Wildfire in Randall County, Texas

The Western Fire was ignited by equipment use, most likely welding on Friday May 15th around 5pm. The fire would go on to burn 1,137 acres before being contained on Saturday May 16th. This fire in conjunction with the other fires around the Canyon area (Hunggate and Chocolate Chip), had cause for concern that the Palo Duro Canyon State Park, River Falls, and Pullman Acres, would be threatened. So evacuations were issued and about 4,500 local utility customers were affected by power shut offs. Eventually the fire was halted and the evacuations were lifted.

A prolonged hot and dry period was set up for the Panhandles in mid May. And with the lack of significant rainfall to help transition the grasses from cured to green, the fuels were well above the 90th percentile in dryness. While it's not uncommon for a high based storm or two to occur west of the dryline and create dry thunderstorms, on May 14th it was certainly more scattered to nearly widespread storms that occurred. Several lightning ignitions occurred, and given that the storms had severe dry microbursts associated, the fires that ignited would spread quickly. Thereafter the Panhandles would go through several consecutive days of critical to extremely critical conditions. And the issues of any new starts, as well as active fires that ignited on May 14th would take another run were of high concern. Overall 20 wildfires ranging from over 34,000 acres to some as small as a few acres would ignite in the TX/OK Panhandle between the 14th and the 18th.