Published: April 11, 2008 07:30 am      

Rain a big benefit to area

The last precipitation that graced the region was...well no one can remember, said Woodward County rancher Dick Lodes.

“I don’t remember the last time we got any appreciable rain here,” Lode said. “So this that we are getting today is gonna help everybody, the wheat people, the cattle people and it will help everyone’s attitude.”

That was the word from several people Wednesday as they stopped in to Stormy’s Feed Store on the east edge of Woodward.

Lodes perched himself in a metal chair tipped back and sipped slowly on a cup of coffee. Western Oklahoma dust that had been dancing on the brim of his black cowboy hat for months mixed with dampness and made a permanent home in the felt.

Nearby, Stormy Johnson drew short puffs on a smoke held in his work roughened fingers. He blew a short breath and smoke curled into the cold damp air.

“You know, they (farmers and ranchers) have been scared of the input costs,” Johnson said. “And with fuel costs so high and feed costs so high, if we don’t get any rain either, it just makes it all that much harder.”

Outside, a cold but gentle rain fell beginning at about 9 a.m. in Woodward and closer to about 10 a.m. in locations like Slapout and Laverne, according to residents of those communities.

Waitresses at Wagg’s talked easily to patrons and commented over and over on the rain to those who ventured in for a bite.

One patron said her husband was a landscaper and mower and was enjoying his day off.

“I tried to help him this week with some mowing and the dust was so thick in the air just trying to mow the grass,” the patron said.

According to the National Weather Service in Norman, the last time the region received precipitation was in March when the area around Gage received about fourteen-one hundredths of an inch and that was measured March 17.

Before that, there was about six-tenths of an inch that fell at the Gage Air Port one month earlier, February 16.

Before that, the only measurable precipitation occurred with a snow storm that reached down from Colorado and dumped about four to six inches of snow on the Panhandle, Woodward increasing as it moved east.