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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Henley, Christopher, and Page needed a plan. Typically, they fought fires by going to the head. But that strategy equaled a death wish in the high winds. So they decided to deprive the flames of any fuel that lay ahead. Henley drove his pickup to a ranch about four miles east of the main intersection at Ringgold, and Christopher climbed onto the tailgate to light a back burn, a controlled blaze set ahead of a fire that freezes its progress with a fresh strip of ash. At 4:49 Henley radioed to his crew: “Jennings’s ranch house. West of it, we’ve got a forty-, fifty-acre coastal field that’s really short. We might have a chance on it there.” Using a three-foot-long torch attached to a propane tank, Christopher thought he’d be able to light a back burn, but before he could start, the fire jumped the road, forcing them eastward yet again.
Meanwhile, people in town were trying to save themselves after they realized they couldn’t save their homes. They drove through flare-ups to get on the road, cranking up the air-conditioning in their cars to filter the smoke pressing in on them. Larry Fenoglio’s mother, Mary Lou, saw a pine tree blow over her garage and light the roof’s shingles up as if they had been doused with gasoline. She didn’t even bother to go back for her purse as she ran to her car. She drove east past the cemetery and turned onto a farm road where neighbors were sitting in their trucks, talking on cell phones and trying to locate friends and family.
What the firemen needed more than anything was a rise in humidity to turn the grass’s flammability off like a switch. Grass, because it is so thin, responds almost instantly to humidity, which, as of 5:05, had dipped down to a devastating 3 percent.
Without moisture to help the wood resist fire, homes began burning up like kindling, creating intense temperatures. In most house fires, part of a wall or some furniture is left standing. During the Ringgold fire, the structures were reduced to their foundations, and even appliances, which are usually left intact during a fire, had melted down to puddles.
But perhaps destruction of the livestock was even more difficult to watch. Some pregnant cows were so heavy they couldn’t outrun the fire. Others got pinned against fencing. One woman caught a nightmarish glimpse of her neighbor’s six-year-old gelding, a horse that had been gentle enough that he could be ridden without a bridle or saddle. The horse was walking on his hind legs, his back completely overtaken by flames.
AS NEWS OF RINGGOLD’S obliteration sunk in, firefighters realized that Nocona, a town of 3,200 people, was the next target. Page had been instructing workers to fight the fire from the southern flank and push it northeast, scraping Nocona’s north end. But experience had taught him that fire goes where it wants to go, and dispatch after dispatch from Henley proved that the fire had a will to jump every back burn and road in its path. Halfway between Ringgold and Nocona, Henley was advancing to the head when three vortices lifted off the north side, stood up one hundred feet in the air, and slammed down on the ground, scattering fire for 150 yards.
And the news got worse. At 5:34 Page sent a dispatch: “Be advised, we’re getting a wind shift. The fire is now moving southeast toward Nocona.” The 37-year-old mayor of Nocona, Paul Gibbs, had prepared the local EMS to load buses with nursing home residents and hospital patients an hour earlier. Now, as he called for a mandatory evacuation of his town, sirens from city hall began ringing throughout the streets.
Fortunately, help was arriving from all directions. Nearly sixty fire departments were working the southern flank of the fire. Tanker drivers arrived unsolicited with their equipment and parked wherever they were needed. Ranchers pulled up to the Nocona Police Department with cattle trailers, offering to load livestock. Men with bulldozers called Henley repeatedly, begging for an assignment.
Page stationed them on the north side of Nocona to dig up every bit of fuel in the fire’s path. But how could the bulldozers work with enough speed and avoid the deadly tornadoes of fire? Just as the firefighters would get a handle on the beast from the side, it would whip around and blast right into them. Henley and Christopher watched as a fifty-foot-tall column bent over their pickup. The flash rushed past them for two seconds before it faded to a thick cloud of white smoke. Henley then sped down the road, trying to keep an eye on the painted yellow highway line that disappeared as the smoke thickened. For the second time in a matter of hours, the men had just barely escaped with their lives. But they wouldn’t have time to reflect on that for days.
MAYBE PAGE WAS RIGHT that the fire had a will of its own. The men could attack it with every department north of Fort Worth, but ultimately the fire would call off the fight when it was good and ready. Not that its perseverance wouldn’t be tested. Henley and Christopher were barricading Nocona with ditches of dirt when they got the message from Page at around 7:15 that night: “The wind has switched to the north.” With the same capriciousness that had caused the flames to dash madly from the offending utility pole all the way to Nocona, annihilating anything they craved, the fire decided to roll over and sleep.
At 7:23 Page radioed Henley to get the position of the southern flank. “Don’t know for sure on the southern flank yet,” Henley responded. “It’s going to be close to the edge of Nocona, if not in the city of Nocona.”
The Granbury crew watched their laptops as the humidity numbers began to rise. From the Gainesville weather station, at 8: 25 the temperature was 68 degrees, humidity had climbed to 21 percent, and the wind had dropped to 10 miles per hour. The unburned grass began to absorb the moisture like a sponge. Without wind, the firefighters finally had a chance to make advances.
At 8:41 Page radioed Henley again: “Billy, how is everything up near Lake Nocona?”
“Right now we think we have the forward progress of this fire stopped,” Henley said. “I think we’re in good shape right now. We just need to go mop it up.”
“Received. So right now we don’t need to worry about an evacuation?”
“Negative. We do not.”
Henley stayed on the twenty-mile-long fire through the night, so he didn’t see the devastation in Ringgold until morning. What he saw was sickening. The city looked like some apocalyptic nightmare: Telephone poles were burned up, trees were tipping over, and only brick chimneys remained where houses had once stood. The air stank like a wet dog. At least three hundred cattle and ten horses had either died right away or were wandering the black pastures with no ears or tails. It was as if someone had shaved the earth and glued down soot. People wandered around town in awe as ash fell like snowflakes around them.
The long, narrow streak of devastation, observable from the helicopters above, demonstrated how violently the wind had blown through. As neighbors pointed out to one another, some houses were unaffected while others nearby were cremated, as if the fire had selected its casualties. The school and the church had been saved, but the old grocery and the boarded-up FINA station were destroyed. A perfectly preserved blue post office box remained in front of a crumpled pile of aluminum sheets where the post office had once stood. Amazingly, the Mitchells on Hanson Road were spared, the roaring fire passing over their house, while others, like Johnny Reynolds and Darrell Fuller Jr., found themselves in the hospital with burns covering their bodies.
Support and aid poured in. Governor Rick Perry declared a disaster area. FEMA promised assistance. The county’s volunteer fire departments garnered $100,000 within the first two months of fund-raising in 2006, and new recruits were signing up for Ringgold’s—and other towns’—units. For those who lost everything, however, the assistance was little consolation. Only a handful of people in town had homeowners’ insurance, and displaced residents moved in with relatives or stayed indefinitely in hotels in surrounding towns. That no one died was nothing short of miraculous.
Forty-one thousand acres of Montague County burned that day—200,000 acres statewide—with hot spots flaring up through January 4. Jesse Christopher took naps at the fire station every few hours through Wednesday, and when he finally collapsed into his La-Z-Boy at home, he jumped up in panic throughout the night, dreaming of fire. Billy Henley stayed in contact with him until the end. Friends told Henley what a good job he had done. They reassured him that there was nothing he could have done differently to have prevented the destruction. Henley could only shake his head and hope that the people of Ringgold felt the same way.
The Department of Public Safety’s situation report on January 2 read as follows: “Since December 26th, there have been 139 fires burning … For the same period, there have been 278 homes lost . . . Today, January 2nd, is predicted to be less intense than the last 24-hour period. However, beginning tomorrow, Tuesday, January 3rd, conditions will replicate the past intense period of high winds, low humidity, and above average temperatures.”
Meteorologists predicted no substantial rain for four months.
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