Dangerous, critical fire weather conditions persist Wednesday after more than a dozen new wildfires torched tens of thousands of acres and forced evacuations in the Plains amid bone-dry conditions and powerful winds on Tuesday.
The Ranger Road Fire is the largest and is now a megafire: It exploded in size and has burned at least 145,000 acres in Oklahoma and Kansas since starting early Tuesday afternoon. That’s about the size of Chicago.
Most of that extreme growth happened in just eight hours, during which the fire on average consumed an area equal to three to four football fields every second. The fire was at 0% containment as of Wednesday morning, according to the Oklahoma Forestry Service.
The Ranger Road Fire started in Beaver County, Oklahoma, then spread for about 60 miles to reach southern Kansas. It forced the evacuations of thousands of people in Englewood and Ashland, Kansas on Tuesday, according to CNN affiliate KAKE.
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