PRESIDIO COUNTY — This past week, the Marfa Volunteer Fire Department responded to three separate lightning fires around the county. The fires were a result of what’s known as “dry lightning” — or strikes without an accompanying rainstorm.
The largest of the three fires was reported to the department on Saturday evening. The department was already out on another call at Plata, between Marfa and Shafter along Casa Piedra Road, where lightning had struck a cottonwood tree.
Then a call came in about a fire on Ocotillo Ranch between Plata and Cibolo Creek. Night had fallen, making it difficult to fight the blaze amidst rough terrain. Presidio County Emergency Management Director and Marfa VFD Chief Gary Mitschke told landowner Larry Skiles that he would return in the morning to resume work.
Mitschke typically doesn’t send crews in to fight fires at night, and was especially glad he didn’t this time around. “It was really rough country,” he said. “We couldn’t get trucks to it, so we had to get as close as we could then work it with hand tools and water packs.”
The obvious downside of working to contain a fire during the day is the heat. “It was around 100 degrees — we couldn’t work it for a long period of time before we had to rest and re-hydrate,” he said.
Mitschke pulled the crew around 1 p.m. to rest while he checked out the fire on four wheels and waited to see if a passing rainstorm would help alleviate the situation. Assistance from the Texas Forest Service arrived later that afternoon to ensure from the air that the fire was completely snuffed out.
At around 155 acres, the fire was not particularly large compared to what the department can tackle, but the remoteness of the land — and the frequency of similar fires that week — had Mitschke on edge. Just days before encountering two dry lightning fires at once, Mitschke’s crew had extinguished a fire with the same cause on 26 acres south of Marfa.
“We’re started to experience what we have in the past with the dry lightning and the fire starts — the last couple of years it’s been kind of quiet that way,” he said. “In years past, from storms coming through dry lightning like that, I remember getting called for 6, 7 or 8 fires in the matter of a couple of hours. It gets us running every which way.”
Though the county has enjoyed a deluge of rainfall in previous weeks, Mitschke noted that the extreme heat persisting through the region dried the terrain up fast.
“Conditions right now are pretty bad,” Mitschke said. “With this kind of heat, even those places that received rain a week or two ago, this heat and no humidity have dried it up.”
Larry Skiles said he counted himself lucky there was very little wind the night the fire broke out on his property. He had hopped into an off-road cart with neighbor Brandt Buchanan, who first spotted the flames, to circle its perimeter and get a sense of its size — they noticed its proximity to Buchanan’s property, which contained more equipment. The Skiles’ pasture just north of the one that caught fire had cattle on it. A strong wind could have exacerbated the problem significantly.
Thankfully, firefighters also benefited from a sudden rainfall that helped put out the flames.
“Fortunately it was not a huge fire, but it could easily have been had it not been for the work done by the fire department and the forest service and the good Lord — a little rain shower helped slow it down,” said Skiles.
