Texas wildfires force brief shutdown of US nuclear weapons facility
A Houston firefighter walks through a wall of smoke while keeping tabs on a prescribed burn at the the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024 in Houston.
CANADIAN, Texas - A series of wildfires across the Texas Panhandle prompted evacuations, cut off power to thousands, and forced at least the temporary shutdown of a nuclear weapons facility, officials said.
On Tuesday night, Pantex – the main facility that assembles and disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal – shut down its operations but said it would reopen for normal operations on Wednesday.
"We have evacuated our personnel, non-essential personnel from the site, just in an abundance of caution," Laef Pendergraft, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at Pantex, said during a news conference. "But we do have a well-equipped fire department that has trained for these scenarios, that is on-site and watching and ready should any kind of real emergency arise on the plant site."
FILE - Tumbleweeds collect on the barbed wire fence that surrounds the U.S. Department of Energy's Pantex plant on May 21, 2002. (Photo by Smiley N. Pool/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Pantex posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, early Wednesday that the plant "is open for normal day shift operations" and that all personnel were to report for duty according to their assigned schedule.
Pantex is located about 17 miles northeast of Amarillo and some 320 miles northwest of Dallas. Since 1975, it has been the U.S. main assembly and disassembly site for its atomic bombs. It assembled the last new bomb in 1991 while disassembling thousands.
RELATED: North Texas fire crews battle wildfires in Texas Panhandle
Wildfires spread through rural Texas Panhandle
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties as the largest blaze, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, burned nearly 400 square miles, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. That's more than twice its size since the fire sparked Monday.
Authorities have not said what might have caused the blaze, which tore through sparsely populated counties surrounded by rolling plains.
This story was reported from Los Angeles. The Associated Press and Kelly Hayes contributed.