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| One of the huge Nebraska wildfires back on March. Photo from Nebraska State Patrol |
Amid a drought and record breaking high temperatures that further dried out the landscape, high winds fanned wildfires that burned through 820,000 acres of Nebraska rangeland.
The worst of the fires burned in March. One of the fires blackened 600,000 acres. The blazes left numerous ranchers without feed for their cattle. Damage estimates are at least $10 million.
This is all bad news, of course. And climate change is a prime suspect again. An insane March heat wave contributed to the conditions that led to the huge fires. World Weather Attribution reported that the March heat wave would have been virtually impossible without climate change.
The fires burned through just about all of the 11,000 acre ranch Mike and Kayla Wintz lease in the middle of nowhere - deep in the Sandhills of western Nebraska. With the grass gone, the cattle couldn't graze, as CBS's on the road reporter Steve Hartman noted.
Suddenly, after the fires. Wintz and other ranchers started getting phone calls. The callers said hay was on the way, and where should we put it. At last report Wintz has received $80,000 worth of hay, all donated.
Highways in central and western Nebraska became busy with convoys of trucks carrying hay to desperate ranchers. Some of the hay came from as far away as South Carolina. The convoys became almost like celebratory parades, as school kids lined streets to watch the trucks, fully loaded with enormous bales of hay pass by.
"Empathy, charity and grace," Hartman concludes.
All true. Hartman is always the feel good reporter we need when we need to see someone acting like good humans should.
Unfortunately, I'm not as kind hearted as Hartman. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely support and love this Nebraska "hay lift," for lack of a better term. And of course I support helping your neighbor in any way you can. Whether that neighbor is literally next door or half a world away.
However, like so much havoc caused by, or more often made worse by climate change, massive hay donations like we've just seen in Nebraska aren't going to solve the problem.
In the first few months of 2026, major wildfires scorched over a million acres in Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, Nebraska Public Media notes.
"The amount of Great Plains land burned by wildfires tripled between 1985-1994 and 2005-2014, according to a 2017 study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The number of incidents also increased from 33 per year to 117 per year."
Judging from news reports about Great Plains fires in the past three years at least, that trend detected nearly a decade ago by UNL researchers has continued.
There's always talk of "adaptation" to extreme conditions wrought by climate change. And people in the Great Plains can adapt to an extent. They can make homes and outbuildings more resisted to fire. Improve warning systems. But if there's a drought, strong winds and hot temperatures, there's little you can do to stop the grass from burning.
While people are contemplating wildfires, the Plains might be in for a temporary reprieve. Climate change makes fires more likely, but so does La Nina. That weather pattern tilts conditions toward dry in the central and southern Plains during the early spring.
Early spring is peak fire season. A potentially strong El Nino is poised to replace the La Nina. An El Nino more often than not tends to turn the southern half of the Plains wetter.
Still, El Nino will end at some point. And so the fires will come back, possibly even more ferocious than this year's as climate change continues to heat the planet.
Here is the CBS report. Click on this link to view it, or if you see the image below, click on that.
