Still zilch at our place. I was just looking at our weather records from our backyard weather station, and we've received a total of 0.08" since June 21st. That's drier than last year! We still have rain in the forecast, so hopefully something will pan out for us.

Yes, we got some rain this morning after long long time. Priya called me at office to inform that its raining!!! Kids seems to have rain dance! A colleague of me sends an email to everyone saying that something is falling from the sky LOL!!!! We hope to get few more showers tonight and tomorrow. However drought outlooks is not that promising, that means lot of the beds go empty until next spring. -Chandra

I was afraid the rain hadn't reached y'all. Maybe sometime in the next few days it will.

Last year was as bad for us as this year is for you and you have my sympathy. We had no measurable rainfall in all of June and July, and then when it rained it August, the lightning started fires. I didn't care though because we had rain! it was a whole lot easier fighting fires on an 80 or 90 degree day with a little rain than on a 110 degree day without rain.

All summer last year we expected for our pipes to break as the ground shifted, despite our efforts to water enough to prevent it from happening. When the rain returned in earnest in September, that's when the ground shifted very quickly and the pipes broke. Twice. It has been wetter here this summer, so I don't think our pipes will break this year. If your ground has shifted much this year, yours might be in danger when rain returns. I don't know if your soil cracks and shifts as readily as our does. That was our first time in 13 years our pipes had broken though, so considering how much our dense clay compacts and cracks, I was surprised it hadn't happened before, most notably in 2005 when our rainfall for the whole year was under 19". However, 2004 had been a really wet year, so we had good deep soil moisture which may have played a role in the ground not shifting as much or cracking as much in 2005 as it did in 2011.

Our soil actually cracks very little, even compared to some of our neighbors. I think it's because the soil is so shallow that the house/plumbing is basically sitting on the sandstone bedrock. It's also very sandy, so perhaps the clay content isn't enough to cause the really serious cracking. The only evidence I've seen so far that our house has settled at all is that the kitchen cabinets close a little bit differently than they used to. We've never watered our foundation at all, but we also have no gutters so whenever it rains the water just runs right off the roof and onto the ground. Whatever, the reason, I'm thankful we haven't had to worry about breaking pipes! That doesn't sound pleasant at all.

I had sprinkles in NW OKC as I came home to meet ONG for our broken gas pipe. :( It didn't reach my house, though, I seemed to bring clear weather the closer to home I got. We found out last Friday our yard's gas line connecting our house to the meter had broken. ONG came out and shut 'er down, so we've been taking the polar plunge each morning when we shower. They cannot tell where the line is broken, but it's under either the concrete driveway or the concrete patio around the pool - either way, there's no good way to get at it to fix. So we are going to be painfully writing a lot of checks in the near future. ONG is going to (thankfully!) send their crew to bore under the driveway to relocate the gas meter next to our house from where it currently resides at the back of the yard, and then they will connect us from the main to the meter. We are on the hook for getting a new stub out and running the gas pipe into the attic to connect to our gas lines inside. Plus we found out that the hot tub gas heater outside is illegally hooked into the gas line, so it needs to be totally rerun at our expense. Overall, we are in the $4K area to get everything up and running again, and that's with ONG footing the bill for moving the meter, which our plumber would have charged another $2000 for.

I'm unsure if the drought has much to do with the line break, as the ONG emergency crew said that the people who sold us this house reported a gas leak early in 2011 (we bought end of 2011). The subtext was that perhaps the seller had not made the repairs but knew about a leak. It may have just gotten worse, enough for us to start smelling gas in the house, or an additional break occurred. I find we are on really red Oklahoma clay at this house. I cannot think of any watering I could have done to prevent this, as I don't think it would have ever occurred to me to water the driveway!

Heather, I guess that is the difference in wicked clay and good old sandy soil. If you even frown at our clay soil, it cracks out of spite. I grew up living on black gumbo clay, so keeping the soil in the foundation area moist is pretty much ingrained in my being. I do think the red clay here cracks even more than the black clay in Texas did, but at least I know what I am dealing with.

When a drought ends, I always hope it will end in a moderate fashion, with repeated smallish rainfalls so that the cracks in the ground don't close up too quickly and shift the soil too quickly and cause breaks in water lines. I don't expect trouble this year because we've already had almost as much rainfall, year-to-date, as we had all of last year. There are still cracks in the ground, but most of them are much farther away from the house than last year.

Mia, Isn't it frustrating to drive home through rain and then have the rain stop before it reaches your place?

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! That is going to be a very painful round of check-writing. It hurts to think about it. I am sorry to hear y'all are going through such an ordeal.

I am just relieved y'all didn't have something awful like the house blowing up while you were in it.

I don't know if the drought in your area is responsible for lines breaking, but it sure seems like the OKC area has had tons of water line breaks and gas line breaks this summer.

We had that kind of year last year in our county, when only about 11" of rain had fallen through August. Water lines and gas lines broke, foundations shifted and cracked, roads developed cracks, etc. It is much better here this year because we have had more rain.

Dawn

I would not be surprised if all the pecan trees my mom planted at my childhood home in Blanchard are now dead or close to it. They had turned into nice productive trees for the last 10 years.

I have heard it looks bad in that area from Norman to Blanchard. Even worse than us since the soil there is not as deep.

Scott,

Your comment about hearing it looks bad from Norman to Blanchard made me wonder who/where in Oklahoma is worst off now because of drought? I'm betting it is about from Okmulgee near the farm up to close to Carol's place near Jay and then over towards Norman and Blanchard? Let's not forget how dry it is in Adair and Sequoyah Counties too, and so little relief in the form of rainfall in all those places.

I know it is very dry in parts of western OK too, but they are always drier so their plants are not used to the abundant rainfall normally seen in eastern OK. Obviously, if an area is used to getting 55-70" of rain a year, the plants there suffer greatly if only 15-20" or less has fallen.

So, in the quest to figure out who's being hurt the most by this drought, I'm linking the KBDI map. It isn't the only way to tell who is suffering, but clearly anyone in the 700s on this map is in a world of hurt....and some places are getting incredibly close to 800 which, prior to last year, seemed unimaginable to me. Last year, Altus and Durant exceeded 800.

We are lucky in one way---we have these high KBDIs while we still have green leaves on the trees and on some plants. If we had these KBDIs in winter when we've lost most of the green vegetation to dormancy or, in the case of annuals to death, this whole state would be on fire every day.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Today's KBDI Map 0= Great, 800=Awful