Watching the Sky and Waiting

Jan. 3, 2006 — -- Across Oklahoma and Texas, people are watching the skies and waiting for the afternoon winds -- expected to reach 60 mph -- that can whip a tiny spark into an inferno.

Sherry Suggs has a commanding view of eastern Oklahoma from her kitchen window. Every day she scans the horizon looking for signs of smoke. She keeps her horse trailer hitched to her pickup so she can load her beloved horses quickly if fire flares up nearby.

She wonders whether this is a new Dust Bowl developing in Oklahoma, and how long this drought will last.

"I became just almost obsessed with drought and the fire, and I think I could handle tornadoes and earthquakes a lot better than I could fires," she said. "I kinda muse about how the Dust Bowl era must have been just like this, and maybe we are going to be in a long-term pattern."

Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry is just as concerned about the long-term pattern showing the drought getting worse. Nearly a quarter-million acres have already burned in Oklahoma; 290 homes have gone up in flames.

Henry said the forecast gave no sign of relief.

"We've had high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds, and that causes, literally, a perfect storm," he said.

Travis Briscoe knows firsthand what the drought means: leaner times for his family.

"If the drought continues through the winter into the summer then we won't have any crops and we won't have any hay and we will have to sell the cows and look for jobs elsewhere. We will have hard times before it gets any better," he said.

Someone tossed a cigarette out of a car at the corner of Pine and Industrial in Guthrie, Okla., on Sunday afternoon, triggering a fire that flashed across a mile of homes in 30 minutes.

Adam Trojanowski saw the smoke across the woods and raced to help his sister-in-law save her home. When he returned home, he saw the fire had claimed his house.

"I could see a giant plume of black smoke, and I had a weird feeling that it was my house. When I pulled up, the roof was collapsing and it was already gone," he said.

"The winds move so fast, and the fires switch direction with the wind. One minute it could be going this way and the next minute it is coming right back at you."

Trojanowski lost everything. He had a fireproof safe -- for birth certificates, insurance papers and other important documents -- but when he found the safe in the ashes of his house, it crumbled in his hands like a Styrofoam cooler.

Johnny Dodd will be keeping an eye on the sky today. One of his two daughters lost her home in the fires, and the other daughter had the fire come dangerously close to her home.

"We need rain. We haven't had any for so long that when the winds come in like this, we have nodefense at all," he said.