A quarter mile from the canyon

Dumas, the seat of Moore County, is a city of about 14,500 people some 40 miles north of Amarillo. The land around it is mostly flat grassland, broken by gullies and canyons you don't see until you're on top of them. Grass fires here move fast, pushed by wind with little to stop them.

The Dumas Fire Department started in 1930 as a volunteer company. Today it runs 16 full-time firefighters and up to 30 volunteers out of a single station, with 12 apparatus, from engines and a ladder truck to grass trucks and water tankers. With mutual aid, its response area covers about 909 square miles.

In April 2011, a grassland fire broke out near Cactus, a small town just north of Dumas. Crews from both departments went out to fight it. A Dumas truck bogged down in sandy, rough ground. A Cactus crew came to help pull it free, and their truck got stuck too. Then the fire reached them.

The firefighters scattered. Searchers found the others, but not one of them, and they didn't know where his truck was either. As Chief Pray later heard the story, they worked their way down unfamiliar roads by guesswork, left at one fork, right at the next, and down into a canyon.

When they reached him, he had been burned over. Reports at the time said he may have tripped over a downed power line while trying to get out. He was taken to the burn center in Lubbock, where he was pronounced deceased 11 days later.

The lesson ingrained into the department that day was simple and painful: on a fast-moving fire, you have to know where every one of your people is.

After the fatality, the county and city installed a radio-based GPS system to track their units. It worked, for a while.

When Chief Pray arrived about a decade later, the system was failing. The radios were out of date, and parts were no longer being made for them. The laptops it ran on, built to last about four years, needed replacing. Getting everyone back to a working system would have cost $50,000 to $60,000.

For a rural department, that's a serious number. And it would have recreated the same aging approach.

Instead, Chief Pray went looking for something different. He asked several GPS tracking companies for test units and took them where his crews actually work.

"We went out in the middle of nowhere," he said, "because many times out there in those rural areas you can't even get a cell signal."

Only one system kept reporting from the canyons and hard-to-reach areas, places where, in some cases, even the department's radios couldn't reach. That was One Step GPS, whose trackers carry two cellular cards so one can take over when the other gets spotty. The department chose it for that reason, and at a tiny fraction of what restoring the old system would have cost.

The department still runs on that system today, with 16 tracked units. During his time as chief, Pray watched them on an iPad, from his truck or on his phone.

That matters most when a fire is big. In late February 2024, the Windy Deuce fire burned 144,045 acres across Moore County and beyond, part of the same outbreak that produced the Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history. As incident commander, Chief Pray could see every unit on his screen at once.

"It's given us a lot of help," he said. "Not only accountability of our folks, but knowing where they're going."

It helps crews find each other, too. On big grass fires, county road and bridge crews cut firebreaks with motor graders while fire trucks work the line. When a truck runs out of water, it has to leave to refill, and by the time it comes back, crews have often lost track of each other. Now they pull up the app and see who is where.

On a big fire, the fire department isn't working alone, and neither is its tracking. About 80 vehicles across Dumas and Moore County now run on the same system: 14 fire units, eight Moore County Road & Bridge trucks, six emergency management vehicles and two city public works trucks, along with the Moore County Sheriff's Office. Every agency on that account can see the others' vehicles on one screen. The Dumas Police Department runs 26 more vehicles on a separate account, bringing the total across the city and county to more than 100.

In 2011, crews searched canyon roads by guesswork for a man they couldn't see. Thirteen years later, the department's chief could watch every truck on one screen, and tell a driver in the dark to slow down before the ground fell away.