Texas' largest-ever wildfire that killed at least 2 was ignited by power company facilities, company admits

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Xcel Energy said Thursday that 'its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek Fire,' the largest-ever wildfire in Texas that's burned nearly 1.1 million acres.

Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based company that powers homes across the eight states in the West and Midwest, said Thursday that its facilities played a role in the massive wildfires in the Texas Panhandle that have left at least two people dead, burned more than a million acres of land and killed thousands of animals.'Xcel Energy has been cooperating with the investigations into the wildfires and has been conducting its own review,' the company said in a statement on Thursday.

The fires have been so extensive that all it took was a week for a handful of fires to burn nearly as much land as thousands of fires did over the course of four years in the state, from 2017 to 2021. Xcel said, however, that it doesn't believe its facilities ignited the nearby Windy Deuce Fire that started in Moore County. That fire has since grown to an estimated 142,206 acres, and is 81% contained as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the Forest Service.

 

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