No burn ban yet
Recent wildfires in neighboring Adair County along with heightened wildfire danger designations for several adjacent northwest Arkansas counties have Sequoyah County officials on the alert and prepared to issue a county burn ban when conditions are present.
At their weekly meeting on Monday, Sequoyah County Commissioners discussed declaring a seven- day county burn ban, a concern Emergency Management Director Todd Harris brought before the commissioners.
However, Sallisaw and parts of the county received more than 2 inches of rain last week, which lessened the county’s drought severity. Therefore, the county does not currently meet the criteria for a burn ban.
Todd Harris
“Our criteria has come down a little bit from what we were last week, so there’s no action on that,” decided District 2 Commissioner Beau Burlison.
Harris is expected to continue monitoring the criteria, and will address this with the commissioners should things change.
The most recent burn ban for the county occurred for one week in October 2024.
The U.S. Drought Monitor last week showed Sequoyah County and many adjoining counties as experiencing moderate drought. Cherokee and Wagoner counties, as well as much of Adair and Muskogee counties, were experiencing
severe drought. Much of Delaware County has extreme drought conditions.
Adair and Wagoner counties are the closest nearby Oklahoma counties with active burn bans.
Northwest Arkansas counties with current burn bans include Benton, Johnson and Madison. Crawford, Logan Sebastian and Washington counties are designated as high wildfire danger counties. Most Arkansas counties are designated for moderate wildfire danger.
Burn bans prohibit outdoor burning, with exceptions usually for attended grilling.
Recent wildfires have been battled in Adair County, where about 800 acres burned in the Indian Creek area in the far southeastern part of the county, along with 375 acres in the Backwoods Hunting Club area in the northern part of the county. An additional fire in far northern Cherokee County consumed almost 250 acres.
One of the state’s biggest wildfires is near Beaver in the panhandle, where almost 285,000 acres have been scorched and is only about 65% contained. Another has burned more than 1,400 acres near Hartshorne in Pittsburg County.
As of last weekend, the U.S. has experienced more than 6,900 wildfires, burning more than 305,000 acres. By comparison, the 10-year average for late February is 3,504 fires and 71,556 acres. While national preparedness remains low, year-to-date acres are well above average, driven largely by fire activity in the Southern states.
