Firefighters have been battling nearly a dozen blazes in South and Central Texas following extremely high winds and low humidity on Tuesday, with the Texas Division of Emergency Management urging Texans to avoid activities that could create sparks and have an emergency supply kit ready amid continued wildfire danger.
A lot of what happens in the coming days will heavily depend on weather patterns sweeping across Texas.
Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist for Harris County, has been closely monitoring the forecast and how it might affect current fires and potential for new ones. He joined the Standard with more on what Texans can expect.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Can you recap some of the conditions that Texans have been facing for the past 24 hours? I mean, there have been storms in North Texas, red flag fire warnings in Central Texas, and of course 911 call centers have been swamped over the past 24 hours.
Jeff Lindner: It’s a very dynamic storm system that came out of the Four Corners area of the United States into the Central Plains yesterday. Texas was on the south side of that storm system. On the eastern flank of it, over North Texas, over towards East Texas, Louisiana, we got that severe weather with some damaging winds and some tornadoes.
The front comes sweeping through, and then we get all that dry air coming in from the West. Really, what was remarkable about this storm system was the wind outside of the thunderstorms. We had winds of 40-50 miles an hour across the entire state and gusts at times up to 60 miles an hour, especially across the Hill Country in the Rio Grande Plains into that I-35 corridor.
Relative humidity fell to about 8-9% yesterday afternoon, which created incredible fire weather conditions probably we haven’t seen in years across the Hill Country in Central Texas. We did have some fires yesterday. The good news is local resources were on top of them very quickly.
I think this was a well-forecasted event. The message was out: You got to be careful. And so we didn’t have any great big fires, but we did have several 5,000-acre fires, and we had structures threatened. We did have some structures lost south of San Antonio and north of Corpus Christi.
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Today, the good news is the winds are going to come way down. So even though it is still going to be breezy, 15-20 miles an hour, the humidity is going to come up a little bit. We still have what we call an “elevated fire risk,” but it’s not as critical as what we were facing yesterday across the state.
We’ve got a lot of dry grasses [and] dead grasses from winter freezes. Be really careful with any sparks or chains or anything that can produce a fire. You know, 90% of wildfires are produced from human causes. We have to be really careful out there.
Kind of looking ahead to Saturday, we may kind of face something not quite as intense, but fire weather concerns are out in the Central and Western part of the state as we get towards Saturday.
I want to ask you about that, because I was taking a look at the Texas A&M Forest Service weather map, the outlook for the next several days, and I noticed that even tomorrow we’re looking at extreme fire dangers in far West Texas, and then very high fire dangers as you look into the Panhandle plains, going even into the Hill Country, and high fire danger across Central Texas, much of North Texas and South Texas. Are we expecting a return of the winds?
Yeah, we’re expecting another storm system to come in here on Friday and Saturday, so tomorrow and Friday we’ll have southerly winds. When you get up into West Texas, the Panhandle, parts of the Permian Basin out there, even a southerly wind is not necessarily a moist wind like it is in other parts of the state, so you can still get fire weather concerns with a southerly wind out in the western part of the state.
And then Saturday on the backside of another front, northerly dry winds coming in again. So that’s going to produce increased fire weather danger a little bit further east toward that I-35 corridor. We’ll see how the humidity does. You know, we’re still a couple days out, so we may be able to get some more humidity.
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It won’t be quite as critical as the situation we just faced. But still, until we get the spring green up, until we can green up the grasses and stuff like that, we’re going to be facing some fire weather concerns.
We have a long-term drought out in Central Texas. You know, that area – San Antonio, Kerrville, Austin – that area has been in drought conditions for a couple years now. It’s not just the grasses; it’s the cedar trees, the mesquite trees that are readily available to burn. And so we’re going to have to be very careful with this over the next month or so until we get the spring green up in place.
Anything Texans need to be doing right now in preparation?
I think the biggest thing is just be really careful. Like we mentioned, most of the wildfires are started with humans. And so be very careful. Don’t drag chains. Be careful if you’re welding out there. Certainly don’t burn – even if you’re not in a burn ban, don’t burn. These are not the types of conditions to have any type of fire.
If you see smoke or see fire, call 911 immediately and get that reported because in these conditions, the quicker we can get the firefighters [and] the ground crews there, the better off we’ll be.
