THE MORNING AFTER THE HEARTSTRONG FIRE, as doctors in Greeley fought to save Jennifer Struckmeyer’s life, 100 miles to the south the Colorado State Forest Service prepared to treat a sick mountain.
Trees so overcrowded the forests surrounding the Lower North Fork of the South Platte River that they risked fueling a fire big and hot enough to threaten both the woodlands and the watershed. The CSFS determined that a prescribed burn set by firefighters to remove excess timber, scrub, and grass was the best way to bring the woodlands back to health.
That Monday, Kirk Will, “burn boss” for the fire the CSFS planned to set three days later, stood in the woods watching crews “blacklining.” Firefighters sprinkled a flaming mix of diesel fuel and gasoline onto the ground from drip torches that looked like watering cans with spouts of fire. From above, the arcing line they blackened on the forest floor looked like it had been drawn with a skyscraper-sized Magic Marker. According to Will, the line was between 66 and 132 feet wide.1 After the fire, however, a report would claim that it was about 50 feet wide,2 while a map of the line identified it as just 10 to 20 feet wide.3 A week later, the width of the blackline would be just one among many details about the burn that didn’t add up.
The blackline—ground burned void of anything flammable—encircled the north and east sides of a plot of forest owned by Denver Water on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains about 30 miles southwest of Denver. The south side of the plot was contained by a “handline,” which was effectively a trail firefighters dug down to mineral soil with rakes, shovels, hoes, and axes to remove anything flammable so that a fire on the ground couldn’t pass it. The blackline and handline connected with a road on a ridge to form a continuous perimeter—a “control line” intended to hold the fire in a plot known as Unit 4 like a corral holds wild horses.4
Inside the perimeter were 50 acres of masticated fuels—timber cut down and chewed up with chippers and chainsaws four years earlier.5 The chunks of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, some the size of a man’s leg, were spread shin-deep below the pines and firs that remained standing.
Building the control line had taken the better part of a year, so it was satisfying to watch the circle close. Like every other aspect of a prescribed burn, it was a labor-intensive, painstaking process. And Unit 4 was just one of six areas in the Lower North Fork that the CSFS planned to burn over a five-year period.
The previous spring Kevin Michalak, an engine boss and technician with the CSFS, had lit a test fire to see if the prescribed fire intended to heal the forest might accidentally destroy it. The test hadn’t gone well. The small blaze had jumped the line intended to contain it.6 Nonetheless, the prescribed burn planned for Unit 4 went forward.
When the blackline was completed, Will and his crew “mopped up,” the firefighter’s term for making sure every ember was out cold—soaked, crushed, or buried. The following day, Tuesday, a crew put hoses, a motorized pump, and a portable water tank into position. The water would be a critical tool for mopping up the burn and extinguishing any “spot fires” that might ignite outside the line. Wednesday Will confirmed with 10 different agencies and fire departments that their promised manpower and equipment would be there the next day, when they lit the fire inside the control line and let it run.7
At 8:30 on Thursday morning more than 80 people, twice what was called for in the burn plan, gathered for an hourlong briefing at Jefferson County’s Reynolds Park, where the firefighters could look out at the mountains where they would be working. Then they drove a few miles south, unlocked the gate to the Denver Water land, and headed to Unit 4. A 20-man firefighting crew made up of inmates from the Colorado Department of Corrections joined two 20-person crews from the CSFS to make sure the blaze stayed within the control line. Six engines from as far away as Fort Collins surrounded the unit, with two more standing by. Two people set up air quality monitors. Rocco Snart, fire management officer with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, was the safety officer and was also overseeing the training of eight firefighters who were refreshing their wildland firefighting credentials.8 Kevin Michalak was in charge of mopping up. Also overseeing the fire was Allen Gallamore, district forester with the CSFS. Six members of the Platte Canyon Fire Protection District crew would light the blaze.9
The state’s prescribed burn plan had more than a dozen pages of questions for Kirk Will to answer regarding the controlled fire. It included a “complexity analysis” of how difficult the fire would be to ignite and manage; current and predicted weather conditions; smoke management and air quality; how the work was funded, scheduled, and staffed; and a plan for what to do should the controlled fire escape its containment and turn into a wildfire. Its final “Go/No Go Checklist” asked: “Has the burn unit experienced unusual drought conditions or does it contain above normal fuel loadings which were not considered in the prescription development?”
The Haines Index that the CSFS relies on to measure drought showed very low moisture at the burn site.10 Other measures showed an even more dramatic drought.
Snowcapped mountains trickle water into the forests below, thus keeping woodlands moist for months after the snow stops falling. In 2011, when the Lower North Fork prescribed burn was being planned, Colorado had extraordinarily heavy snowfall. But a year later, when the state foresters were going over their checklist, the state was at the end of one of its driest winters on record. At the time of the burn Colorado’s snowpack was about half the annual average, and NOAA reported it was the driest March in state history. By the end of May, 100 percent of the state would be in drought.11
The dead timber spread over the forest floor was certainly a far heavier fuel load than normal, but one the firefighters believed they understood.
On-site weather observations noted a maximum temperature of 59 degrees, with relative humidity of 21 percent and winds running east to northeast up to 9 miles per hour. There was enough of a breeze to dissipate the smoke, but the winds wouldn’t be strong enough to blow up the fire. Cool temperatures would dampen the flames. Conditions seemed ideal for a prescribed burn, even if there was barely a fraction of the normal amount of snow on the ground.
So despite the thick load of broken timber piled on the forest floor and unusually warm and dry weather, Will noted no unusual drought or fuel load in the Go/No Go paperwork.12
The burn boss went over the plan with his firing boss, who would oversee the crew lighting the fire, and the holding specialist, who would lead the firefighters charged with keeping it corralled. They agreed that each item was a go. At 11:29 Will signed the checklist. The firing crew lit a test fire, and at 11:45 Will noted it went well. The fuel was dry enough to burn, and weather conditions would make the blaze easy to contain. At noon firefighters began dripping fire onto the forest floor.13
A WEEK EARLIER FIREFIGHTERS HAD HUNG SIGNS along the roads surrounding the forest warning of the pending burn, but Kim Olson hadn’t seen any of them. Neither she nor any of her neighbors, a little more than a mile from Unit 4, were aware of the planned fire.
A petite dancer with short but wild blond hair, Kim looked only a few years older than the university students she sometimes taught, but she was actually the mother of three children. She and her husband, Doug Gulick, had moved into their home on Kuehster Road, atop a wide, flat ridge of forests and meadows, in the mid-1990s. They’d seen a lot of other homes sprout up in their community since then.
The daughter of a firefighter, Kim was usually the first person in the neighborhood to smell any smoke, the woman who was always looking for smudges in the sky. Even her family had begun to see her wariness as bordering on paranoia.
Although no scent, sight, or sign alerted her to the planned burn, while the firefighters were igniting the forest, Kim headed to town to purchase fire-escape ladders for the family’s home. She couldn’t say why.
10
Slop-Over
Conifer, Colorado—March 26, 2012
IF ANYONE UNDERSTOOD THE NEED to burn the forest
s around the Lower North Fork, it was the man who had just taken charge of extinguishing fires there. Bill McLaughlin was five weeks into his new job as the chief of the Elk Creek Fire Department when the members of the Colorado State Forest Service lit their torches in the forest. His office was about five miles from the prescribed burn on the Denver Water land.
When McLaughlin interviewed for the job, he knew he was stepping into a troubled department. Two previous chiefs and the department’s board president had all resigned amid scandals and turmoil. And like many volunteer departments (the chief was paid, but most of the firefighters were not), Elk Creek’s budget was stressed. It hadn’t had a levy increase since the 1950s. Although an explosion of development had increased the fire department’s budget—Jefferson County was the fastest-growing county in Colorado—it didn’t come close to keeping up with the department’s needs. Radios were old and couldn’t be used to talk with many other fire departments and sheriff’s offices, or with the Colorado State Forest Service. Outdated maps, some of them decades old, didn’t show most of the new homes, developments, and roads.
“Realistically, with the resources that we’ve got, we can handle a five-acre fire in a low-complexity situation, without a lot of wind or immediate threat to homes,” McLaughlin told me. “That’s the limit. It gets beyond that and we have to rely on outside assistance.”
Some of the forests he’d toured during his interviews were more stressed than the department’s budget. Many were overgrown dog-hair thickets after decades in which firefighters had extinguished every natural blaze.
At higher elevations they’d come to vast mixed-conifer and lodgepole pine forests that naturally burn in what are known as “stand-replacing fires,” which kill almost every tree on entire mountainsides. He could see that the trees were all about the same height and width, a sign that they had sprouted at the same time and grown up together after a fire incinerated all their predecessors. He knew that was how these forests regenerated: lodgepoles have cones that release their seeds in a fire and grow well on recently burnt ground. He also knew that they tended to burn big.
McLaughlin found something else that crowded the woods and would be far more complicating to his job—homes.
Along Elk Creek, the Bucksnort Saloon epitomizes the neighborhoods McLaughlin would defend if he took the job: hard to get to, hard to leave, and smack-dab in the middle of a natural chimney. A narrow road follows the creek through the bottom of a canyon to the log-walled tavern. Bikers and tourists put their feet up on its deck, which overhangs the rapids of the creek, and the ceiling is covered with dollar bills bearing messages from visitors from around the world. Thick forests crowd both sides of the gorge that snakes miles in both directions from the saloon. Ancient, tumbledown mining shacks hang from cliff tops, while new mansions rise in clearings in the dense, dark woods. The winding road is so tight that occasionally drivers have to pull off to the side to allow oncoming traffic to pass. McLaughlin couldn’t imagine how he would get a fire truck through the narrow lanes, how he would defend those homes with a fire filling the canyon, or how he would evacuate the saloon with traffic clogging the road.
“This is a community that is at extreme risk for wildfire,” McLaughlin told the board when he got back to the department. “We have literally thousands of homes scattered around out here, most of them down one-lane dirt roads—one way in and out, a lot of fuels, a lot of forest . . . that we expect to burn with crown fires. And people are living right in the middle of it.”
CALM AND QUIET, WITH GRAYING HAIR and a soft, roundish face, McLaughlin looks more like an executive than a mountain firefighter. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father was stationed in the U.S. Army.
“I stayed as long as I could stand it and then I drove as far as there was a road—literally,” he told me. “Homer, Alaska—the nickname there is ‘the end of the road.’ I got on a boat there to Kodiak. And then I got into a bush plane and I flew to the far end of the island. And then I felt like I was away from New Jersey. I was 21.”
Hungry for adventure, service, and the kind of camaraderie he’d grown up around in an army family, McLaughlin joined a volunteer fire department in Alaska. “My second call ever we had two fatalities,” he recalled. “. . . A commuter plane crash . . . I was still in rookie class.”
Over the next decade he moved from volunteer to professional firefighting and from Alaska to Washington State, where he was the fire chief at Friday Harbor, in the San Juan Islands. There McLaughlin was not only a firefighter but a fire setter. He worked on prescribed burns to restore the Garry oak savanna on the islands. The flames burned away snowberry and thinned out stands of Douglas fir, both of which outcompete the native oaks in the absence of fire. “It’s about time,” area residents would tell him.
He knew that it would be much more difficult to put fire back on the ground in Colorado. The forests were not only overgrown but were far drier than they were in western Washington. And as he looked at the developments, businesses, and homes sprinkled throughout them, he knew that the local population would be far less accepting of controlled fires than the population in the San Juans had been. One way or another, however, the forest was going to burn.
“If we don’t have fires run through this landscape, we’re going to continue to change the makeup of the forest,” he said. “And it is going to continue to [have] heavier fuel loading and move more towards a less often but much more destructive fire regime.”
McLaughlin took the job knowing that helping out with prescribed fires would be part of his job and that if one got away, his crews would be fighting it. A month before the Lower North Fork prescribed burn, the Elk Creek Fire Department worked with the U.S. Forest Service on a burn of enough slash from thinning projects to fill 18 tractor-trailers.
“They actually hired me specifically to . . . bring the level of preparedness both for the department and for the community up to where it needs to be,” he told me.
McLaughlin had been in his new job for four weeks when the Colorado State Forest Service called to let the department know about the prescribed burn they planned to ignite on the Denver Water land on Thursday, March 22. Even though Colorado was in the midst of its driest March in history and a record warm spell, McLaughlin wasn’t concerned about the plan to light the woods on fire. The CSFS hadn’t provided him with a copy of the burn plan, so he didn’t know enough about it to get worried. He just knew that the forest was as thirsty for fire as it was for water.
KEVIN MICHALAK WAS IN CHARGE of mopping up after the prescribed burn in the Lower North Fork—making sure every last ember was out. He was pleased with how the burn had progressed, and confident that it was out cold when he left it Thursday night. But he couldn’t say that it had gone like clockwork.
Variable winds had caused the flames in Unit 4 to jump around more than he would have liked, and a few firefighters had fretted that the interior of the unit had burned too hot.1 Embers rolling down hillsides and across the control line also had ignited four or five small spot fires. Tracking down tiny smokes outside the prescribed burn area is like hunting down tiny, burrowing animals before they can reproduce and climb into the treetops. That wasn’t hard with some 80 firefighters on the scene. Engines and crews on foot quickly snuffed any smoke or ember they spotted outside the line.2
They mopped up a swath about 100 feet wide between the control line and the interior of the burn.3 Inside that perimeter, a few stumps still smoked, but the crew was confident there was no way for anything burning to escape. Still, the thick layer of chewed-up trees covering the forest floor like a giant campfire was a fuel bed that few of them had much experience with. They’d have to keep an eye on it through the weekend.
Michalak returned to the burn site around 9 a.m. Friday to complete the mop-up. To finish snuffing the blaze, he had only a fraction of the manpower that had been there to light it—a crew of prison firefighters, four engines, and an all-terrain vehicle that could carry water through the unit. He
avy smoke rose from a couple of spots deep inside the burn, and one spot fire crawled outside the control line before they smothered it. They threw smoking branches near the perimeter deep into the burn area, dug up smoldering roots, and soaked the edge of the burn.4
The burn plan’s mop-up and patrol guidelines were based on the Keetch-Byram Drought Index, a measure of how dry, and consequently how combustible, a landscape is. It led them to devise a 200-foot-wide perimeter of “cold black”—ground burned, scraped, and soaked with water into something that looks like a black tar racetrack. Michalak reported achieving that goal by the end of the shift.5
By the time he left, however, the sky seemed to be inhaling in preparation to blow hard. A ridge of high pressure rose between New Mexico and South Dakota, while a low-pressure trough formed along the Pacific coast. Temperatures increased nearly 20 degrees during the weekend after the burn—Denver set a temperature record—and relative humidity plummeted into the single digits.6
Saturday morning—two days after the burn—Michalak went back to the burn and traveled along the western and southern edges of the unit on foot and in an ATV. The fire was lifeless, with just two wisps of smoke rising from needles in the center of the charred woods. He noted that there was no “heat” within 200 feet of the unit’s perimeter. The entire blackline was cold. It seemed impossible that an ember deep in the burn could reach the forest outside it.7 He left the unit early that afternoon and contacted Kirk Will, the burn boss, and the district forester, Allen Gallamore.
The burn plan required patrol of the site for at least three days after the fire to make sure it stayed out, but Michalak and Will were so confident it wasn’t a threat, they decided to leave the burnt forest unattended on Sunday, March 25.8 Michalak wouldn’t return to it until Monday morning.
At 5:26 on Sunday morning the National Weather Service issued a Fire Weather Watch for Monday, calling for “strong winds and low relative humidity.”
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