‘Pretty Sickening’: Texas Ranchers Face Crippling Losses

Justin Homan kept driving across his vast Texas ranch, but he only found the same bleak scenes: blackened grassland, charred cow carcasses and smoldering debris turned almost entirely to ash.

Then he arrived at the place he thinks of as a hidden oasis: a pond and small lake that, in better times, bask in the emerald glow of looping, leafy trees and tall grass. As he stepped out of the cab of his truck and onto the singed grass, his mutter was nearly drowned out by the wind.

“Pretty sickening.”

On a normal Friday afternoon, he might check on his herd and then come here with an old friend, pour a glass of whiskey and cast a line into the pond. Now, he was facing the realization that almost all of his family’s century-old ranch, a swath of land nearly the size of Manhattan, had been burned this week when the largest fire in state history tore through the Texas Panhandle.