Brownwood Fire Chief Eric Hicks provided an update on the multiple grass fires that began late Monday morning on U.S. Highway 377 South near the 3M plant.

As of 4:30 p.m., Hicks said, “It’s about 98 percent contained right now. We’re doing some mop up and hot spot clean up, and we’ll be here for quite a few more hours.”

The original call came in at 11:25 a.m. with an address of 2906 U.S. 377 South, near the Cadenhead Veterinary Clinic. However, the larger fires were directly across from 3M near the location of Premium Portable Buildings.

“We were pretty short-handed getting to the original fire because we had two separate fires going on,” Hicks said. “We called in different resources from different agencies. We had 27 units responding, and that does not count the city supplying a wheel loader, three dozers from the forest service and one helicopter, so we had well over 30 units.”

Firefighters from the Brownwood, Early, Bangs, Zephyr, Brookesmith, Winchell and Lake Bridge departments were all on scene.

Hicks said the cause of the fire – which forced the closure of U.S. 377 South for a few hours – is currently unknown, and may remain that way.

“It wasn’t just one area, that’s the problem, so to track this down, we may never know,” Hicks said. “There were multiple fires going when we got here, multiple different spots, and the wind was almost 20 mph. So it’s pretty hard to track down the origin and pinpoint that right now.”

Hicks added the fires scorched roughly 25 acres of land.

“It’s pretty rough terrain here but we did a spot with the helicopter and they’re estimating 25 acres,” Hicks said. “With the rough terrain it’s not an easy measurement.”

Some nearby homes and businesses were evacuated – some by local officials and others of their own free will.

“Originally it was headed toward Brookdale Lane,” Hicks said. “So what we did at the time was we, as a precautionary measure because at the time we

didn’t have a ton of resources, we did evacuate that road to make sure everyone was safe.”

By 3 p.m. residents were allowed to return to their homes.