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Gone in 15 minutes.

Article Excerpt
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.

THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC Safety had predicted disaster. The statewide situation report filed on January 1, 2006, tallied up 32 fires from the preceding day, but the worst was yet to come: "The next 24 hour operational period is predicted to be the most intense to date. Strong southwest and west winds combined with extremely low RH [relative humidity] and record above average temperatures will produce extreme fire danger over much of the state.... The use of rotary wing aircraft during these high wind conditions will be limited and restricted and in some situations impossible."

That grim forecast meant trouble for the tiny town of Ringgold, a community of one hundred people just south of the Oklahoma border, in Montague County. Its volunteer fire department was used to dealing with small fires that could be extinguished with its three old trucks. For larger blazes, Ringgold could rely on help from three nearby cities--Henrietta to the west, Bowie to the south, and Nocona to the east. Worst case, it could request air support from the Texas Forest Service, but if perilous winds grounded the aircraft, local firemen would be doomed to fight on the front lines alone.

The first report about the blaze that would become known as the Ringgold Fire arrived at 2:28 p.m. on New Year's Day. The dispatcher in Montague, the county seat nine miles south of Nocona, rang out: "Montague to Ringgold fire department. Attention Ringgold fire department. I have afire ten miles outside of Henrietta going towards Lone Star Hereford Ranch."

At the time, Billy Henley, the 52-year-old chief of Nocona's rural volunteer fire department, had just finished lunch with his wife and was flipping through the bowl games on TV in his Levi's and a T-shirt. Henley had become interested in firefighting when he was a student at the local high school. One Friday night he had been making the drag when he saw the trucks peel out of their station. He tailed them down the highway to a fire in Montague, where the shorthanded crew must have seen a glint in his eye. "If you don't mind getting dirty," one fireman had said, "we could use a hand."

Henley had told his wife that he hoped his pager wouldn't go off-not that day, not with those winds. When the alert came, he didn't have to verbalize his dread. He just looked at her and raised his eyebrows.

Because the Nocona department had newer trucks and a younger staff than most of the surrounding communities, it usually responded immediately to any fire in northwest Montague County. As Ringgold's crew assembled at the fire station, Henley jumped into his Dodge pickup and drove out ahead of his men to see what kind of mess they were getting into. Seven miles before he got to the fire, the smoke was so thick that he called his wife and told her, half-jokingly, "If we get this thing stopped before it gets to Nocona, it'll be a miracle."

When Henley arrived on the west side of Ringgold, he spotted a strip of green wheat near the railroad tracks that acted as a fireguard against sparks from the trains' metal wheels. Presumably, the shield would slow down the oncoming flames and allow his men to get the blaze under control. After three trucks arrived--two from Nocona and one from Montague--and parked on the east side of the tracks, two firemen decided to climb up on the tracks to get a better look at the fire. Looking out onto the horizon, they estimated that the flames were a mile away. They headed back to the truck. When they turned around again, the fire was right on top of them.

Forty feet tall. That was the size of the blaze that pushed over the railroad tracks like an ocean wave. When the fire hit the tracks, it cleared one hundred yards of bare ground. Henley had been expecting a bad fire, but this was unlike anything he had seen in his 33 years as a firefighter. The Montague truck burst through a barbed-wire fence to escape, and one of the...

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