5 Die in Texas, Okla. Fires

More Than 100 Homes Destroyed as Withered Grass Burns

Photos
Deadly Fires in Texas, Okla.
Wildfires engulfed thousands of acres of drought-stricken grassland, destroying dozens of homes and causing at least four deaths in Texas and Oklahoma.

CROSS PLAINS, Tex., Dec. 28 -- By the time the smoke cleared Wednesday, more than 100 homes across wildfire-stricken Texas and Oklahoma lay in ruins and at least five people were dead, including two elderly women trapped in their homes by flames.

The community hardest hit by Tuesday's fires was Cross Plains, a West Texas ranching and oil-and-gas town of 1,000 people about 150 miles from Dallas. Cross Plains lost about 50 homes and a church after the flames raced through grass dried by the region's worst drought in 50 years.

Two elderly women were killed there when they were trapped in their homes, said Sparky Dean, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

In Callisburg, near the Oklahoma line, a woman apparently fell and broke her hip and could not get out of her home before it was destroyed, firefighters said.

No information was immediately available on the fourth death in Texas. A fifth death occurred 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 son, J.D., 18, 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," Cook 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 was left standing of the First United Methodist Church. The steeple lay across the ground. Ten houses on Cook's street were destroyed.

Teresa Kennedy stood with her two children Wednesday outside her mother's home, destroyed in minutes the day before. She and her seven siblings had left the home untouched since their mother's death six years ago.

"There's nothing," a tearful Kennedy said of her childhood home, a mix of brick and wood.

Most of the homes destroyed in Cross Plains were modest, working-class houses built in 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.

Altogether, the grass fires destroyed more than 100 buildings across Texas, including 78 homes, the state emergency management agency said. About 50 homes were reported destroyed in Oklahoma.

Wind gusting to 40 mph drove the flames across nearly 20,000 acres in the two states. At least 73 fires were reported in Texas over two days, and dozens in Oklahoma.

Fires were still smoldering Wednesday in four Texas counties. One fire broke out Wednesday in an isolated area of eastern Oklahoma but was quickly contained.

Severe drought set the stage for the fires, which authorities believe were started mostly by people shooting off fireworks, tossing cigarettes or burning trash in spite of bans imposed because of the drought. A fallen power line apparently started one Oklahoma fire.

Rainfall this year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of north Texas, where most fires broke out, is about 16 inches below the average of about 35 inches, National Weather Service meteorologist Alan Moller said.

"The last time we had something quite this bad, you got to go back to about 1956, when we had 18.55 inches," Moller said.

The weather service's long-term forecasts show the drought intensifying through early 2006.

Oklahoma has received about 24 inches of rain this year, about 12 inches less than normal.