Fires Reflect Wider Disaster: Drought

Owners of a feed store in Johnson City called Texas agriculture officials last month to report that they had so little hay in stock that they were cutting off sales to everyone but their oldest customers.

In Oklahoma, summer crops that have long propped up a meager economy -- cotton, corn and peanuts -- will likely be depleted next year.

And across the region, ranchers are selling cattle as fast as they can, not because the price is right, but because there isn’t enough grass growing on the prairie to feed their herds.

As bad as the wildfires were this week in Texas and Oklahoma, officials said Thursday that the blazes were a symptom of a broader problem: debilitating drought conditions that have plagued large stretches of the two states since the late 1990s.

The drought pattern has not been consistent.

In 2004, for instance, Texas had an extremely wet year, with more than 3 feet of rain and damaging floods. Still, officials say they are rediscovering a weather aphorism that had been forgotten, mercifully, since the Dust Bowl days of the ‘30s and an infamous regional drought in the ‘50s.

“It’s hard to break a drought,” said Allen Spelce, spokesman for the Texas Department of Agriculture. “It takes a number of wet years. We need rain. And we need it now.”

That, forecasters say, is unlikely anytime soon; the drought condition is only expected to worsen in 2006. If that forecast holds up, officials say, the drought will have become, effectively, a single, eight-year-long weather event.

It began in West Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, but spread rapidly this year as a dry spell seized much of the region. Oklahoma received an average of 24 inches of rain this year, a full foot below normal levels. And parts of Texas received 20 fewer inches of rain this year than they did in 2004. Some lakes in the region are more than 12 feet below normal depth.

“I’m not suggesting that we are back in the ‘30s or the ‘50s,” said John Nichols, interim head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M; University in College Station. “But each year, you lose a little bit more. It is, gradually, a greater and greater problem.”

The drought spun into disaster this week when 40-mph winds fed more than 100 separate wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma.

More than 20,000 acres have burned. More than 100 buildings have been destroyed, most of them rural homes and half of them in tiny Cross Plains, a ranching community in Central Texas, near Abilene, that was evacuated.

At least five people have been killed, four in Texas and one in Yeager, Okla., southeast of Oklahoma City.

Officials say there is little rain in the immediate forecast, and they are bracing for more blazes. At least five fires continued to burn Thursday in the two states.

Oklahoma Secretary of Agriculture Terry Peach said this week’s wildfires were only the latest in a string of fires that started in July, when forests in southeast Oklahoma erupted in flames.

In September, another round of fires raged in the western pocket of the state, near the Texas Panhandle.

In November and early December, fires were reported in several areas of southeast and south-central Oklahoma.

“So you can see, our entire state is affected,” Peach said. “These fires are just an indication of how serious the drought is throughout the state.”

Farmers, who are also fighting high fuel and fertilizer costs, will continue to shoulder the brunt of the drought.

Authorities said it was too early to gauge losses to agriculture in 2005.

But the federal government has estimated that the national net farm income in 2005 will be $71.8 billion, down nearly $11 billion from the previous year. And local authorities said losses in Texas and Oklahoma would probably be responsible for a significant portion of the decline.

Next year’s crops, meanwhile, could be hit even harder.

“This is the worst crop situation that we’ve seen for a long time,” Peach said. “The real economic impact of this drought will be seen in 2006.”