An incredible amount of fires erupted amid strong winds in Oklahoma on March 14.
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00:00Storm chaser Mike Scanlon, he's joining us once again in Merrimack, Oklahoma with more
00:04on the situation there. Mike, the one thing I want to ask you is that looking at your shot,
00:07is that more smoke in the sky or is that more dust?
00:15I mean that's anyone's guess. You know sometimes the color kind of lightens up to where it's a
00:21more of a dirt color and then you know we get a burst of flames here in the woods that shoots
00:26the gray and the black smoke back up so you know it's hard to tell. It kind of comes and goes but
00:31we do have some areas here out in the brushy areas. This is west of Oklahoma 99,
00:36about three miles north of 412, probably five or four miles south of 64 here. Very near the
00:44town of Hallett and Merrimack. Cleveland, Oklahoma is just about five or six miles northeast of here
00:48so they had a pretty good handle on the bigger flames earlier. The winds died down just enough
00:54for them to catch up and now we've got some new hot spots out here in the brush and kind of the
00:58harder areas to hit. We did have some embers jump the highway here so we had a couple of small spot
01:04fires on the east side of Oklahoma 99 but they knocked those down pretty quickly. But right now
01:08we're getting probably sustained winds of 40. I'm surprised my hat is staying on. It's kind
01:14of small so it's kind of smudged on there pretty good but you know the stronger winds are just off
01:19to the west. Those 60 mile an hour gusts are coming through as they round the bend at that pivot point
01:24and then they're going to come blasting through here. You know there are a whole bunch of spot
01:29fires pretty much east of interstate 35 in Oklahoma, north of I-40. They're headed to a new area just in
01:37the north but a ton of fires here between Tulsa and Oklahoma City and then up north towards the
01:42campus border. Just an incredible amount of fires and you know now I'm here we've got a pretty good
01:49handle on the one near Manford just west of Tulsa Metro. So I'm going to leave this and I'm going to
01:55go find something else because I've got a pretty good handle on this and I've seen about all I can see here and I'm
02:00going to head back towards the Tulsa Metro and see what's over there. Mike Scantlin, we appreciate
02:04that reporting in Merrimack, Oklahoma. An area pretty familiar to you in general. Yeah he was
02:09talking about the main storms or fire zone that we're tracking is going to be to the east of I-35
02:14and to the north of I-40. So this is going to be that area from Oklahoma City to Tulsa in an area
02:19you're very familiar with as well Jeff up near Joplin. Yeah and we have had reports that even
02:24in Missouri reports of structures burned in wildfires. Some of these areas will see both
02:29fire danger and then the severe thunderstorm threat and we're going to get some more from that
02:34from Aaron Rigsby. He has some drone videography he's reporting.