With drought conditions like that there's no way you can prevent wildfires being driven by near hurricane force winds. Praying for all those affected.
We had a drought here back in summer were we went almost a whole month without rain and the rain we did get during that period was barely enough to wet the dirt. Thank God we didn't have any fires then. The grass here was so dry it was like matchsticks on the ground. I didn't mow lawns for a month. More than made up for the rain deficit in December though, in fact set a new rainfall record for December.
We're about to have 72+ hours of temps below 20 degrees starting Sunday, Tuesday night/Wednesday morning is supposed to be -15 for a low possibly setting a new record. Officials are warning people just because it will be that cold not to go ice fishing because the temperature swings we had, yesterday was 40, and will have will make the ice unsafe especially by next weekend when temps will be in the mid 30's again.