This picture, courtesy of the Greenville Professional Firefighters Association, taken February 27, 2024 shows a fire truck driving toward the Smokehouse Creek Fire near Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle ( Greenville Professional Firefighters Association)

Texas fires falsely linked to 'smart city' plans

Published on March 11, 2024 at 17:47
4 min read
By Rob Lever, AFP USA

Texas experienced the worst wildfires in its history in early 2024, but social media posts suggesting the blazes in the US state's northern panhandle were intentionally set to make way for a "smart city" are false. Officials say power lines -- not arson -- are to blame for the largest fires in the region, and the city of Amarillo's urban plan makes no mention of creating infrastructure built around smart technology.

"The Texas Fires Have Some Extremely Concerning 'Coincidences.' There Is A Smart City City Project Planned In Amarillo Texas," says a March 2, 2024 post on X from Wall Street Apes, an account that AFP has repeatedly fact-checked for spreading misinformation.

In a March 1 YouTube video also shared on Substack, blogger Peggy Hall says: "We know this is part of the 'burn back better plan'" -- an apparent reference to a legislative proposal from US President Joe Biden.

Screenshot of a YouTube video taken March 8, 2024

Similar claims have circulated on TikTok and Facebook, echoing past misinformation about fires supposedly linked to smart cities in the states of Washington and Hawaii.

Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the Texas fires, which killed at least two people and more than 3,000 farm animals in late February and early March.

Authorities have not linked the blazes to arson -- a spokesperson for the Texas A&M Forest Service told AFP on March 8 that law enforcement investigators concluded both the Smokehouse Creek and Windy Deuce fires were "ignited by power lines."

Electric utility Xcel Energy acknowledged in a March 7 statement that its facilities "appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire," which affected rural areas about 60 miles from Amarillo (archived here). Dry and windy conditions helped spread the flames (archived here).

Map of burnt areas in Texas as of February 28, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (AFP / Sophie STUBER, Sabrina BLANCHARD, Sylvie HUSSON)

Historically, about 90 percent of Texas wildfires have been caused by human activity -- including negligence or burning of debris, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service (archived here). However, just five percent are classed as arson.

Texas State University says on its website that more frequent and intense droughts, coupled with higher temperatures, have helped fuel wildfires in recent years (archived here). Other experts have concurred (archived here).

Amarillo plans

The draft plan for Amarillo, a city of about 200,000 in the Texas panhandle, is aimed at fostering economic development and quality-of-life improvements (archived here).

The document makes no mention of "smart" technology, and AFP found no such reference on the city's website.

While definitions for smart cities vary, the term generally applies to those that use a network of connected devices that communicate and exchange data between vehicles, home appliances and street sensors to make city services more efficient (archived here).

Amarillo officials signed an agreement with Dell in 2023 to create a digital assistant to help guide people to municipal services (archived here). One year prior, the city also inked a deal with AT&T to create a fiber internet network (archived here).

Rich Gagnon, Amarillo's assistant city manager, told residents during an October 2023 meeting that another plan for smart electric meters was not linked to any additional data collection (archived here). The smart meters program from Xcel allows the utility and customers to monitor usage remotely and respond to outages and stop-start requests, similar to devices in use elsewhere.

Gagnon also told residents that Amarillo had no plans to join a smart cities organization, according to the Amarillo Globe-News.

The municipality is not a member of the World Economic Forum's G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance on Technology Governance, an initiative aimed at "ensuring responsible and ethical use of smart city technologies" (archived here). Amarillo also does not appear in the International Institute for Management Development's 2023 index of smart cities worldwide (archived here).

Nonetheless, 163 people had signed a petition as of March 11 calling on Amarillo to halt supposed smart city implementation pending a review of privacy considerations.

AFP contacted Amarillo city officials for additional comment, but no response was forthcoming.

More of AFP's reporting on misinformation about the Texas wildfires is available here and here.

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