Wildfire Is Now 2nd-Biggest in Texas History

The largest of several wildfires burning in the Texas Panhandle is now the second-largest in state history. The Smokehouse Creek Fire, which started on Monday, grew to 850,000 acres Wednesday and was only 3% contained, CNN reports. The largest fire on record, the 2006 East Amarillo Complex fire, which burned 907,245 acres. That fire killed 13 people. No deaths or injuries have been reported in the Panhandle fires, but scores of homes have been destroyed, including around 40 on the outskirts of Canadian, a town where residents were told to shelter in place after road closures Tuesday, the AP reports.

Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency in 60 counties on Tuesday. NBC News reports that the Pantex facility northeast of Amarillo, the main US site for dismantling nuclear weapons, evacuated its staff Tuesday night but said it was operating normally on Wednesday. The fires, which broke out amid record high temperatures, forced the evacuation of numerous small communities and left around 11,000 people without power on Wednesday, the Washington Post reports.

Adam Turner, a spokesman for the Texas A&M Forest Service, tells CNN that the explosive growth of the Smokehouse Creek fire was the result of a sudden shift in wind direction. "Wind was coming straight out of the north and made just this massive wall of fire moving across the landscape," he says. Turner says calmer winds Wednesday gave firefighters time to prepare for stronger winds expected later this week. "When the winds do pick back up this weekend, we will have people, resources, all kinds of things here ready to go," he says. (More Texas wildfires stories.)