Fires in Texas are causing loss to a small town that already knows it well

Mickey German has lived in Fritch, Texas most of his life, but Fritch hasn’t always made it easy.

He recalls watching from the safety of a bar, The Renegade, in 1992 as a storm brought a group of tornadoes through Fritch, leveling his apartment and 200 other homes. Then, in the spring of 2014, a fire that locals call the Mother’s Day Fire burned another 225 people.

Now a new disaster has devastated Fritch, a close-knit town of about 1,900 residents, and left 54-year-old Mr. German homeless again. His apartment was one of dozens consumed by flames last week during one of several active wildfires that have burned a total of 1.2 million acres in the Texas Panhandle.

“It was in smoke,” Mr. German, a maintenance worker at a gas station, said Tuesday as he stood outside his temporary residence at the Lone Star Motel. “This one hurt.”

The population here has been steadily declining for decades, and after this latest catastrophe, residents are wondering which of their neighbors will be the next to pack up and leave. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the city lost 12 percent of its residents. Yet many are drawn to stay because they want to live somewhere where everyone knows everyone and where persevering despite setbacks is seen as a sign of achievement.

“I know there’s a few I’ve talked to who say, ‘I’m done,’ but I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. German said as he smoked a cigarette near his truck, one of the few assets he could have . to save from the fire. “I won’t let it pass me by. Not a chance in hell. It’s home.”

Mr. German and other longtime residents said last week’s fire had burned some of the same land that was hit by the tornadoes in ’92.

The latest tragedy to befall Fritch was compounded Tuesday by the death of the city’s volunteer fire chief, Zeb Smith, who collapsed shortly after dawn while responding to a house fire in the city. Mr. Smith, 40, had entered the cream-colored one-story house because it was full of smoke, authorities said, and had to be pulled away by other firefighters. He couldn’t be saved.

At an emotional news conference, officials said Mr Smith and his crew had worked long days and nights last week battling the bushfires, only to have to deal with an unrelated blaze in the heart of their city.

“To me, he was one of my children,” Fritch Mayor Tom Ray said as he fought back tears.

Residents lined Fritch’s main thoroughfare, Broadway Street, to pay their respects as an array of fire trucks, police cars and motorcycles escorted a silver hearse. The flags in the city flew at half-mast.

Melony Watkins, 52, an artist, lives with her husband a block away from the house that caught fire and said she watched from her porch as the flames burned out the windows and doors. Ms. Watkins has lived in the city since fourth grade and describes herself as “a die-hard Fritchian,” but said she felt overwhelmed by what felt like one disaster after another.

“I just want to escape,” she said. “It’s just like any crazy day; I wake up almost before I even get my coffee and see what kind of roast is happening today.

Ms Watkins praised the generosity of many local residents who have offered food, extra bedrooms and farm supplies to those feeling burned out, but said she still expected some people would eventually leave. There is very little temporary housing, and some people whose homes burned may not be able to rebuild because, like many people in rural Texas, they didn’t have homeowners insurance.

The fire that struck Fritch, known as the Windy Deuce fire, was one of several fast-moving fires that started last week.

The largest fire by far is the Smokehouse Creek fire, which became the state’s largest fire in history and resulted in two deaths. A landowner lawsuit claims the fire was started by a downed utility pole, although the state has not yet drawn any conclusions about how the fire started. Thousands of cattle are feared dead, and large swaths of land have been charred, in a blow to ranchers and farmers who form the economic backbone of the region.

The fires have been unusually powerful, partly because of a combination of high winds and miles of dried-out grass that can ignite almost instantly, fire officials say.

“I’ve fought fire from Florida to California, from New Mexico to Montana, and the fire behavior we’re seeing in the Panhandle is by far the most extreme fire behavior I’ve ever seen,” said Colten Ledbetter, 32, a hood captain with the Southern Plains Fire Group that has been fighting the fires for the past week.

When the fire hit Fritch on the afternoon of February 27, the fire was moving so quickly that firefighters were unable to save homes. Some people saw the homes of friends and relatives in ruins, along with their own.

Wanda Buchanan, a teacher, has lived in the same house on the Chisholm Trail, a road overlooking large fields on the southern edge of the city, for 49 years. On Tuesday, she examined what was left: a pile of ash, fallen rocks and the twisted remains of the metal roof.

Her son’s house was also destroyed, and not far away the house of one of her grandsons.

Ms. Buchanan, 74, was working as a substitute teacher in Amarillo that day and could not return in time to save her most valuable possessions. Chief among these were her mother’s cookbook, her diplomas, the license from her marriage to her late husband, and a plethora of old home movies.

“Things like that you never get back,” she said. “I try not to think about the past and what I’ve lost.”

About the only thing she could find in the ashes Tuesday afternoon was a charred hammer, a metal shovel and the outline of her stove. There were no seats left on the swing in the garden, only metal chains dangling in the wind.

She admits that Fritch is once again faced with a difficult situation. But she said that after teaching at the city school for 26 years, she knows several generations of some families and understands how resilient they are.

And she knows there are many reasons to stay in Fritch: the weather that changes every season, the way everyone comes to support the youth sports teams, all the shared memories of a city with a long history, even if it was a difficult one. .

“It survived the other fires, it survived the tornado, it’s going to be fine,” she said. “We will probably only be stronger.”