There's a bad one in Okmulgee county and 412 has been closed near Manford and the firetrucks passed me on the way to 106th St N. I must have driven right by it.

Amy. there is a bad one effecting homes on 106th N between garnett and Mingo. Going north faster than the fireman can stop it.

edit- looks like the crews got it out.

Yeah, the firetrucks went past me on Garnett. I didn't see it because it must have been a little east of Garnett. There was another fire on a golfcourse on the other side of town, but I guess it was quickly put out.

Mike,

Thanks for your kind words.

Every firefighter in Oklahoma works hard and today I know that many of them have been working nonstop all day long and some of them seem likely to be working late into the night, if not all night long. The news coming out of various parts of OK today, and particularly northeastern and eastern OK, has been horrible. Not only have the fires been moving dangerously fast, driven by incredibly strong winds, but there's been so many of them and there's just not enough firefighters and firetrucks to get to every fire quickly. It is a horrific situation. I've already seen news stories about one firefighter being struck by a vehicle driven by a civilian and another one about fire overrunning a firetruck. Thankfully, the firefighters got out of that burning truck alive, but at least one of them was injured. The images of the huge smoke plumes, burned rangeland, vehicles backed up on closed roads (due to smoke or to protect the safety of the firefighters fighting fire right along the road), burning barns and homes, etc......it all is so heartbreaking.

When we have a Red Flag Fire Warning in particular, almost anything can spark a fire.....not just cigarettes tossed from windows, but arcing power lines, squirrels that get into transformers and get fried....falling to the ground and igniting it....chains or something else dragging from a vehicle, etc. We've had fires started by a spark from welding, overheating of chargers attached to various piecs of equipment, even sparks from tractors, balers, mowers, brush hogs, etc. Often your firefighters are running from one fire to another so quickly that they don't even have time to think about what might have started a specific fire. They just want to get it under control before it does further damage.

We have not had any fires today, and I am not complaining. We always were marginal for a Red Flag Fire Warning (although we did have one) because our relative humidity was going to stay fairly high (for a Red Flag day, though not high overall) and our wind was only going to gust into the mid- to upper-30s). I told Tim this morning "I think the Green Country is going to burn today because they're going to have the worst winds" and hated that this is what did happen. I feel relieved we didn't have fires today. We had a huge one last week (3800 acres burned on a day when the when was blowing around 11 mph...and it was as odd as it sounds, but this fire was making its own wind by late afternoon) and usually what happens after a huge fire is that it is very quiet for the next week or two. Why? My best guess is that the huge smoke plume scares everyone so much that they are extra careful for the next few days. I think we've only had 3 fires since that big one, so it seems everyone here has been extra careful lately.

I was like a cat on a hot tin roof today, pacing and watching the wind and listening to the scanner traffic. Finally, I relaxed as time passed and we weren't paged out, and then I went out to the garden and planted, watered, weeded and mulched. I kept thinking something might happen because our wind got really strong for a couple of hours this afternoon, but it stayed quiet. I hope our luck holds for a few more days. I heard either large limbs or entire trees crashing to the ground in both our woodland and our neighbor's woodland today. Likely they were trees that were dead or dying, but I hate hearing the cracking sound as trees come down in the wind.

My thoughts are with all the firefighters serving our state and their local communities tonight, and particularly with those who have been injured today. I hope they are able to get all these fires extinguished and that the loss of homes and property is kept to a minimum. Sometimes I think we forget that when, for example, a ranch burns, it isn't just the barn and the fences that burn, but sometimes the houses and the animals, the tractors, the bales of hay stored up for future use, other equipment, the gates, the feeders, the waterers.....and most of all....it is someone's livelihood and their dream all going up in flames. On a day like this, a lot of dreams are burning and that is such a horrible thing. I hope tomorrow will be better but fire danger still will be somewhat elevated.

Dawn

I'm sorry if I made anyone upset about the cigarette comment. All the fires I saw here started right by the street. Every exit of a highway it littered with cigarette butts. I agree there are 100's of other ways they get started but its hard to deny the ones that start right by the road. I have seen trailer chains sparking before but I have seen lots of people flicking cigarettes out the window. Look at all the new cars. None of them have ashtrays anymore. My 2011 truck came with a cig lighter but no ashtray.

Ok off my soapbox. Sorry.

We are even having major grass fires here in the Kansas City area which is fairly rare. One near the airport is still burning and has consumed about 1300 acres so far. The national news reported on it this morning. It was started by sparks from a bearing in a mower deck. Another south of KC was started by a tree falling on a power line. The wind is still howling this morning so we may have more flaring up today. I had to drive around a tree that fell across my driveway overnight.

A very good friend of mine lost around 40 round bales last night due to a suspected cigarette being thrown out. She smokes, but people tossing butts out the window of their vehicle isn't high on her list, right now! Since this is her and her kids livelihood, I can't say as I blame her.

Even as sad as the results of a wildfire can be, there is still good that can come out of the fire. Fire has always been natures way of returning nutrients back to the soil. Forestry departments and various land managers have learned the hard way, that completely eliminating fire isn't good.

If you look back about 15 years ago, we had an alarming number of massive forest fires throughout the western states. The departments and managers took a more proactive approach after that and went to great lengths to remove heavy undergrowth to reduce the possibility of wildfire. Controlled burns, timber harvesting and use of mastication proved to be valuable tools and have been helpful in reducing occurrence. Funding this process, while expensive has actually been cost saving in the long run. Fighting forest fires is astronomically expensive and that's not even considering if there is a loss of life. Then there is no price tag!

I'm not sure what the answer is here in our Crosstimbers zone, but the increase of human population has greatly contributed to some of our fires having the impact they do. For the last century, farmers, ranchers, and homeowners have gone to great length to reduce or eliminate the use of fire, resulting in massive stands of red cedar and heavy undergrowth in the form of brush and grasses.

Getting rid of the red cedar would help, those things are like molotov cocktails, very explosive. And they suck a lot of water out of the ground, that intensifies drought.

The person that finds economic value in red cedars, stands to make a lot of money. They could be had for nothing. If a product with value could be produced from them, it would be great for everyone.

I've heard they make mulch from them, but nothing else. ODWC uses them for fish habitat in aging lakes. They not much of value.

I've made a lot of money, exporting high quality logs, but most cedar we see around this part of the country won't make the grade.

Cedar oil is used in various products, mostly perfume, but is expensive to extract. At one time there was a plant being set up in western Oklahoma for that purpose, I'm not sure if it ever got off the ground.

There also seems to be interest in the mulching/composting arena. Hopefully equipment and transportation costs won't keep that from happening.

The low BTU potential in cedar also keeps it from being a major contender as a biomass fuel.

Even as volitile as cedar is, blackjack oak under the wrong conditions will explode, burn more readily and burn much hotter.

Every time someone mentions cigarette butts, my firefighter husband and son explain that cigarettes are now self-extinguishing and don't start fires nearly as often as people think. During fire season, which runs here most years from late winter of through late spring (whenever there is enough greening up of vegetation), almost anything can start a fire. On high wind days, it often is the arcing of power lines, or a spark from welding, a spark from a chain dragging, or hot rubber thrown from a 18-wheeler tire that is shredded as the truck drives down the road. While cigarettes get blamed, there are many, many other causes of fires. That was my point, and I am a non-smoker, so I'm certainly not defending the smokers who do toss butts out of windows.

Prescribed burning is a land management tool still used widely in our county on both range land and Wildlife Management Land, but it must be used properly, and too many landowners burn on days when the wind is too high or the RH is too low and lose control of their so-called "controlled burns". I hate cedar trees and far too many people give up the fight and just let them take over their range lands, which then diminishes the quality of the forage the land produces. We cut down cedar trees almost every year or they'd take over every square foot of land we have. It seems pointless, though, to cut down your own cedar trees for fire protection when you have neighbors on three sides of you who are letting their fields revert to heavy cedar forests. Luckily for our family, the area from which fires usually come in our direction is the roadway, and we don't have any cedars between the roadway and our house on our property because we clear them out. Of course, they are 5 feet south of our property line but we cannot do anything about that.