Houston firefighter returns home after helping battle largest wildfire in Texas history

HOUSTON — Several crews are back home after they battled the historic and deadly wildfires in the Texas panhadnle.

The Smokehouse Creek Fire in Hutchinson County burned more than one million acres for nearly three weeks. Texas A&M Forest Service announced it was 100% over the weekend. It is now the the largest wildfire in Texas history.

The fire killed at least two people and destroyed hundreds of structures as it wiped out livestock and scorched ranch land.

Beau Moreno, a captain with the Houston Fire Department, was among the fire crews from across Texas who flooded in to help.

“We found a lot of houses that were still burning,” Moreno said, “we saw just miles and miles of black areas had been burned, just trees just completely stripped down to the to the soil.”

Moreno was deployed with six others just a few days after the fire started. He returned to Houston on Sunday.

He said at one point they sifted through the ashes to help families look for their belongings.

“I’m like, man, that’s that’s your house. Your whole life is gone. You know, you have nothing left. But, you know, they said, hey, we’re fortunate, we’re still alive,” Moreno said.

Firefighters witnessed the devastation as they worked from sun up to sun down.

“They lived there over 30 years and never seen anything like this and lost completely everything,” Moreno said of a family he met.

As he returned home, he said what they witnessed is finally beginning to settle in.

“It’s almost unimaginable seeing that many houses burned that much acres burned,” Moreno said.

He said this was the largest firefighter deployment for wildfires in Texas since 2011, which was during the Bastrop fires near Austin.

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