In March 2006—18 years ago now, LavacaCountyToday.com editor Bobby Horecka was covering what had become Texas' largest wildfire at that time, which incidentally struck in roughly same area of the state, the Texas Panhandle east of Amarillo. Surprising today were similarities between the two fires, those of the past moth those from 18 years ago. Having trained as a fireman as a younger man and covered countless fires during the course of his career, the sheer absence of anything was what Horecka said stood out most to him in both fires.
"The was no ash, no charred wood, nothing," he recalled. "The way they described it then—and given reports of comparable windspeeds between then and now, the same still holds true today, I'm sure—the fire burned so hot and so fast it completely consumed everything in its path, leaving close to 2,000 square miles looking far more like some sort of lunar landscape than the rolling hills and grassland prairies that should be there right now."
Incidentally, Horecka was also around the third largest wildfire, the Big County Fire in the 1990s, back when it held the No. 1 spot as the largest wildfire in state history. It burned much of the Stassney Cook Ranch (and others), which spans an area that it takes a full hour to drive at highway speeds, from Abilene east to Albany. It as one the first major statewide events Horecka covered in his career.
The attached video clip was just one of the news stories Horecka put together in March 2006 on the fires and what came after. He shot much of the footage you'll see, and if watch carefully, you might even spot him working a camera back then in one of the shots dealing with the recovery. He worked for the Texas Farm Bureau then, and this clip was part of the weekly show the bureau did for the RFD-TV Network at the time.