Oklahoma fire heads toward Kansas from same county that led to state’s largest blaze

A fire in northern Oklahoma along the Kansas border was moving north on Saturday, burning buildings, a high school football field and causing towns to be evacuated, officials said.

The National Weather Service in Amarillo, Texas, said the fire was verified in Beaver County, Oklahoma, at 10:44 a.m. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported at 2:46 p.m. that Beaver, Oklahoma, was being evacuated and that structures and the high school football field had been burned. The Highway Patrol posts on Facebook showed buildings burned or burning. At 4:05 p.m., the Meade County Emergency Management, in Kansas, said Forgan, Oklahoma, “has just been ordered to evacuate.”

A fire that started in Beaver County, Oklahoma, in 2017 ended up crossing into Kansas and burned several hundred thousand acres in Kansas. The fire, known as the Starbuck Fire, was the largest in Kansas history and burned in Meade, Clark and Comanche counties.

Forgan is less than 10 miles north of Beaver and it is about the same distance into Meade County. Forgan and Beaver have combined populations of around 2,000 people.

Fire officials from Kansas and Texas were helping fight the flames as well, the Highway Patrol reported.

Winds in the Beaver County area at around 5:30 p.m. were reported to be roughly 28 mph with gusts of 33 mph, according to the National Weather Service.

During the week of March 5-11 in 2017, the Starbuck Fire started in Beaver County from a downed power line and moved northeast into Kansas. It burned roughly 509,000 acres and did more than $44 million in damage, according to The Hutchinson News.