This is a developing story and will be updated.
Update, 6:10 p.m., August 21: There are still questions and debate about where the fires started, park police told a Big Bend Sentinel photographer after initial reports said it was in Mexico.
As photos of flames and black billows of smoke in a dense mesquite thicket in Big Bend National Park — some 15 acres in total near Santa Elena Canyon — spread across social media early today, comments came rushing in, mostly questions on the cause.
Many commenters asserted that the black smoke seen could not be from burning brush and wondered if something like tires were burning. (Smoke experts, however, note that black smoke can result from low moisture vegetation.) Black smoke fueled suspicions that this could be related to construction work for Customs and Border Protection’s barrier project, although that construction work stopped Monday night after CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott paused work until he took in feedback from local officials in a Tuesday meeting and Wednesday tour of the park.
Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson raced to the scene and met with park officials who stressed that everything pointed to controlled burns — that obviously were not under control — on the Mexican side that skipped over the Rio Grande “two or three times” to ignite brush in the park. As of 4 p.m., Dodson said fires were still burning, the main site being about two or three miles before Sana Elena Canyon on Alamo Creek.
Park officials did not respond to a request for more information, but Terlingua Fire and EMS Chief Susan Martin told Big Bend Sentinel that the park service was monitoring the fire, likely with hopes that it would burn out on its own.
Park officials were not concerned at this point about containing the fire or whether it would burn out on its own, Dodson said.
The original photographs posted on a Big Bend Facebook group were by Stephen Parks. He said he talked to one person who said the fire’s origin was from a controlled burn on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, but then a park ranger told him it could have been across the border but didn’t appear to be a controlled burn.
Regardless of the origins of the fire, it sparked renewed interest today in getting Los Diablos firefighters — wildlife responders from Boquillas del Carmen, who have fought fires in the park for decades — reauthorized to cross the border to work in the United States again, after cuts and directives from the Trump administration took away that authorization.
