It’s a bad sign, stepping out of the front door into a strong odor of grassfire. Or maybe it’s housefire. Hard to tell the difference before that first cup of coffee.
The City of Tulsa has posted a notice that the smoky haze that is drifting over the city is coming from a fire at Camp Gruber, an 87 square mile National Guard Training Center near Braggs, some 14 miles southeast of Muskogee.
Nearly the entire state of Oklahoma is under a burn ban in the wake of months of drought and excessive drought conditions, and the state of Texas has lost more than 12-hundred homes to out of control range fires.
Officials say the fire started as a result of a tracer round fired from a machine gun during a training exercise over the weekend. Some seven-hundred acres burned before the fire was brought under control earlier Monday.
Weather conditions caused smoke from the fire to drift north and remain close to the ground, creating a haze that obscured visibility of incoming communters to the downtown area and carried over much of northeastern Oklahoma.
The smoke is expected to dissipate throughout the day as winds increase and temperatures rise.
