Anna Pope

I brought some white wine, and then I have a bottle of water here right by me.

Yeah, so a lot of the big major fires are in northwestern Oklahoma, specifically in our panhandle.

Earlier this week, I went to Woodward, which is not in the panhandle, but it's about two hours and 15 minutes away from Oklahoma City where I'm based.

And, you know, they saw fires in the city, but they were able to maneuver the fire around a lot of structures.

So no lived-in homes were burnt down.

And also people were evacuated.

About 4,000 people were evacuated and were able to go back to their homes.

But, you know, there was still a lot of acres burned, high and fast, high flames and just fast fires.

wind speeds caused like a lot of, you know, it was a battle for people.

And I think the folks that I talked to who were actually fighting the fires in that moment, they were really like surprised that nothing really burned down with the exception of three storage structures.

Um, but in the North, farther Northwest in the panhandle, um, over in Beaver County, I,

A 283,000-acre fire has crossed from Oklahoma into southwestern Kansas.

And there, there's a lot of ranches up there.

And so that's always a really difficult thing to experience.

Not only are you having this...

property damage like in the form of fencing which is expensive and also um and maybe your home or different structures your bar and things like that are in danger but you also have livestock and so it's you know people are getting reports and hearing like of you know cattle being harmed or you know dead because of the fires but then also maybe even some reports of people having to euthanize livestock which is always really um sad and it's also like a story about you know

People work up these herds, like in genetics, in the herds for a really long time.

And so it's not like they're easily replaced.

Yeah, exactly.

And so it can be really difficult to, you know, it would be difficult to lose them.