Blazes Scorch Texas and Oklahoma

Fires driven by wind and unusually warm weather ripped across parts of north Texas and Oklahoma on Tuesday, killing at least one person and causing dozens of evacuations and some injuries as houses burned, officials said.

“It’s been a really wild day,” said Anita Foster, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where smoke caused several highway and road closings that slowed traffic in the evening rush hour.

“There are quite a number of fires still as we speak,” said Foster, whose mother successfully fought a grass fire outside her home in suburban Fort Worth using a garden hose. “Having this many in our metropolitan area, at this time of year, that is a little strange.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry issued a disaster declaration for parts of north Texas, where the fires were aggravated by drought conditions.

“As dry as it’s been, we’re lucky it’s not worse at this point,” said Lt. Billy Henderson of the sheriff’s office in Hood County, about 30 miles southwest of Fort Worth. One Hood County subdivision, which Henderson said contained a few hundred houses, was under an evacuation order as fire teams prepared to battle unpredictable grass fires nearby.

A fire at the edge of Arlington, between Dallas and Fort Worth, consumed a few homes near Tierra Verde Golf Club, and fire squads were setting up defenses around two apartment complexes Tuesday evening.

Foster said firefighters were hoping they would be able to control the fire as winds weakened at nightfall.

Authorities said that a woman was killed in a fire in Cooke County, near the Texas-Oklahoma border. No further details were available.

In Oklahoma, wildfires were reported in at least 12 of the state’s 77 counties. The worst blaze was in Mustang, about 10 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, where at least five homes were destroyed, said Michelann Ooten, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Emergency Management.

“It’s very unusual to see this in December,” Ooten said of the fires. “It’s been very warm here, unusually warm, and very dry.” Temperatures were in the upper 60s and 70s Tuesday in much of the state, she said, in contrast to normal late-December marks in the 40s and 50s. A ban on outdoor burning was in effect across the state, she said.

Three firefighters in Texas and one in Oklahoma were hospitalized for smoke inhalation or heat exhaustion, Ooten said. At least three other people in Oklahoma were injured. She said at least 4,500 acres had burned in Oklahoma.

The fires follow late-November wildfires that destroyed about 50 homes in Oklahoma.

Strong wind gusts Tuesday made aerial firefighting too dangerous in many cases, Ooten said. “We have National Guard helicopters with water tanks available to fight the fires, but because of high winds, we’re unable to do that” in many places, she said.

“Now people notice that there are members of the news media that are up in helicopters, they’re seeing this on CNN,” Ooten added. “And so some people are asking us, ‘Well, if they can go up, why can’t you go up?’ The difference is that the news media isn’t carrying 700 gallons of water when they go up.”

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Times researcher Lynn Marshall contributed to this report.