Cross Plains, Texas – By the time the smoke cleared Wednesday, more than 100 homes across wildfire-stricken Texas and Oklahoma were destroyed and at least five people were dead, including two elderly women trapped in their homes.
The hardest-hit community was Cross Plains, a West Texas ranching and oil-and-gas town of 1,000 people 150 miles from Dallas. Cross Plains lost about 50 homes and a church Tuesday after the flames raced through grass dried out by the region’s worst drought in 50 years.
Two elderly women there were killed after being trapped in their homes, said Sparky Dean, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety. And in Callisburg, near the Oklahoma line in north Texas, another woman apparently fell and broke her hip and could not get out of her home before it was destroyed.
No information was available on the fourth death in Texas or a fifth in Oklahoma.
“We had a tornado here years ago, and we thought that was devastating. This lasted for hours and hours,” said Patricia Cook, a special-education aide whose Cross Plains home was saved by her 18-year-old son, J.D., and a friend. They saw the flames approaching the house from across a field and ran to save it.
“The fire was literally nipping at their heels,” she said. “He just picked up the hose and started watering things down.”
Elsewhere on her block, the front brick wall and part of a side wall were all that remained standing of the First United Methodist Church. The steeple lay across the ground. Ten other homes on her street also were reduced to charcoal.
Most of the homes destroyed in Cross Plains were modest, working-class houses built during the 1930s and ’40s. The fire spared a town landmark, the nearly century-old house – now a museum – of Robert E. Howard, author of the “Conan the Barbarian” books. All together, the grass fires destroyed more than 100 buildings across Texas, the state emergency management agency said. About 50 homes were destroyed in Oklahoma.
Wind gusting to 40 mph drove the flames across nearly 20,000 acres in the two states. At least 73 blazes were reported in Texas over two days, and dozens more broke out in Oklahoma.Severe drought set the stage for the fires, which authorities believe were started mostly by people shooting off fireworks, tossing cigarettes or burning trash.
