The way the Sequoyah County Commissioners and Sequoyah County Emergency Management (SCEM) views the current drought conditions, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
That’s why a burn ban has been enacted through Monday.
The commissioners, with counsel from SCEM and relying on drought models from the National Weather Service, will review the current burn ban at their Monday meeting to determine if the ban should be extended.
Sequoyah County joins other northeastern Oklahoma counties that had previously implemented burn bans. Those counties include Adair, Cherokee, Craig, Delaware, Mayes, Ottawa, Rogers and Washington counties. Several counties in northwestern Arkansas have also been under a burn ban for several weeks.
LeFlore County Commissioners considered at their Oct. 21 meeting implementing a burn ban, but the county did not meet the criteria for such restrictions.
Several southeastern Oklahoma counties are currently under a burn ban — Atoka, Bryan, Choctaw, Coal, McCurtain and Pushmataha counties.
According to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture and Forestry, any person convicted of a violation of a county-issued burn ban shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a fine of not more than $500, imprisonment for up to one year or both.
Under a burn ban, it is against the law for any person to set fire to any forest, grass, range, crop or other wildlands. Campfires, burning trash and bonfires are also prohibited.
“This morning, the National Weather Service has elevated the fire risk to near critical,” SCEM director Brad Taylor told the commissioners. “With the moderate drought that Sequoyah County is in, and the winds and no rain in the foreseeable forecast, I called county fire departments for a consensus on a burn ban to try to mitigate and prevent something from happening. With the current conditions, if there was to be a fire break out — with the wind and low humidity — a grass fire could rapidly become something so much bigger.
“Ninety-nine percent of all wildfires are started by people, so if we can pull that back a little bit, hopefully people will listen. We’re just hoping to prevent some potential disaster.”
Taylor explained that the burn ban prohibits all open fires, including burn barrels, burning brush and campfires.
He said long-range forecasts project Oct. 30 to be the area’s next best chance for rain.
“It’s just safety measures to try to prevent someone from losing their home, add that extra precaution to not have something get out of control,” Taylor said.
“There was that little bit of rain we had back in September that kept us from meeting the criteria earlier. But with the National Weather Service pushing out the near critical for rapid fire, a good light wind and something as small as a cigarette could cause grass to ignite and carry on. Talking with fire chiefs all over the county, they were more than willing to say ‘yes, we need that’. If we can come together as a county to try to prevent a fire and prevent more loss, I think that’s more of a step we should just take. Prevention is the main thing.
“We’re in a moderate drought and the southern winds are coming up. And the cold front that came in, that dropped the humidity down real low. It’s just dry, more dry than normal,” Taylor said.
It has been 29 days since the county received more than 0.10” of rain, and Sallisaw is 5.6” below normal. In the past 100 days, Sallisaw has recording more than 0.10” of rain on 11 occasions. The most recent rainfalls were 0.89” on September 24 and 0.74” on September 1. There were only three instances when Sallisaw received more than an inch of rain in August — 2.55” on August 11, 1.61” on August 12 and 3.69” on August 16.
No burn bans were issued for Sequoyah County during 2023, but there were multiple burn bans in 2022, with the latest coming Oct. 19-31.
