it has already devastated local ranchers, many who have maintained businesses that have been in their families for generations, he said.
“They’ve lost their livestock, ranches, all their belongings, all their family heirlooms,” Miller said. “Many of them just have the shirt on their back.”
Personally, I find the incineration of the area where so much of the nation’s high-quality protein is raised extremely disturbing. It is fortunate that the fire’s consequences are not worse.
However, it appears ranchers may still face challenges keeping the survivors alive.
Cattle that have survived the blazes relatively unscathed are still suffering, as are their owners, as the fires took out essential resources. Of the primary five fires that have burned over the past two weeks, four are in the Canadian River Basin, Miller said, a region that he says is mostly canyons and grazing land. Roughly 120 miles of powerlines have been burned down in the fires, and seven grain and seed dealers were “completely wiped out.”
“That means no electricity, no water for the livestock,” he said, adding that his unofficial estimate is that 3,0000 to 4,000 miles of fencing has also been destroyed. One mile of fencing, he said, is about $10,000.
Even the burned grass poses a problem, as the cattle industry heavily relies on healthy pastures. Miller said he believes it will take at least two years for grasses to return to where they were, and that, on top of everything else, means many ranchers will likely have to completely change their future plans, with some even getting rid of their surviving cattle.
“For most of these people, that cattle that survived, they’re probably going to have to either find some other grazing somewhere in the state or another state, or probably sell out and wait ’til they get their ranch put back together before they can restock,” he said.
Furthermore, I would also like to note that power lines have been blamed for the deadly Maui wildfire, as well as wildfires that have occurred in California.
It will be interesting to see if racing to adopt renewable energy forced the utility to make the same sort of choices that Hawaii Electric made, making the Smokehouse Creek wildfire another woke-caused disaster:
To begin with, the rush to eliminate carbon emissions may have killed the implementation of effective fire prevention policies.
Legal Insurrection readers recall my recent reports that downed power lines were being blamed as the initiating case of the fire. At the end of 2019, Hawaiian Electric issued a press release about wildfire risks assessed after hurricane-based winds contributed to a 2018 blaze.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Hawaiian Electric was well aware of the potential for this situation, but diverted resources away from fire safety support in order to meet state-required green energy mandates.
Meanwhile, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used satellite imagery to capture the scale of the wildfire’s impact.
The Smokehouse Creek fire is the largest fire on record in Texas. @NASA’s Terra satellite captured this enhanced-color image of the burn scar on March 2, where most burned areas appear brown. https://t.co/cSy4Aynj7t pic.twitter.com/wc6VQttmcG
— NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) March 5, 2024
Fires began to spark in the Panhandle on February 24 and had spread widely by February 26 and 27, according to NASA data. The burn scar of these blazes was captured in false color by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite on March 2, showing the immense scale of the Smokehouse Creek Fire in particular.
Another satellite image, captured by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8, shows a detailed view of the Windy Deuce Fire’s burn scar, displaying the scorched land surrounding the town of Fritch and nearby Lake Meredith. Fritch was rapidly evacuated as the Windy Deuce Fire approached its perimeter, with over 50 houses burned to the ground.
Hopefully, the region and the ranchers will recover quickly, and perhaps the utility companies will be allowed to use their resources to preserve the utility instead of being forced to comply with eco-activist requirements.
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Comments
It will cut down on methane emissions.
Just like Gaza, far less methane.
You think that’s funny … do ya? Maybe you can die that way so all of us can have a laugh … you fkn jerk.
Use FEMA funds. They do it for much less in blue states.
Fires start all the time. The controllable thing is flammable fuel.
As opposed to non-flammable fuel which is not fool, you fuel!
/s
Those poor poor animals
And ranchers
What a bunch of BS… The wildfires were intentionally set. Anything else sai is crap.
What evidence do you have for this???
Pardon me for asking for some evidence. I guess the new standard for LI is that you can make any claim you want without any evidence at all. My bad.
As you are so prone to do
Or, it was power lines.
Hey, at least they didn’t have to propitiate the Hawaiian water goddess.
Because, y’know, no water.
Probably was my first thought
As hot as that fire was, and the shear size, I doubt it possible to determine the cause.
Not enough dem votes in texas for biden to care.
The fire was on vacation?!
“I claim this valley in the name of the Conflagration Nation…”
Fixed. Clearly, I am still not completely back. But the margaritas were glorious.
Milhouse: I love wordplay, and spotting stuff like that. SUVs and guns killing people, bot the humans using them. Or, the misuse of “into”. ” The perpetrator of the burglary felt guilty, so he turned himself into a police station.”
Used to do a lot of air travel in the ’80s. Always burned me to hear the pilots announce, “We’ll be taking off momentarily.” Always wanted to yell back, “Screw that — get it off the ground and KEEP IT THERE!”
“Momentarily” has three distinct meanings: “in a moment”, “for a moment”, and “from moment to moment”. I used to wonder which of these meanings they wanted to convey.
So power lines aren’t the only thing dangling?
It’s the 70+mph gusting wind; tree branches whipping, and broken tree limbs LOFTED many dozens of yards into power lines.
No one can truly ensure that such things in these wild windstorms will never happen. What happens when a huge clump of tumbleweed are lofted into energized utility lines. I see that as likely as a rodent getting zapped and it’s burning corpse setting dry grass aflame.
No one gets a free ride in this. Texas or California or Arizona etc.
Untold thousands of wild animals die in these cataclysmic wildfires. Why don’t environmental groups fund animal and plant repopulation projects? I’m not talking about government handing the Sierra Club lawyers a $20million bribe, I’m talking about the mouthy urbanites tithing to their supposed earth religion. Damn all of them.
Untold thousands of wild animals die in these cataclysmic wildfires.
Thousands of domestic animals, too. So much good meat prematurely barbecued.
That must’ve sounded funny in your head.
Its panhandle of texas with no trees. Mesquite grows maybe 3 ft high. But rotting wood utility pole from weather exposure could eventually fall over?
Yeah, believe it. I live in a similar climate, sunny and hot, little rain. When I moved out here 20 years ago, everything was above ground and on wood poles. Since then, we’ve had two microburst storms, and some 30 poles on the US highway that I front are now “improved steel.”
Meanwhile, I have a number of wood poles crossing my property that are true antiques — bowed, tilted, you name it. Until seven years ago, they even had WWII steel wiring (not powered) still running between them. Pole arm rotted out, dropped the steel wire to about 3′ high across my driveway. Next morning, I drove my car through it, $1,600 damage. If I had been on a bike, I’d be dead.
Why is it that in the last few years, “powerlines” are the go-to reason for wildfires?
We’ve had hot, dry, windy conditions every year since the Flood, and powerlines in brushy country for the last 120 years, but only now do fires start from powerline failures.
We must just be smarter now.
Power lines have been setting fires for many decades. It’s not new.
But, more often since they stopped brush clearing – for “environmental reasons.”
Laguna Fire
It’s know that the panhandle is treeless. Do you have inside information regarding the “rotted” utility pole that supposedly fell over and touched off the inferno?
I recall Texans telling me that fir, pine and oak trees in the Sierra Nevada mountains should be cleared to 100 yards each side of ordinary residential telephone/utility poles. Of course, such a thing is patently absurd, but people will say all sort of silly things. It would be just as absurd saying mesquite etc., should be removed 100 yards each side of the very same type of utility poles. By the way, The Sierra are loaded with manzanita, a bush very similar to mesquite.
We simply can’t safeguard every aspect of our lives.
That reply was for “smooth in reply to Tiki. | March 12, 2024 at 9:50 am”
I dunno what caused panhandle fire. Looks like they are going to pin it on utilities provider, because they have deep pockets. I was only saying its less likely tree branch went down into the wires in panhandle fire, unlike in sierra fires. There’s no way for CA to fireproof the sierra. In the sierra, dry lightning strikes have been hitting mountain tops for million years.
You’re kinda right, DFN. Lawyers want to blame utility companie$. Acts of god lack deep pockets.
Hoboes started a number of really bad wildfires here in Cali, but Newsom hushes that part up. It’s hard to sell climate change when his kidz are torching valley and coastal chaparral land and LA basin suburbs.
The North Complex Fire burned 350,000 acres of rugged, remote forest land, all due to dry lightning strikes.
Well, you can have either electrical power which starts these fires and trees which burn, or…
You can have your forests cut down and replaced with windmills, which don’t provide enough electricity to spark any fires, and nothing left to burn.
Though basic line maintenance, inspection and replacement of poles or older transformers and brush clearing around the lines would mitigate potential fires. Can’t control for everything but some things we can so long as priorities are set to allow/demand they be done.
70mph winds make even a spark into an inferno, given enough dry grass. We are just now getting into Midwest pasture burning season where every spring, farmers set fire to thousands of acres of grassland in controlled burns while environmental nutjobs scream about air quality and injured wildlife. If burned regularly, every 3-5 years, large pastures are fairly immune from uncontrolled burns even with high winds because there’s more green grass than dry, but when the green nutcases manage to shutdown burning in an area for too many years in a row, pastures turn into bombs waiting for the first strong wind and a tossed cig.
Big uncontrolled spaces such as this have a lot of problems doing controlled burns. Weather flares up, drought extends through spring, rains start up early, etc… It’s the same problem forest lands have when the pine needles are allowed to build up into a thick, explosive cover. The knee-jerk reaction of environmental activists is to ban fire. That only ensures disaster down the road.