All shifts were scheduled to report normally to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, again on Friday, even as nearby wildfires of historic intensity continued to burn.
The plant’s website shows normal scheduling for the day, swing and graveyard shifts on Friday. Workers were recalled Wednesday after operations at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plant were briefly suspended Tuesday evening because of the nearby fires.
Several large wildfires are burning north of Amarillo, close to the NNSA’s nuclear weapons assembly-and-disassembly hub. The unextinguished fires include the Smokehouse Creek Fire, northeast of Amarillo, which as of Friday morning has burned more than 1 million acres, making it the largest wildfire in Texas history, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.
The fire was 5% contained on Friday morning, according to Texas A&M. The entire Texas panhandle is under a “high” or “very high” fire danger rating, according to the Wildland Fire Assessment System, an online database of federal, state and local land managers developed by the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, Mont., which is owned by the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.
Smokehouse Creek still has the potential to grow, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), a federal, interagency organization.
“Ground crews are moving along the fire with heavy machinery, but the rough terrain is causing slow progress,” the NWCG said in a statement late Wednesday. Winds are expected to shift southerly, which should push the blaze away from Pantex, NWCG said.
Another large fire called Windy Deuce, northwest of Pantex, has pushed southward toward Panhandle, Texas. That blaze has burned 142,000 acres and is 55% contained, Texas A&M reports.
Pantex personnel were evacuated on Tuesday evening out of an abundance of caution, a National Nuclear Security Administration spokesperson at agency headquarters in Washington told the Exchange Monitor on Wednesday.
“Operations at the Pantex Plant returned to normal on Wednesday, following non-essential personnel dismissals and shift cancellations the day before due to wildfires north of the plant site,” an NNSA spokesperson said on Friday. “There is no imminent wildfire threat to the plant at this time. Thanks to the responsive actions of all Pantexans and the NNSA Production Office in cooperation with the women and men of the Pantex Fire Department and our mutual aid partners from neighboring communities, the fire did not reach or breach the plant’s boundary.”
