I was out on the main drag in Stamford this afternoon when one of our fire department's pumper trucks came tearing down the street, headed north at a high rate of speed with sirens and lights going. My dad and I rode all the way to the northern edge of town and didn't find them or any smoke, so we didn't know what was going on. However, just heard on the 10 o'clock news that Haskell, 15 miles to the north, lost 4 businesses and had damage to several others due to a fire on the east side of their square. It took the Haskell, Stamford, Munday, and Throckmorton fire departments to put it out, but it's really a wonder that it didn't spread any more than it did. Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as the Cross Plains mess from earlier this week, but it's still going to take a bit of an economic toll on Haskell.

We've completely banned the sale and use of fireworks in Stamford, and the police and fire departments are supposed to be patrolling round-the-clock on 8 hour shifts all weekend to watch for fireworks and to monitor the hundreds of cotton modules stacked on the gin's yards around town. It's been a bad week for the Big Country, and we certainly don't need a cotton fire to top it off.

[This message has been edited by WestTxAg06 (edited 12/31/2005 10:29p).]

I hope folks will take a minute to say a prayer for all of our fire fighters out in this part of the country. I saw the story from Haskell tonight and you could tell all of those guys were ragged out.

And support your Volunteer Fire Departments!

Amen to that, squid. I saw our fire chief on KTXS and he looked like he'd been rode hard and put up wet.

WestTexasAg06 -- I make trips out into west Texas every three months or so and each time am curious about the number of acres of formerly rowcrop land now idle and in grass. I presume that land is in Conservation Reserve. In addition, fence lines of the former crop land are now grown up with weeds and tall grass ... unlike the tidyness one knew of cultivated or grazed land. Just traveling up 36 does not afford an accurate picture of the situation but the question comes to mind about whether the idle land program contributed to the fire threat in areas where it never existed before (that is, since the 1880s.) Anyone?

WestTx, any news on Knox City?

GigEm, I had not heard anything was amiss in Knox City, what have you heard?

I haven't heard of anything, but, you know it is in the vicinity.

Ahh, I thought you had heard of a fire up there and was wondering if I had knew anything about it.

Knox County has stayed in the clear, to the best of my knowledge. We had a pretty small fire outside of Stamford yesterday, but other than than the fire on the Haskell square, the northern Big Country has been lucky (knock on wood). Are you from Knox City?

FossilAg, in reference to your question, I think there is a good bit of truth to your assessment. Virtually all of this land in discussion is historically a native tallgrass prairie. Anyone with any knowledge of range management or history of the Old West is aware that the ranges of old were regularly ravaged by prairie fires, something that was vitally necessary to maintaining the health and proper vegetative makeup of the range. When all this land was broken out into farmland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the prairie fire began to be taken out of the equation, as it wasn't quite as necessary for maintenance of cultivated land. Nowadays, we look at wildfires as a freak occurrence, but like you said, there is a LOT of land that has been put back in native grasses through the CRP program, so when you've re-introduced a vegetative ecosystem that actually is helped by the presence of fire, that certainly makes fire more likely.

One other thing to consider--my dad was telling me when the Cross Plains fire broke out that he had been through a lot of that country recently, and it appeared that there were quite a few hay fields that were a lot taller than they ought to be at this time of year, like an early freeze caught them by surprise and they didn't get a final cutting of hay off of their land. As many acres are dedicated to hay around Cross Plains, Eastland, Gorman, and even up around Nocona and Ringgold, pastures of knee-high dried Bermudagrass combined with high winds and just a little bit of a spark is about as dangerous of a fire situation as there is in Texas.

[This message has been edited by WestTxAg06 (edited 1/3/2006 9:41a).]

no, my mom is.