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Early on the morning of March 6, as the midlatitude cyclone reached the Rocky Mountains, the winds began tumbling toward the ground, and they were indeed gusting up to 50 miles an hourequivalent to the wind speed of a decent-sized tropical storm. Around 11:30 a.m., the winds reached the southern Great Plains. In Beaver County, Oklahoma, a power line started swinging in the wind. A shower of sparks fell to the ground and a spot fire sprang up, the size of a fist. Usually such a small fire stays "benign," to use the parlance of wildfire specialists, and quickly dies out. But pushed by the wind, this fire kept growing, the flames wrapping around the wilted grass, and it was soon on the run, galloping eastward across an open range.

Within an hour, there were reports of half a dozen more grass fires in Oklahoma and Kansas. Around 1:45 p.m., a couple of spot fires were seen three miles north of Amarillo, along U.S. 287. They were a mile and a half apart and most likely had been caused by sparks from a chain being dragged along the pavement by a truck or trailer. The two fires quickly merged and turned into one large fire. Brad Smith, a Texas A&M Forest Service wildfire analyst, drove to the scene. By the time he got there, the fire was at least three miles wide and the flames at the front were twenty feet high. It was moving at 6 to 7 miles per hour, as fast as Smith had ever seen a wildfire move on the Texas Plains.
Around 2:30 p.m., there was a report of another Texas fire, this one near the town of Perryton, in the northeast corner of the Panhandle. John Ericksona 73-year-old rancher who also writes the best-selling Hank the Cowdog children's book series about a smelly but lovable cowdog that lives on a Panhandle ranchdrove his pickup to the top of a bluff to get a look at it. Over the years, Erickson had seen his share of prairie fires. In The Case of the Blazing Sky, his fifty-first Hank book (Erickson has published 69 of them since 1983), he has Hank tell his young readers, "I guess you know what strong wind does to a fire. In dry weather, it will turn a little fire into a roaring monster . . . a roaring, leaping, hissing monster." That afternoon, standing on the bluff, Erickson realized a monster was on its way. He watched the fire triple in size. The smoke, he would later say, looked like a cloud from an atom bomb explosion. He drove back to his ranch house and told his wife, Kris, to pack some clothes in a suitcase. They needed to get out of there as soon as they could.
Along with the Texas A&M Forest Service firefighters, at least a dozen Panhandle volunteer fire departments arrived to do battle with the fires near Amarillo and Perryton. The men and women stood on their grass rigs and shot streams of water at the sides of the fires to keep them from getting wider. Using road graders and bulldozers, they built firebreaks to slow the blazes' forward momentum or divert the fires away from populated areas.

...and much more

On that single March afternoon, at least 32 fires broke out in the southern Great Plains, scorching more than 1.2 million acres, "the largest individual Plains fire outbreak documented in the modern era," says Lindley, the National Weather Service meteorologist. The amount of damage totaled tens of millions of dollars. Scattered throughout the pastures were at least a couple of thousand dead cows. Other cows and calves were burned so badly"staggering around like broken toys," wrote one reporterthat they were shot and carried by bulldozers to large pits for burial.

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