A Charred Life 
Gone in 15 Minutes
That’s how long it took a massive wildfire to destroy the North Texas town of Ringgold on New Year’s Day. But for the residents who lost everything—and the brave volunteers who risked their lives—putting the disaster behind them will take a bit longer.
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Because it was a holiday, most of the men were home when they got the call to meet Henley at Hanson Road. Fuller hopped into the driver’s seat of the red pumper truck with Alexander and two other men who happened to be around for the holidays and headed through a pasture just east of the targeted area. Simpson and his son took Ringgold’s newest truck, a 1991 white Chevy with a three-hundred-gallon tank, and Christopher met up with Henley and settled into Henley’s pickup to discuss strategy.
Hanson Road seemed like a perfect spot to block the fire’s path. The street was situated about half a mile east of the railroad tracks where the firemen had just been overtaken, but it was still due west of the city’s center. Henley figured that they could stake out the area where three houses lined the road before the fire swept into a more populated section of town. A fireman told one resident, truck driver Bruce McDonald, to evacuate with his wife and two sons. “Take what you can and get out,” he said. “You have about five minutes.” The wind was blowing so hard McDonald could barely keep his eyes open. With a garden hose, he wet the grass around his house, then packed his family in their car while he got in his pickup. But McDonald didn’t have any insurance for the house, so when he was sure that his wife and sons were speeding away, he spun around and headed back into the fire to try to save what he could.
In the next house, Johnny Reynolds, a USDA county executive director, had been making his New Year’s Day cabbage and black-eyed peas for good luck when he heard the Ringgold fire trucks leave the station. “Bad day for a fire,” he’d thought to himself. When he went outside and saw the smoke over the patch of bluestem and mesquite behind his house, he and his wife got their garden hoses and began to water their roof. Two trucks arrived at Reynolds’s house and got ready to start their attack. “We’re here to save your house,” a fireman told him. Reynolds started a four-wheeler and told his wife to get ready to run.
In the third house, Jackie Mitchell, his wife, and her brother had been spraying the crape myrtles that laced the outside of his house when a truck from Nocona pulled up. “You need to get out of here,” one fireman told him. “That water hose isn’t going to do a bit of good.” After Mitchell and his wife gathered all the photos they could, his brother-in-law yelled, “You need to get out of here now!” and took off.
As each second passed, it became clearer to the firemen that the flames showed no sign of flagging and that any intention to stay behind and save the houses was suicidal. When Mitchell headed outside, he saw the firemen in their trucks barreling down the road, running for their lives. No one could have prepared him for what was coming over the road. Normally, a fire has one “head,” which is the hottest part. But if it gets into low dips or drainage areas such as ditches, the wind becomes compacted, blowing oxygen at the flames and coaxing them upward, drawing up a column like a burning tornado. By the time the fire hit Hanson Road, the head had split into three 40-foot-tall vortices that roared up to the road like swirling orange Christmas trees.
“We need to go,” Mitchell yelled. His wife grabbed her favorite gray cat, and the couple jumped in her Isuzu, at which point she began screaming. The fire had already come around to the garage and was blasting in toward the truck. Realizing that they were safer inside the house, they ran back in, shut the doors, and paced from window to window in silence, watching the fire squeeze in on them as the bright orange flames churned in mesmerizing patterns on all sides.
WITHIN MINUTES after the smoke had cleared north of Hanson Road, firefighters said, an explosion appeared to be rolling through town. The wind picked up speed, feeding the fire with even more oxygen, and the brush and thirty-foot-tall post oak trees burst into gargantuan flames. Henley and Christopher drove from house to house on the main streets, honking the horn and yelling, warning people to get out, but by the time they’d get to a house, it was already going up in flames.
Those who hadn’t been able to escape the inferno suffered tremendous burns. Johnny Reynolds’s wife made it down Hanson Road on the four-wheeler, but he jumped on a fire truck as it drove off, laying lengthwise along the vehicle. But the truck was slow, and as the smoke thickened, the engine began to sputter. Reynolds yelled, “Go! Go! Go!” as he felt the flames swallow him up. During the two seconds in which the fire seared him all over, he thought to himself: “Hold on and burn or fall off and die.” By the time they drove out of the smoke, the skin on his arms hadn’t just blistered; it had disintegrated. And the strong, singed-hair smell of his own burned flesh emanated from him like steam.
As dozens of trucks began to arrive from nearby towns, the firemen who had barely escaped incineration were baffled about how to fight such a thing. After the fire had burned the grass on Hanson Road down to the roots, Jack and Chance Simpson had staked out an area and aimed their hoses at a house, but the water would shoot only ten feet before the wind blasted the rest back at them. It was making a pop-pop-popping sound the way a flag does on a windy day, raging against their thick fire suits, and sand and gravel whipped around them as they sprayed. After finally running out of water, they drove home to check on their property, where the fire truck broke down.
The other Ringgold fire crew was in even worse shape. Fuller and his team in the pumper truck had gotten caught in a flash in the coastal patch east of Hanson Road. They received burns to their faces, backs, and hands as the flames burst around the truck and into the cab through the open windows. Directly afterward, Henley got on the radio to report that the fire was jumping the main intersection in town, where U.S. 81 crosses U.S. 82. “Montague,” he said, “I need every ’dozer, police in the area—anything they can send us. This fire has jumped 81 and is headed east.”
“Has it jumped 81?” the dispatcher asked, to clarify.
“It has jumped 81,” Henley replied. Then the voice of an unidentified man watching the crossroads of town said, “It’s jumped 82 and going right downtown into Ringgold right now, houses and all.”
“Montague?” Henley asked, sounding exhausted.
“Go ahead,” the dispatcher replied.
“Contact the National Guard,” Henley said. “We need everything we can get up here.”
Those listening to the dispatch were stunned by the speed at which the events were taking place. A community dating to the late 1800’s that had been devastated by fires in 1913, 1939, and 1956 was in flames again. Firemen were forced to retreat from the front of the blaze to the sides, spraying helplessly. In a matter of fifteen minutes—from 3:20, when it hit Hanson Road, to 3:35, when it barreled into the center of town and passed the crossroads—70 percent of the town had caught on fire and begun burning to the ground.
THE FIREMEN’S DESPERATE PLEAS for help multiplied throughout the afternoon. Douglas Page, the fire marshal and chief in Bowie, was playing with his kids when he got the initial call on Ringgold’s fire at around 3:00. When he arrived at his fire station, he encountered chaos. Trucks were driving in from everywhere and attacking the fire from anywhere they could. Page prepared for the maiden voyage of his Hazmat trailer, which he’d obtained with a 2005 Homeland Security grant. Stocked with a TV for weather updates, two chairs, a laptop, a dry-erase board, and a radio dispatch, the trailer would be key on a day when Granbury would be flooded with calls.
“We’re going to try to set up a command post. Where would you like it?” Page radioed to Henley.
“Doug, I don’t know,” Henley responded. “I’m trying to work my way east to get to the head of the fire and see what we’ve got. Stand by just a minute.”
“With your permission,” Doug said, “I’ll go ahead and establish one here on 81 south of Ringgold.”
“10-4.”
The main question everyone working on the fire seemed to want answered was when air support would arrive. During many wildfires, a pilot in a twin-engine single-wing aircraft flies over the burning area and helps decide the best aircraft needed for the job. But Ringgold wasn’t the only massive fire in Texas that day. The Granbury region was fighting eighteen major fires that were devouring the state’s resources: 231 people, eleven helicopters, six single-engine air tankers, and 24 bulldozers.
By the time Granbury got the report on the Ringgold fire, at 4:13, six other towns were in danger. Helitanker support was requested, but at 4:37 the last remaining tactical aircraft at the Mineral Wells airport had been grounded because a wildfire had spread over the runway. By 4:59 all the firefighters in the state would be suffering. With the winds swirling and darkness creeping in, all aircraft were grounded.
Conditions were becoming more dangerous by the hour. Firemen pray for nighttime, when the earth cools off, the winds die down, and humidity rises. That is, unless a front is coming through. In the case of Ringgold, that front was coming straight out of the west. The inferno was shooting fireballs ahead of itself that rolled over the town, and one man driving down the highway at 30 miles per hour said the fire was moving faster than he was.
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