‘It Got Everything’: Oklahoma Residents Who Escaped Fires Brace for Losses

When Geraldine and Charles Wyrick heard shouts ring out through their community of a dozen trailer homes on Friday afternoon near Wellston, Okla., they knew the fires were near. It was time to get out.

As Geraldine rushed to her Chevy Tahoe, and Charles to his pickup truck, they noticed that a neighboring family of five did not have a working vehicle. They, too, scrambled into the truck, along with several dogs. In the chaos, there was no time to salvage any personal belongings.

On Saturday, talking at an emergency shelter in Stillwater, Okla., Mr. Wyrick, a 70-year old retired mechanic, said their home and entire neighborhood had likely been destroyed by the fire, alongside many of his prized possessions: a pontoon boat, three trailers and a tractor.

“It got everything,” his wife said.

From the Texas Panhandle to the suburbs of Oklahoma City, residents braced on Saturday to assess the damage after wildfires and smoke forced many to evacuate.

In Oklahoma, nearly 300 homes and other structures were destroyed, Gov. Kevin Stitt said at a news conference on Saturday. At least 50 of those structures were in Stillwater, home to about 50,000 people and Oklahoma State University.

Videos on social media showed houses consumed by flames. He described visiting neighborhoods where just a few homes had been spared, while the rest were little more than rubble.

Mark Goeller, director of Oklahoma Forestry Services, called the disaster “historic.” In 40 years with the agency, he said, he had “never seen anything as bad as what we saw yesterday.”

The fires were fueled by low humidity, dry vegetation and hurricane-force winds, creating dystopian landscapes of orange skies, downed utility lines and homes reduced to piles of sticks — an eerie echo of scenes from Los Angeles just two months ago.

“It was a perfect storm” said Mr. Stitt, who declared a state of emergency for 12 counties on Saturday.

He reported only a single death related to the fires, from a car accident; an additional four vehicle-related deaths had been reported in Texas on Friday.

Mr. Stitt said that his own family had lost a farmhouse, near the town of Luther, Okla.

The turbulent weather was part of a massive cross-country storm system that slammed into California earlier in the week, unleashing rain, snow and a tornado in Los Angeles. It then drove gusty winds and dry air across a parched landscape, fueling the dangerous fire conditions in states including Texas, Kansas and Missouri and unleashing several reported tornadoes across the Midwest and South that killed at least 14 people.

Firefighting crews were scrambling to keep up with blazes popping up across Oklahoma. They had been hampered on Friday by poor conditions that grounded aerial firefighting tools, including the “super scooper” planes that can drop thousands of gallons of water onto a blaze. More than 150 wildfires were burning in the early morning hours of Saturday in Oklahoma alone, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Officials on Saturday said it was unclear what started the fires, though Mr. Stitt said that downed power lines and controlled burns could have played a role in some. About 170,000 acres had burned in the state, he said.

Keith Merckx, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Forestry Services, said it may take days to assess the damage.

Two retired sisters, Sharon Riley and Dina Shellhammer, fled their Stillwater home Friday after watching the flames approach. On Saturday morning, they were not sure if the house still stood but were prepared for the worst, having heard a nearby neighborhood had been devastated.

After spending the night in an evacuation shelter, the sisters were running through the personal items they had left behind.

“There’s a lot of stuff that we realized later we should have gotten, like the insurance policy, or birth certificates,” said Ms. Shellhammer, 77.

Fire weather conditions are expected to improve on Sunday, especially in Oklahoma, with cooler temperatures and light winds in the forecast. An elevated fire weather threat is forecast across a portion of southwest Texas and within a slice of South Dakota and Nebraska.

More critical conditions return on Monday and Tuesday with strong winds predicted to develop across eastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle and the Oklahoma Panhandle. Central Oklahoma will get winds but they will likely not be as strong and widespread as they were on Friday.

In Stillwater, thousands of athletes had come to town for a weekend of distance running and bike races called the Mid South.

On Saturday, the events were canceled, but many visitors remained in town, packing into local restaurants for breakfast.

“There are still sirens going,” said Josh McCullock, creative director for the event. “It’s ironic, because it’s a beautiful day outside today. But when you get out to the outskirts of town, there’s a lot of devastation.”

Across Oklahoma and Texas, over 30,000 households were without power as of Saturday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us. There were no reports of residential damage in Texas, according to FEMA. A spokesman for the Texas A&M Forest Service in Amarillo said that the two most prominent fires in the Panhandle area were still not fully contained but that their progression had been stopped.

On Friday, Jodi Davis of Canyon, Texas, had accompanied her in-laws to a hotel lobby about 20 miles away in downtown Amarillo, because her father-in-law, who uses an oxygen tank, needed to charge his equipment.

Despite the inconvenience, Ms. Davis, 46, said she was grateful that utility companies had proactively turned off electricity in the region. Her family lost hundreds of cattle in a 2017 fire that was worsened, she said, by downed power lines.

She cried as she recalled the loss. “I am thankful that we turn off the electricity,” she said.

Lucinda Holt contributed reporting from Amarillo, Texas, Judson Jones from New York, and Amy Graff from San Francisco.