SOUTHERN PLAINS (RFD NEWS) — The Ranger Road Fire is still burning in the Oklahoma Panhandle. As of Sunday evening, officials report that the wildfire burned 283,000 acres and is now 55 percent contained.
First responders have been working tirelessly over the last week and have made remarkable progress in containing the fire, which was just 20 percent contained on Friday. There is no word yet on what may have started the fire, but it has left a path of destruction in its wake.
At the Gardiner Angus Ranch, ranch owner/manager Greg Gardiner told RFD NEWS on Friday that the fire resulted in the loss of a few hundred cattle that could not reach safety.
“Somewhere between 250 to 300 cattle perished, or we’ve had to put them down; there’ll be some more that will not,” Gardiner said. “We’ve given them a chance to live, but they’ll tell us whether we need to destroy them or not. But when you put it in perspective, I know on either side of us, there’s been operations that have lost homes, they’ve lost whole herds. And so, as in agriculture, everything’s very specific to how each operation is run, and the totality and the scope of how each one’s hit is also up and down the line, different for each person. But it’s been pretty tough for this region.”
The Ranger Road Fire is not the only devastating wildfire that Gardiner Angus Ranch has dealt with in the last decade. In 2017, the Starbuck Fire also hit the ranch, and Gardiner said the damage was much, much worse.
“In 2017, in a couple of hours, we lost over 42,000 acres of grass in totality,” he said. “When it was all said and done, counting the pregnant cows, we lost over 1200 head of cattle. We lost 270 miles of infrastructure, of fences that had to be rebuilt. Because of how we rebuilt those fences this time — one of the emotional uplifts of this experience — those fences are standing when we went out the next morning to see. They were rebuilt with pipe and steel, so that was a very huge encouragement.”
Officials have not yet identified the cause of this fire, and it is still too early for any solid damage estimates. Because this is farm country, several relief efforts have been set up to help some of these operations get back on their feet.
