All shifts were scheduled to report normally to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, on Thursday, despite several wildfires still raging north of the site.
The plant’s website shows normal scheduling for the day, swing and graveyard shifts on Thursday. Workers were recalled Wednesday after operations at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plant were suspended Tuesday evening because of the nearby fires.
Several large wildfires are burning north of Amarillo, outside of which the NNSA’s nuclear weapons assembly-and-disassembly hub is located. They include the Smokehouse Creek Fire, northeast of Amarillo, which as of Thursday morning has burned 850,000 acres, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.
The fire was 3% contained on Thursday at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time, 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. Smokehouse Creek still has the potential to grow, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG).
“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 30% 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. Around 10:30 p.m. Central time on Tuesday, Pantex officials decided normal day shift operations would resume on Wednesday “because the fire threat at that time was stable,” the spokesperson said.
