Neighbors about 3 miles East of us had a pretty good pasture fire today. We were building a weaning trap and took a break about 2:15 pm. On the way home we saw smoke but when we headed back around 3 pm didn't notice any. About 3:30 pm we started seeing airplanes. We got to a stopping point and rode down to see how bad it was because everything is so dry. We've had maybe 1.5" of rain since first of August. Not sure how big the fire got but they had 1 helicopter making a short trip to a pool, 4 forestry dozers, 6 airplanes, and probably 3 volunteer fire departments. The Airplanes were flying 30 miles one way to a lake and back. It was awesome to see how much water they could drop and how fast they could get to the lake and back. Hopefully nobody lost too much. If it wasn't for the fire service things could have gotten bad quick though. They do a good job and act fast.
Pasture Fire
- Thread starter Lucky
- Start date
Well reports are saying 70 acres and no major damage. We kept seeing allot of black smoke in one spot and were told it caught some old hay on fire and burned the tires off an old horse trailer next to the hay. Still no word on what started it. My neighbors got 40 acres over that way and had to go open his gate for them. He still doesn't know if he got any damage. Was worried about his cows but they finally came up once things quitened down.
Glad it wasn't worse and no loss of cattle. When it's that dry, all it takes is one spark. We had a guy that was going to burn one of our fields and he uses a pipe rigged to the back of a 4-wheeler to spread the fuel. I'll be damned if there wasn't a rat inside the pipe that caught fire, ran (blazing!) to the neighbors' pasture and set that on fire. Yikes! And a lot of fires are started around here when someone is brush hogging and hits a rock (or rocks).
Caustic Burno
Well-known member
We’re in a drought and had above average rainfall for the year.
We got 55” in April and June and then the good Lord chain locked the valve.
1982vett
Well-known member
Seems to be the norm these days. We still have a chance to have an average rainfall year with 2 months to go but for the last 3 months the total stands at 1.3 inches with 8/10ths of that being on August 27th. 1/10th of an inch since. I do still have grass but the green has gone out of it.
The fire risk is bad right now. We have knee high grass stacked up burned to a crisp. We keep getting these low humidity, and windy days. It's a bad combo.
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greybeard
Well-known member
It's no better up this way either. I've seen 2 different burned areas along I- 14 just this week. Fortunately, so far, the high winds Texas saw in previous years have been absentee this year here in Central TX
Nesikep
Well-known member
wish our forestry department was that efficient.. Around here a tree gets struck by lightning and it smokes for 3 days while they "monitor" it, a gust of wind comes along and lights them up... Of course the thunderstorm that hit that tree hit 100 others, and the gust of wind that lit it up lit up the other 100 trees, so now we're short staffed and don't have enough equipment.. and about 20 years ago the figured lighting more fires works better than pouring water on it. And for the firefighters, don't start at daybreak, start at 8am, then have 2 hours of safety meetings, now it's 10AM and pushing 100F, so it's too hot to do any real work... and they wrap up at 3pm.
But climate change is why we have more/worse/bigger fires
