Wildfire burns homes around lake in Texas amid high heat

By TERRY WALLACE and KEN MILLER
Associated Press

A wildfire has burned at least five homes and resulted in about 300 homes being evacuated around a lake in north Texas amid sweltering temperatures and dry conditions, authorities said.

Many of the residents returned home Tuesday, but the area remained under a voluntary evacuation notice, the Texas A&M Forest Service said.

The fire at Possum Kingdom Lake about 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Fort Worth, which began Monday afternoon, had burned about 500 acres (202 hectares) and was 10% contained Tuesday, forest service spokesman Adam Turner said. Firefighting crews were working around the clock, focusing on protecting threatened homes in resort subdivisions along the lake’s western shore, the forest service said.

Meanwhile, the biggest active Texas wildfire is the Chalk Mountain Fire about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Fort Worth. Eight structures are known to have been lost to its flames, but it was not clear how many of those were residences or businesses, state forest service spokeswoman Mary Leathers said.

The fire, which began Monday afternoon, was just 10% contained after blackening about 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) as of midday Tuesday, and crews using bulldozers were digging containment lines while fire trucks and aircraft worked to extinguish the flames, the forest service said.

No injuries have been reported from the fires, and their causes were under investigation. A combination of near-record- and record-high temperatures approaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) combined with breezes gusting as high as 30 mph (40-50 kph) and drought conditions to leave the region ripe for fire, the forest service said.

The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag fire warning for northern and central Texas and western and eastern Oklahoma for Tuesday.

“We are experiencing dry fuels to a level that we haven’t seen in the past 10 years,” Turner said. “Any spark that lands in tall grass or even lands in some short grass right now is liable to spark.”

Wildfires and intense heat in Texas and some other parts of the United States come as unusually hot, dry weather has gripped large swaths of Europe since last week, triggering wildfires from Portugal to the Balkans and leading to hundreds of heat-related deaths.