EDINBURG — Firefighters across South Texas have stayed busy this week Wednesday because of particularly volatile weather conditions, conditions some feel will lead to a record fire year.
Edinburg fire Chief Shawn Snider is urging residents to exercise caution in the volatile conditions, saying his department responded to as many as 12 fires Wednesday.
The biggest of those was a junkyard fire in Alamo. Snider said his department also responded to a fire in the Sendero Trails subdivision on FM 490 north of Edinburg, which was started by homebuilders cutting rebar and the sparks set grass afire. The fire jumped the street the house was on and burned two lots and went into a brushline area where they finally got it stopped.
Another grassfire, in San Carlos, caught a little shed and part of a house on fire before Edinburg firefighters extinguished it. They managed to save the house before it was seriously damaged.
Snider says the fires his department were just a snippet of what firefighters across the Valley are dealing with. Fires, he said, are breaking out everywhere.
“We’ve seen these conditions before, typically in the New Year after wintertime comes, especially if there’s a freeze. There have been years that are considered remarkable in relation to the amount and size of fires,” he said. “This will be one of those years.”
One of the most significant fires readers reported Wednesday — a blaze on the King Ranch near Encino — was still burning that evening.
Snider said that fire had grown to consume almost 6,000 acres late Wednesday and that his department hadn’t been asked to respond to it.
“King Ranch usually deals with fires on their property by themselves,” he said. “They basically don’t allow any outside resources to come in on their property, and they have tremendous resources. They’ve got massive tractors with disks and everything else, so if they call us it’ll be because it jumps their property lines and gets into other people’s property.”
Fires continued in Brooks County on Thursday. The Texas A&M Forest Service reported that morning that the King Fire there had grown to an estimated 10,000 acres and was 80% contained, while the Butterfly Two Fire, also in Brooks County, had consumed 300 acres and was 70% contained.
By Thursday afternoon, Brooks County reported five fires in its jurisdiction, three of which were mostly contained, saying that 10 different fire departments from the area had deployed to fight them.
All the blazes and the record fire year Snider is expecting are a product of dry conditions, low humidity and an abundance of fuel. A bumper crop of grass produced by rains during the hurricane last year was killed off in last month’s freeze, he said, creating conditions where the smallest fire quickly becomes “explosive” and extremely difficult to control because of high winds.
Snider is highly encouraging people to refrain from outside burning and to exercise caution in the volatile conditions.
“Either in the city or outside the city, because we’re having fires that are occurring in alleyways, open fields, vacant lots along the roadways,” he said. “Everywhere.”
