From today's Daily Oklahoman:

The southern halves of McCurtain and Choctaw counties in southeastern Oklahoma are in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor report released Thursday.

CRACK, CRACKS, CRACKED: The drought has had an effect on the lake at "No Name Creek" on Lake Eufaula, shown Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2006 in Eufaula, Okla. Lake Eufaula has dropped 6 feet below normal.
Many areas in Oklahoma continue in drought.

"When you bring that into play with fire behavior and fire activity it means you know we're going to have more intense fires. ... It's going to be a huge safety issue."
Andy James
Area Forester for Oklahoma Forestry Services
Also, the Interstate 35 corridor and the western Oklahoma Panhandle continue to be classified in a moderate drought.

"Just from what I've seen from driving around, from riding around, from walking around, from being on some fires, this is as dry as I've seen it in the five years that I've been down here," said Andy James, Area Forester for Oklahoma Forestry Services, whose office is in McCurtain County.

James is not fooled by the fact that the monitor at his office, which he's told has been there 60 years, was only 4 inches below average for precipitation last year. Again, he's traveled around the area a lot.

Plus, the Oklahoma Mesonet shows overall that the southeastern region, which averages about 50 inches a year, was 12.29 inches below normal in 2010.

"That's the thing, is how much variation there can be in a matter of yards," he said. "Then you go beyond that and start talking miles and counties and there's a lot of change."

What he's seen are ponds that are extremely low and creeks and rivers that are showing more bank and less water. And when conditions are that dry, he knows other problems can be found close.

"It just means that those fuels that are out there are going to be drier as well."

James said fuels are categorized from one-hour to thousand-hour fuels.

One-hour fuels are twigs, leaves and grasses. Thousand-hour fuels are things over three inches in diameter, like heavy downed logs.

In a normal year there might not be as many of the one hundred- and thousand-hour fuels available to burn. But this drought means those potential fuels are drier.

"When you bring that into play, with fire behavior and fire activity, it means you know we're going to have more intense fires," he said. "Suppression efforts are going to be more difficult and what I look at as a firefighting agency is safety. It's going to be a huge safety issue for not only our firefighters but also firefighters employed by the forest industry and also the U.S. Forest Service."

And again, although the situation is severe in the southeast, much of the state is still battling a moderate drought.

"In reality, the impacts are pretty much the same for most of the state, although in western Oklahoma you start seeing more agricultural impacts, such as stress to the winter wheat crop," said Gary McManus, of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. "We will probably start to see that severe drought designation in the U.S. Drought Monitor start to creep into central Oklahoma and the Panhandle if we don't see appreciable moisture soon."

Keith

Keith,

That's a great article.

My introduction to fire behavior came during the drought of 2005-2006 when we had only a little under 19" of rain in 2005 and our "winter fire season", which normally is mostly a spring season, began in October. We were in extreme to exceptional drought. How dry was it? Tree roots burned underground. Some wind-driven fires required 20 to 30 fire departments (our county has 13 VFDs at the time) including firefighters from Texas. It was horrendous. It continued into 2006. I cannot even explain the impact except to say that our tiny, 3 to 4 year-old VFD went from about 40 calls a year to over 240 in the worst year of that drought. We never slept.

This year, we have had sporadic "bursts" of grass fires that come in spurts. Now that all the vegetation is dry and dormant, it is happening a lot more often than it was in October or November. In fact, our VFD has been out with six others at a fire all afternoon and just cleared from that fire a few minutes ago. We are fairly wet here, but dry dormant vegetation doesn't retain moisture and having wet, muddy ground means the firefighting brush trucks often get stuck in the mud. That's happening at pretty much every fire in our county since it rained hard last week and the week before.

The folks in SE OK are in serious trouble and will have a very severe winter fire season. So will the counties just across the Red River from us. (They already are.) Been there before...not only in 2005-2006 but also the last half of 2007, 2008 and the first 4 months of 2009. I dread it.

Every morning, I check several fire sites, including the fire weather forecast from the NWS and the OKFire site available via the Mesonet before I come to GardenWeb. Our firefighters know I watch those fire weather websites like a hawk and I let them know when they're facing a High to Extreme Fire Weather Day, or let them know when our county's fire danger ramps up from Low or Moderate to High, Very High or Extreme.

The worst fires I've heard of lately have been in central OK where several recent fires have spread to and damaged/destroyed homes and other structures. It is going to be a long winter.

Rain won't help much, if any, at this point. In our county, the Keetch-Byram Drought Index is very low because we have had lots of rain since September. However, some counties have KBDIs in the 500s, and that is very serious stuff because the KBDI tells you how intense your fires are likely to become.

I don't know that 2011 will be as bad statewide as 2005-2006 was, but for the very dry portions of the state, including parts of central OK and southeastern OK, it has that potential. Rainfall can be deceiving because a lot depends on when the rain falls. We were dry and burning like crazy here in Love County in Jan-April of 2009. Then, on either April 29th or 30th, 12.89" of rain fell. Now, if you had looked at our rainfall total for 2009 at the end of April, you would have thought we had grear rainfall, but that was not really true---what we had was great rainfall on one day only.

I say it isn't that bad here yet and it isn't, but there are fires in our county virtually every day. We had an awfully bad one on Jan. 2nd and another pretty aggressive one today.

I wouldn't want to be a firefighter in SE OK this winter because they are going to be incredibly busy.

Dawn