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Here's the good news: The Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Texas Panhandle, the largest wildfire in state history, is now 100 percent contained.
And now for the gut punch: Xcel Energy, a major utility provider for the Panhandle, has acknowledged "its facilities appear to have been involved" and several lawsuits allege a single electrical pole that cracked sparked the massive conflagration that killed multiple people and thousands of cattle. An inspector had marked the pole as unsafe to climb earlier this year but apparently Xcel did nothing to fix it.
As if we didn't have enough reason to question the Public Utility Commission after the devastation of the Winter Storm Uri power failure, now we can see more clearly than ever the agency's failure to protect Texans from a decaying infrastructure that repeatedly sets our forests, prairies, farms and homes ablaze. Read our Sunday editorial on changes to state law and regulations that could help prevent future catastrophes and help our neighbors recover.
Over the last few days, we've published editorials, op-eds and letters on a huge range of subjects --- from SpaceX's latest rocket launch to get humans back to the moon to DNA testing on the remains of victims of convict leasing buried in Sugar Land. We've been kept on our toes by all the news and hope you'll weigh in by emailing viewpoints@houstonchronicle.com.
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