Emergency officials counted 12 different wildfires around the state, with at least 65 homes destroyed in parched areas north and south of Oklahoma City and south of Tulsa.
A state-wide burn ban was issued by Governor Mary Fallin Friday, according to a statement by Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Fallin, who earlier in the day invoked a statewide ban on outdoor burning after declaring a state of emergency for the state's 77 counties, told Reuters fire conditions may be worse on Saturday. "The fire danger might be even higher," she said.
Oklahoma has contacted neighboring states for help, but they are contending with their own wildfire threats and no out-of-state help is on its way, Fallin said. "There's fires in Arkansas. There's fires in Kansas and Texas. Everybody else is on high heat alert," she said.
The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning, saying there would be "critical fire weather conditions over much of northeast Oklahoma" Saturday....
Oklahoma sunrise obscured by smoke from the 1988 Yellowstone National Park forest fire. Shot by John K Rathgeber, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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