{
  "title": "Wildfire Risk in Hutchinson County, TX 2026 | Satelife",
  "description": "Hutchinson County wildfire risk analyzed with satellite data: the Smokehouse Creek Fire origin, Fritch burned twice in ten years, a 71% four-foot flame probability, and a real property report. Check your address.",
  "image": "https://satelife.ai/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/hutchinson-county-locator.png",
  "canonical": "https://satelife.ai/wildfire-risk/texas/hutchinson-county/",
  "content": "[Home](/)›[Wildfire Risk](/wildfire-risk/)›[Texas](/wildfire-risk/texas/)›Hutchinson County\n\nHutchinson County, Texas · 2026\n\n# Wildfire risk in Hutchinson County: where the _largest fire in Texas history_ started\n\nOn 26 February 2024 a broken utility pole a mile north of Stinnett started the Smokehouse Creek Fire, which burned **1,058,482 acres** — the largest wildfire Texas has ever recorded. The next day a second fire crossed Highway 136 into Fritch, a town that had already lost 225 homes in 2014. A Satelife report for a Fritch address returns 59 / 100 — High — and a **71.0% modelled probability of four-foot flames**.\n\n[Get your Hutchinson County wildfire risk PDF →](/#cta) [See the Fritch case study ↓](#case-study)\n\n![Satellite locator map headed “Wildfire risk — Hutchinson County, Texas”, with the county boundary outlined, Borger, Fritch and Sanford marked, and a flame icon at the Smokehouse Creek Fire origin north of Stinnett](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/hutchinson-county-locator.webp)\n\nHutchinson County on satellite imagery — the Canadian River breaks and Lake Meredith on the west, Borger and Fritch marked, and the flame icon at the Smokehouse Creek Fire origin north of Stinnett. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nLocal context\n\n## A million acres in _three days_\n\nThe Texas Panhandle burns differently from the rest of the state, and Hutchinson County is where that difference produced a record. After a warm, dry winter left the short- and mixed-grass prairie cured, a storm system crossed the southern High Plains on 26–27 February 2024 with extreme winds. A broken utility pole roughly one mile north of Stinnett dropped a line into that grass.\n\n-   **Smokehouse Creek Fire** — ignited 26 February 2024, Hutchinson County. Final size **1,058,482 acres**, two fatalities, roughly **$1 billion** in damage. It overtook the 2006 East Amarillo Complex (907,245 acres) to become the largest wildfire in Texas history, and was not fully contained until mid-March.\n-   **Windy Deuce Fire** — the same weather system, burning west of Lake Meredith. On 27 February it crossed Highway 136 into **Fritch**, destroying more than 90 homes. Evacuated neighbourhoods included Double Diamond, Arrowhead Addition, Alibates, McBride, Harbor Bay and Chisolm Trail.\n-   **Double Diamond Fire** — 11 May 2014, near Fritch. **2,202 acres**, and yet **225 residences and 143 outbuildings destroyed**: a cold front swung the wind to the north at 21 mph gusting 45, and the fire travelled more than four and a half miles in a little over five hours while about 2,100 people evacuated.\n\nNote the relationship between those two Fritch numbers. The 2014 fire burned **2,202 acres** and destroyed 225 homes. The 2024 fire that reached the same town was part of a complex of over a million acres. Acreage is not what determines structure loss here — wind direction and where the town sits relative to the grass are.\n\n![Heavy smoke from the Smokehouse Creek Fire blowing across a road in the Texas Panhandle on the afternoon of 27 February 2024](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/smokehouse-creek-smoke.webp)\n\nSmoke crossing a road on the Smokehouse Creek Fire, afternoon of 27 February 2024. Source: InciWeb incident photo gallery, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smoke_from_the_Smokehouse_Creek_Fire_\\(2024-02-27\\).jpg) (public domain).\n\n![MODIS satellite image showing the vast dark burn scar left across the Texas Panhandle by the Smokehouse Creek Fire in early March 2024](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/smokehouse-creek-burn-scar.webp)\n\nThe burn scar on 2 March 2024 — over a million acres of Panhandle prairie. Source: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smokehouse_Creek_Fire_Scalds_Texas_\\(MODIS_2024-03-02\\).jpg) (public domain).\n\nSources: Texas A&M Forest Service · InciWeb incident updates · NIFC / WFIGS fire perimeters (via the Satelife fire-history layer) · USDA NASS 2024 Texas Wildfires assessment.\n\nTerrain & fuel\n\n## Grass is a fuel that is _always nearly ready_\n\nFritch is a small town of about 373 hectares sitting on the breaks above Lake Meredith, at the edge of the Canadian River canyon system, surrounded by Western Great Plains short-grass and mixed-grass prairie. Satelife's community analysis grids the town into **159 zones** and scores the area vegetation layer at **66 / 100** — the highest of the three Texas counties we publish, and more than three times the corresponding figure for the regrown pine at Tahitian Village in Bastrop County.\n\n![Satellite view of the Fritch town boundary in Hutchinson County, Texas, showing the small street grid surrounded on every side by open prairie and the broken canyon terrain above Lake Meredith](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/fritch-boundary.webp)\n\nFritch on current satellite imagery — a compact street grid with open prairie against its boundary on every side and the Canadian River breaks to the north and west. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nTwo things follow from a grass fuel bed. The first is timing: grass cures within days of a dry, windy spell rather than over a summer, so the Panhandle's destructive season is **late winter and early spring** — both the 2014 and 2024 Fritch fires were February and May events, not August ones. The second is speed. The terrain layer for the Lakeview Drive parcel reads **65 / 100** on the relief of the breaks, and thirty-year ERA5 fire-weather climatology reads **70 / 100** — the hottest and driest of our three Texas case studies.\n\nWhat makes the county's profile unusual is that the hazard layer agrees. Across most of Texas, the U.S. Forest Service Wildfire Risk to Communities backfill Satelife uses in place of the hazard-zone map Texas does not publish pulls a composite _down_. In Fritch it reads **66 / 100 — High**.\n\nEvacuation\n\n## One station, _1.2 minutes_, no second option\n\nFritch has the fastest modelled fire-service response of any community we have analyzed, in either state — and the thinnest. The community analysis finds one OSM-mapped station inside the boundary, and everything is close to it:\n\n1.2 minmodelled drive-time from the Fritch Fire Department\n\n1OSM-mapped fire station serving the analyzed area\n\n38independent road exits from the analyzed Fritch area\n\n0.3–3.0 minmodelled drive-time to the town's top hotspot zones\n\nThirty-eight exits across 159 analysis zones is **4.2 zones per exit** — the best egress ratio of our three Texas counties, and a straightforward consequence of a grid town on flat ground rather than a subdivision on a bluff. The modelled network still narrows to a **24.5-metre** single point somewhere in that grid, but the dominant constraint here is not geometry.\n\nIt is capacity. A 1.2-minute response is decisive against one structure fire and irrelevant against a wind-driven front arriving on a mile-wide flank, which is what February 2024 delivered. What actually scaled that day was mutual aid from Borger, Stinnett, Sanford and further out, plus state resources — and none of that is visible to a parcel-level access model. Read the 1.2 minutes as _how fast the first engine arrives_, not _how much engine there is_.\n\nFire behaviour\n\n## A _71%_ chance of flames beyond hand-crew control\n\nThe clearest single number on this page comes from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities conditional flame-length raster, which models how intense flames reaching a parcel would be if it burns. For the Lakeview Drive property in Fritch:\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for Lakeview Drive, Fritch: USFS WRC burn probability and flame length page scoring 66 out of 100 High risk, with a conditional flame-length table showing a 71.0% probability of flames over 4 ft and 3.0% over 8 ft](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/report-wrc.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — USFS WRC burn probability & flame length, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, Lakeview Drive, Fritch TX 79036 (July 2026). Thresholds and operational language are NWCG standard.\n\nFour feet is the operational threshold at which direct attack by hand crews stops working and the fight becomes an equipment-and-air-support problem; eight feet is where control efforts are generally ineffective. **71.0%** and **3.0%** respectively is a fuel bed telling you that if fire reaches this parcel, it will most likely arrive in a form people with tools cannot stop.\n\nFor scale: the same model returns 28.1% at our Tahitian Village parcel in [Bastrop County](/wildfire-risk/texas/bastrop-county/), 28.1% at Alta Sierra in [Nevada County, California](/wildfire-risk/california/nevada-county/) — a county the California insurance regulator ranks third in the state for high-risk exposure — and 0.0% at our Steiner Ranch parcel in [Travis County](/wildfire-risk/texas/travis-county/). Fritch is in a different band from all of them.\n\nGrassland risk gets dismissed because grass fires are small in duration and thin in flame depth. The federal model does not dismiss it: on this parcel it puts flames beyond hand-crew control at seven chances in ten.\n\nCase study\n\n## One address on Lakeview Drive, _scored today_\n\nWe ran a full Satelife wildfire-risk report for a property on **Lakeview Drive, Fritch TX 79036** — in the town that lost 225 homes in 2014 and more than 90 in 2024. The composite: **59 / 100 — High tier**, at 0.82 confidence, from eight independently-scored and weighted layers. It is the highest composite we have published for a Texas address.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for Lakeview Drive, Fritch: per-layer contributions showing Fire history 90, Fire Weather 70, Vision (imagery) 69, Hazard 66, Terrain 65, Vegetation/fuel 32, Road access 10 and Fire-spread sim 6, each with its weight](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/report-per-layer.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Per-layer contributions, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, Lakeview Drive, Fritch TX 79036 (July 2026). Composite 59/100, High tier, scored under the United States (usa\\_generic) adapter.\n\nWhat drives the score — and this is the rare case where nearly everything points the same way:\n\n-   **Fire history: 90/100, weight 20%.** This run's sample lists ten mapped perimeters, all ten inside the last twenty years — enough to max the count term. The national services actually hold at least sixteen within the same 5 km radius, so ten is a floor, not the total.\n-   **Hazard: 66/100, weight 30%.** Backfilled from the USFS WRC model. At most Texas addresses this backfill suppresses the composite; here it is the second-largest contributor.\n-   **Fire weather: 70/100.** Thirty-year ERA5 climatology of the Canadian Fire Weather Index — the highest of our Texas case studies.\n-   **Terrain: 65/100.** The broken ground of the Canadian River breaks above Lake Meredith.\n-   **AI vision analysis: 69/100.** The model reads the parcel's own imagery and finds a low-density setting with mostly managed groundcover, but trees and shrubs present near the structure and along the frontage.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report: fire history layer for the Fritch parcel scoring 90 out of 100, listing ten mapped perimeters including Double Diamond 2014 at 2,202 acres and Harbor Bay 2018 at 1,291 acres](/images/wildfire-risk/hutchinson-county/report-fire-history.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Fire history, same report. Two separate limits shaped this table. The sample was capped at ten records, so it shows ten of the sixteen-plus perimeters the services hold within the radius; and it ends in 2019 because the _certified_ national history has nothing more recent here — the 2024 Windy Deuce and Smokehouse Creek perimeters live in the operational feed, which did not answer on this run. The 2024 figures elsewhere on this page come from Texas A&M Forest Service and InciWeb instead. The record cap has since been removed and a failed operational feed is now disclosed on the report itself rather than passing silently.\n\nThe 2014 Double Diamond Fire is in the table at 2,202 acres. The 2024 fires that burned into the same town are not in it at all. A fire-history layer is a record of what has been mapped and certified — never treat an absence in it as an absence on the ground.\n\nThe mitigation plan the report generates for this parcel is correspondingly blunt, and it leads with the structure rather than the landscape: establish a Zone 0 ember-resistant perimeter in the first five feet, harden roof and vents against ember intrusion, then maintain thirty feet of lean, clean and green space. In a grass-driven event the ember cast arrives before the flaming front, and vents are how a house that the fire never touched still burns down.\n\nInsurance & real estate\n\n## What a _second_ total loss does to coverage\n\nHutchinson County is a small market — roughly 20,000 people across Borger, Fritch, Stinnett and Sanford — and small markets absorb repeat catastrophe badly. Agricultural and property losses across the Panhandle from the February 2024 fires ran past **$123 million**, on top of the roughly $1 billion in total damage attributed to Smokehouse Creek. For a homeowner in Fritch, the underwriting question after 2024 is not whether the area burns; it is whether this particular parcel can be shown to be defensible.\n\nTexas offers no statutory help with that argument. There is no fire-hazard-severity zone map to appeal to, no mitigation-discount mandate comparable to California's SB 1060, and the Texas Property Code §5.008 Seller's Disclosure Notice contains no wildfire-designation item. The backstop is the **Texas FAIR Plan Association**, the residential insurer of last resort administered under the Texas Department of Insurance, which you become eligible for only after two carriers actively writing in Texas have declined you — narrower and more expensive coverage, reached by failing the market rather than by choosing it.\n\nThat makes dated, parcel-level evidence the practical currency: what the fuel around the structure looks like, what the vents and roof are, what was cleared and when. See [Texas wildfire risk](/wildfire-risk/texas/) for how the state-level picture fits together.\n\nSources: Texas Department of Insurance · Texas FAIR Plan Association · Texas A&M AgriLife / Texas A&M Forest Service Panhandle loss estimates.\n\nRisk reduction\n\n## What Hutchinson County homeowners _can actually do_\n\nIn a grass regime the defensible-space priority order inverts relative to forest. Zone 0 — the first five feet against the wall, kept free of combustibles, mulch, stored fuel and vegetation — does more work than any amount of clearing at thirty metres, because the failure mode is ember ignition of the structure itself rather than crown fire arriving through canopy. Roof and vent hardening comes next. Fritch has run community prevention programming with the Red Cross, Team Rubicon and the Fritch Volunteer Fire Department since 2024, and Hutchinson County has an active partnership with Texas A&M Forest Service on prevention work.\n\nSet against our other Texas pages, the county's profile is distinctive on almost every axis. Fritch: composite **59 / 100 High**, four-foot flame probability **71.0%**, fire weather 70, one station at 1.2 minutes, 4.2 zones per exit. [Tahitian Village, Bastrop County](/wildfire-risk/texas/bastrop-county/): 46 / 100 Moderate, 28.1%, fire weather 59, four stations, 14.9 zones per exit and a single approach route. [Steiner Ranch, Travis County](/wildfire-risk/texas/travis-county/): 27 / 100 Moderate, 0.0%, 5.6 zones per exit. Bastrop's constraint is the road; Travis's is the interface; Hutchinson's is the fuel itself, and the fuel is the hardest of the three to change.\n\nCoverage\n\n## ZIP codes we cover in Hutchinson County\n\nSatelife runs address-level wildfire reports across every ZIP code in Hutchinson County. The ZIPs below are the Panhandle grassland and Wildland-Urban Interface communities we are asked about most. One caveat that is the whole point of what we do: the risk score is computed for **your parcel**, not the ZIP, so two homes on the same street can land in different tiers. Find your area, then [run your address](/#cta).\n\nZIP code\n\nCommunity\n\nWhy it is on the map\n\n79036\n\nFritch\n\nLake Meredith WUI; Lakeview Drive case study, burned 2014 and 2024\n\n79007\n\nBorger\n\nCounty’s largest city; refinery corridor inside continuous grassland\n\n79083\n\nStinnett\n\nCounty seat; the Smokehouse Creek Fire started a mile north\n\n79078\n\nSanford\n\nCanadian River breaks above Lake Meredith\n\n79008\n\nBorger (PO boxes)\n\nSame delivery area as 79007\n\nZIP areas per USPS; Hutchinson County has a small ZIP set and all of it is listed. Texas publishes no statewide fire hazard severity zone map; Wildland-Urban Interface framing per Texas A&M Forest Service.\n\nWhere to go next\n\n## Hutchinson County wildfire risk _in context_\n\n[Texas wildfire risk The statewide picture: no hazard map, three fire regimes, 2026 season](/wildfire-risk/texas/) [Bastrop County wildfire risk Lost Pines, the 2011 Complex Fire, Tahitian Village case study](/wildfire-risk/texas/bastrop-county/) [Travis County wildfire risk Austin’s juniper WUI, Steiner Ranch, Lakeway case study](/wildfire-risk/texas/travis-county/) [Butte County, California The other town that burned twice — Paradise case study](/wildfire-risk/california/butte-county/) [Create a wildfire evacuation plan Zones, egress routes, refuge areas](/wildfire-evacuation-plan/) [How Satelife calculates wildfire risk Data sources, score composition, honest limits](/wildfire-risk/methodology/) [Run a wildfire risk report PDF + score + mitigation plan](/#cta)\n\nFAQ\n\n## Frequently asked questions about _Hutchinson County wildfire risk_\n\nIs Hutchinson County the highest wildfire risk county in Texas?\n\nIt is where the largest wildfire in Texas history started. The Smokehouse Creek Fire ignited on 26 February 2024 about a mile north of Stinnett, in Hutchinson County, and burned 1,058,482 acres. A Satelife property report in Fritch returns 59 / 100 in the High tier, with the USFS model putting the probability of flame lengths over four feet at 71.0% — the highest figure we have published on any county page, in Texas or California.\n\nHow many times has Fritch burned?\n\nTwice in ten years. The Double Diamond Fire of 11 May 2014 destroyed 225 residences and 143 outbuildings and moved more than four and a half miles in about five hours. On 27 February 2024 the Windy Deuce Fire jumped Highway 136 into the town and destroyed more than 90 homes; the neighbourhoods evacuated included Double Diamond — the same subdivision, ten years later, while the Smokehouse Creek Fire burned to the east.\n\nWhy does grassland burn worse than forest here?\n\nBecause grass carries fire faster and needs almost nothing to be ready. Short and mixed-grass prairie cures within days of a dry, windy spell, so the Panhandle fire season peaks in late winter and early spring — February and March — not late summer. The Satelife community analysis of Fritch scores the area vegetation layer at 66 / 100, the highest of our three Texas counties, and the fire-history layer at 90 / 100.\n\nWhat is the fire-station coverage in Fritch?\n\nOne mapped station, and it is close. The community analysis finds a single OSM-mapped fire station — the Fritch Fire Department — with a modelled 1.2-minute drive-time and hotspot-zone drive-times of 0.3 to 3.0 minutes. That is excellent reach and zero redundancy: a 1,000,000-acre fire front does not queue. Mutual aid from Borger, Stinnett and Sanford is what actually scales, and it is not something a parcel-level model can score.\n\nDoes Texas have a fire hazard severity zone map for the Panhandle?\n\nNo. Texas publishes no statewide fire-hazard-severity zoning equivalent to California’s CAL FIRE FHSZ, so Satelife’s hazard layer is backfilled from the U.S. Forest Service Wildfire Risk to Communities model. For the Fritch parcel that backfilled layer reads 66 / 100 — High — which is unusual: in most Texas locations the backfill pulls the composite down, and here it does not.\n\nScores and evacuation figures on this page are drawn from Satelife wildfire-risk reports generated on 25 July 2026 under the United States (usa\\_generic) adapter: a property report for Lakeview Drive, Fritch TX 79036, and a community analysis of the Fritch city boundary. Texas publishes no statewide fire-hazard-severity map, so the hazard layer is backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model. The fire-history layer reads mapped NIFC/WFIGS perimeters; the run quoted here returned a sample capped at ten records ending in 2019, which understates both the perimeter count and the recency for this parcel, so the 2024 Smokehouse Creek and Windy Deuce figures on this page come from Texas A&M Forest Service and InciWeb. Drive-times are modelled on OSM-mapped stations and the current road graph and do not represent mutual-aid capacity. Satelife reports are informational decision support — not a substitute for official evacuation orders, state or federal hazard determinations, or an insurer's underwriting judgement.\n\n## What does _your parcel_ look like, layer by layer?\n\nIf you own or are buying in Hutchinson County — Fritch, Borger, Stinnett or Sanford — get the address-level answer: PDF, per-layer score, and a prioritized mitigation plan.\n\n[Start with your address →](/#cta)\n\n[![PRR](/images/prr.png)](/ficha-de-website-voucher-satelife.pdf)\n\n© 2024–2026 Satelife, Lda. All rights reserved.\n\nSatelife reports are for informational purposes only and do not constitute insurance, financial, or legal advice."
}