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All Things Nebraska
If you’re like me, you were sickened to read about the wildfires running amok across sections of Nebraska in mid March.
Thousands and thousands of acres, as far as the eye could see in areas of the Sandhills, in bluffs and hills southeast of North Platte and south of Kilgore, and (once again) in areas near the Nebraska National Forest in Halsey.
As I write this, more than 800,000 acres have burned, according to the Nebraska Public Media. That’s pasture that could feed hundreds of thousands of cattle. Who knows how many miles of fencing were destroyed.
One elderly woman died trying to escape the flames near Arthur. An awful tragedy. The fires made national news – the kind of national news we don’t want to make. But wildfires are becoming more and more common in Nebraska, according to the 2024 update of the Nebraska Climate Assessment. It’s especially problematic when conditions are as dry as they were in western and central sections of the state this winter, and when winds were gusting as high as 70 mph.
Not only are big, costly wildfires becoming more common, so are extreme winds. (The higher price of your homeowners insurance can tell you that.)
The recent wildfires quickly set a record as the worst in state history. They eclipsed 2012, when 500,000 acres of Nebraska were scorched, and 2020, when 250,000 acres were burned, including large areas of the Halsey forest.
I’ve seen close up what fires can do. Some buddies and I used to travel to the Pine Ridge every spring to chase turkeys (we weren’t the best at actually bagging one) and to camp amid some beautiful, thick pine forests.
One year, half of the area we used to hunt was burned to ash; the next year, the other half burned.
I covered wildfires that threatened to burn into Valentine, and another that came within a half mile or so of the Chadron State College campus. Heroic firefighting, luckily, stopped the fires.
No area of the state is immune. In April of 2022, a wildfire propelled by 60 mph winds burned across 10 miles of harvested fields in eastern Nebraska near where our family farm is located. Flames outraced fire crews. Two homes were burned to the ground.
One takeaway: You don’t need forests of trees or fields of tall grasses to fuel a wildfire.
The data being collected by the State Climate Office and others doesn’t lie – Nebraska’s climate has been getting hotter, and getting hotter more rapidly than normal. Precipitation events are more streaky, coming in buckets when it comes, instead of showers. Winters have less snow.
And when it doesn’t rain, things dry up more quickly due to high winds, especially in March and April, our windiest months.
“Nebraska faces rising risks from more frequent and intense extreme weather,” predicted the 2024 climate report, led by the Nebraska State Climate Office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
That same report anticipated that, if trends continue, Nebraska’s weather would be more like Oklahoma’s by 2050. That means warmer winters, and warmer summer nights. But it also means implications for growing crops.
So what are we to do? It’s hard to stop wildfires from happening. Burn piles can reignite (as in that fire near our farm), dry lightning can strike, a careless cigarette can smolder and a strong wind can knock down a power pole, sparking a blaze (the apparent cause of the massive Morrill Fire, which blackened more than 600,000 acres recently).
Controlled burns (which may have caused one of the recent fires) need to be carefully monitored, and when it’s dry, burn bans need to be heeded. More resilient power poles can be used.
Thinning forests and removing brush and dead timber can help, too. So can rain.
Let’s hope those burn areas get some moisture, so those areas can rebound and so Nebraska can stay out of the national news.
Paul Hammel has covered the Nebraska state government and the state for decades. He is a retired senior reporter for the Nebraska Examiner and the former Capitol Bureau Chief for the Omaha World-Herald. A native of Ralston, Nebraska, he
