At 12:15 p.m. the National Weather Service upgraded that forecast to a Red Flag Warning calling for very low humidity, sustained winds between 22 and 32 miles per hour, and gusts to 60 miles per hour. A breakdown of the upper ridge in the atmosphere would move the high-pressure system east. Behind it, a cold front would move across Utah and into Colorado, pushing high winds, low humidity, and high temperatures before it. A vertical lift between the fronts would function like a vacuum on the mountains, creating a highly unstable atmosphere. Conditions like these drove Colorado’s most notorious fires—the killer South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain, the massive Hayman Fire, the Bobcat Gulch Fire, the Overland Fire.
Michalak arrived at the unit by 10:30 Monday morning, March 26, half an hour after the Red Flag Warning went into effect. The sky was cloudy, and it had been cool enough overnight that he didn’t see too much to worry about with the weather. He planned to pack up all the firefighting equipment and brought only a pickup and an all-terrain vehicle rather than a fire engine.9
Two CSFS firefighters, Rob Kriegbaum and Ryan Cox, had come along to help roll up hoses and map the perimeter with a GPS. The only smoke they noticed was from a scorched log and the pile of needles Michalak had seen smoldering two days before. Both were deep in the black. By 12:30 they had loaded the gear into the truck and the ATV. Michalak noticed the wind shift to the southwest and increase to about 15 miles per hour. The firefighters drove to the north side of the unit, where embers picked up by the southerly wind might land outside the black in the unburnt forest. The wind gusted to 20 miles per hour. Embers jumped “like fleas” toward the control line. Michalak noted several small puffs of smoke from the duff, needles, and charred wood inside the unit. Kriegbaum and Cox grabbed hoes and rakes to snuff the “duffers” that were springing up like leaks in the charred forest floor. Michalak could see they were going to need water, so he drove the ATV to a creek to fill up its 70-gallon tank. He returned 15 minutes later to find the two firefighters swinging their hand tools at two small spot fires that had broken out in the green forest about five feet on the other side of the road. When the spot fires were dead and buried, the three firefighters headed back into the black.10
The flames resurrected by the relentless wind were as dumbfounding to the firefighters as corpses rising from graves. The thick bed of crushed wood hid hundreds of embers. Michalak was quickly exhausting his water. Embers he drowned dried out and reignited within 15 minutes. The growing wind ignited small blazes faster than the firefighters could snuff them. Both Michalak and Kriegbaum called Kirk Will, the burn boss, requesting an engine to help.
They ran out of water less than an hour after filling up, leaving them with only hand tools to attack the small flames. Michalak noticed thickening smoke on the south side of the unit but found only duffs smoldering well within the blackline. The crew on Colorado State Forest Service Engine 862 arrived, left their engine for Michalak, and headed back to their office.11
After they left, Michalak looked back south and saw a thick plume of smoke. Driving the ATV, he found a spot fire no bigger than a quarter acre in size. Just north of the spot fire, Michalak saw an old handline that firefighters had scratched into the hill the previous fall. It was a reminder of the challenge he now faced.12
Five months earlier, in October 2011, the day after he and his crew had burned a portion of the blackline intended to contain the current fire, an ember had ignited a spot fire. The handline firefighters had used to round up that earlier escaped blaze was still visible, emphasizing how difficult it was to control a fire in this forest. It marked one of at least three fires set in preparation for the current burn that had sparked spot fires that had nearly gotten away.13
The burns in the Lower North Fork, in fact, had repeatedly escaped prior to March 2012, but they had been corralled and killed before anyone outside the CSFS heard anything about them. The area was well-known to firemen and area residents to channel gusty and unpredictable winds. Investigators of the escaped fire that Michalak was fighting to contain would find not one but several ignition sources outside the control line.14 A rain of embers had escaped the controlled burn to ignite a wildfire.
With just hoes and shovels, and no water, the three firefighters stood no chance of stopping a fire in chopped-up timber piled in a green forest. They gathered their gear into a staging area and waited for reinforcements. What would soon be known as the Lower North Fork Fire was pushing hard to the north like a herd of smoky beasts.
Michalak reported the spot fire to Kirk Will and requested four more engines, two crews of firefighters, and another officer to oversee the effort. He also asked for a Jefferson County Type 3 Incident Management Team—a first response to a forest fire.15 Jefferson County 9-1-1 Dispatch called the Elk Creek and North Fork fire departments.
The term the firefighters broadcast over the radio—“slop-over”—sounds about as problematic as beer sloshing from a mug. But every firefighter who hears the phrase recognizes the threat behind it: a controlled fire is trying to run wild.
CHIEF McLAUGHLIN WAS SURPRISED to see Monday morning’s forecast predict winds even stronger than the Red Flag Warning called for. He filled up his canteen and called in a few more volunteer firefighters.
The department had already responded to two small wildfires that week, so on top of trying to make headway on the long-term and endemic problems his department faced, the new chief was also racing to get the volunteers ready for what was clearly going to be an early and active wildfire season. Tests of fuel moisture and long-term weather forecasts predicted a much drier spring than usual.
Chinook winds gust every spring in Colorado. They originate in the Pacific, drop their moisture on the west side of the Rockies, and then blow warm and fast down the eastern slopes. The chinooks in 2012 were unusually strong. They normally hit while the mountains are still covered in snow, which shelters fallen timber, scrub, and grasses from the gusts that can dry them out and push flames onto them. Runoff from the gradually melting mountain snowpack keeps the forests moist and “greens up” the vegetation, making it less likely to burn. But in 2012, March—usually the state’s snowiest month—saw almost nothing white in the air or on the ground. On average more than two inches of precipitation falls in that month around the Lower North Fork. In 2012 only half an inch fell, and that had come 20 days before the burn.16 The mountains were tan rather than white and green.
“Looking back historically, spring was not considered part of fire season in Colorado until the very recent past,” McLaughlin told me. “It’s been largely the last decade that they’ve seen those spring fires occurring.”
Across the West during the previous decade, mountain snowpack had melted off weeks, and sometimes months, earlier than it had during the previous century. “Fire season around here was usually a couple of very short windows,” McLaughlin explained. “Those windows just keep expanding further and further.”
The winds started blasting shortly after ten that morning, and the department’s first call came not long afterward. A gust knocked down a power line into a grassy field in Aspen Park, a suburb 30 miles from Denver. A resident from one of the nearby homes was spraying water on the blaze with his garden hose when the Elk Creek crew arrived and put it out.
McLaughlin was getting ready to leave when, at 1:55, the call came for help extinguishing a one-acre slop-over from the prescribed burn on the Denver Water land. And with that alarm the hazard he hoped to mitigate in the woods, the weaknesses he hoped to strengthen in his department, and the disaster he hoped to prevent seemed to cascade onto him.
The call was for a single fire engine, but the chief sent two, along with a water tender—a truck with a tank for others to draw from. But he drove past the turnoff into the property twice. It wasn’t marked on his old map.
“The technology exists so that we can have maps that show topography, show vegetation, that will let us actually predict where fire spread will occur, that will even, when we bring up somebody�
�s address, . . . look at evacuation routes,” he said. But that technology was just an expensive dream at the Elk Creek Fire Department.
“The maps we use to just find somebody’s medical call are just . . . a road map that someone’s copied,” he said. “They don’t have addresses written on them, no houses. Basically about as primitive as it gets. They’re not even as nice as the typical road map you would pick up if you went into a gas station.”
Northwest of the Denver Water land, subdivisions like Aspen Park and Conifer Meadows were named for trees but filled with homes. Many of the developments were not on the chief’s out-of-date maps, and he wondered how he could protect homes he couldn’t even find. Some homes were in a no-man’s-land that was not part of any fire protection district. Many firefighters had taken to relying on their smartphones for guidance, but having a map that vanishes when a cellphone’s connection fades could be worse than having one that is obsolete.
At 2:11 dispatch reported that the fire was one acre in size, “with low spread potential,” but by the time McLaughlin arrived, it was five acres and growing fast. Michalak, the incident commander in charge of the mop-up, was waging a losing battle to contain the slop-over. Curt Rogers, the chief of the North Fork Volunteer Fire Department, arrived a few minutes before McLaughlin with two fire trucks, along with firefighters from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
By then, winds were gusting to more than 60 miles per hour. Firefighters who already had their hands full had to use them to hold their helmets on. Others sheltered behind fire trucks. Blizzards of embers blew sideways, blasting firefighters trying to contain the blaze. When Chief Rogers held up his handheld weather meter, a gust buried the needle at its maximum—80 miles per hour.
THE GROUND FIRE WAS INCHING DOWNHILL to the northeast like molten lava. Flames a foot high filled the forest floor and leapt as high as eight feet, torching individual pines. “It looked like just a four-inch bed of charcoal burning everywhere,” McLaughlin said.
When Rich Palestro, an engine boss with the CSFS, arrived at 3:30, he guessed the fire had grown to 20 acres. He staged his truck at the south end of the fire and joined a crew setting up a pump and hose to try to flank it, but they retreated when he saw the flames racing fast enough to overrun them.17
“We’ll be hitting some trigger points pretty soon here,” Rogers radioed to Jefferson County 9-1-1 Dispatch at 2:38. “I’m sure we’ll be having some evacuations pretty quick.”
Rogers’s certainty was misplaced. Outdated technology and confused communications—other items high on Chief McLaughlin’s fix-it list—got in the way.
McLaughlin called dispatch two minutes later to request more reinforcements. “We need to start looking at evacuating to Reynolds [Park] and potentially further up,” he told them.
The sheriff’s office runs evacuations, but usually waits for a fire’s incident commander to request one. Michalak, with the CSFS, was still commander of the fire, but he couldn’t hear McLaughlin’s and Rogers’s missives to start getting people out of the way of the blaze. The chiefs didn’t know which radio channels the CSFS was using. Jefferson County dispatch tried to patch McLaughlin through to Michalak but failed. “If I wanted to talk to the incident commander, I had to go down there and track him down,” McLaughlin said.
As other departments were called in to help, the communication problems grew. Many departments used 800 band radios, which have greater range but work poorly in mountains and canyons. Departments that work rugged topography usually stick with older VHF technology. The next fire department north of McLaughlin’s used UHF radios, with yet another set of frequencies. The three systems don’t talk to one another. Even when departments do use the same radio systems, each communicates on its own channel until a common one is established among them.
As the fire grew, firefighters began using cellphones to contact colleagues just a few hundred feet away. McLaughlin was working four channels on two radios and was running back and forth between other firefighters whom he couldn’t raise on the two-ways.
“We found fire engines that had come in to help out that had never talked to anybody,” he said. “They were just driving around doing whatever they felt they needed to do because they didn’t have the channels to communicate on.”
Help, unsurprisingly, was slow to come.
Colorado is one of just two U.S. states with no state fire marshal to order resources between jurisdictions. Decisions about which departments send aid to fires in other districts are made at the local and county levels. One fire department asks for assistance from another as “mutual aid” but can’t be sure how much of the requested help will arrive. “It’s . . . a much more cumbersome and slow approach,” McLaughlin said.
When the alarm went out for the slop-over in the Lower North Fork, smokes were sprouting from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins. Some departments couldn’t respond to McLaughlin’s call for help because they had wildfires in their own districts or wanted to keep resources close just in case. Others may have been worried about the costs. Although Colorado has an emergency wildfire fund, assisting departments don’t know if they’ll get any of that money, or how much, until weeks or months after they respond to a fire.
“We don’t know if the state will end up picking up the tab or not,” Chief McLaughlin said. “I think that’s hindering some departments from providing the assistance levels that they could.”
THE CHIEFS WATCHED THE FIRE slowly descend toward a drainage. On the other side was a south-facing hillside thick with scrub oaks, junipers, and oily, drought-stressed brush.
Fire responds to terrain in the opposite way that humans do—running far faster uphill than down. The incline, sunny southern exposure, and highly flammable vegetation on that hill would make the fire sprint up the slope it was approaching.
“If we can stop it down by the drainage, we’ll be doing good,” Rogers radioed at 3:26 p.m. “But if it spots across to the other side, it’s off to the races.”
Rogers estimated that it would take two hours for the fire to climb the long slope. At the top were the homes of Pleasant Park and Kuehster Road.
11
Off to the Races
KIM OLSON—THE FIREFIGHTER’S DAUGHTER—and her husband, Doug Gulick, had bought their property on Kuehster Road in 1997. “We made a hunting cabin into a house,” she said.
The soil along the road, unusually rich for its 8,000-foot elevation, had drawn the Kuehster family to build a farm there in 1810. Two hundred years later, it was the solitude, verdant forest, and stunning views—Pikes Peak to the south, Mount Evans to the west, and the high plains spreading east past Denver—that led people to construct homes among the trees. The rocky pulpit of Devils Head stabs the sky from the Rampart Range, and the towering Cathedral Spires overlook Elk Creek. The good and evil labeling made Kuehster Road seem that much more like heaven.
The neighborhood also included all the points of Colorado’s polarized social and political compass. Buddhist prayer flags with wind horses and snow lions hung from one porch, a banner with a rattlesnake warning “Don’t Tread on Me” from another. Wind chimes rang from some properties, rifle shots from others. Bulldozers were parked next to corrals of horses. Somehow everyone seemed to get along.
“Everybody likes their space,” Kim Olson said, “but there’s never been a time when somebody didn’t help somebody off the road or lend them firewood, or a tool, or a cup of flour.”
Ties revealed themselves in surprising ways. Kim’s husband worked with a thermal analyst named Sam Lucas at Lockheed Martin, a few miles away. His father was also named Sam and lived near Kim and Doug with his wife, Moaneti. Sam the elder was a retired mechanical engineer who chopped wood for his stove and taught Sunday school. Moaneti “prayed about everything, including parking spaces at Walmart,” Jack McCullough, of Red Rocks Fellowship, recalled. She painted landscapes, raised chickens and vegetables, and sang in the church choir.1
The high school sweethearts had been ma
rried for 58 years. When they were newlyweds, Sam hitchhiked home from college to see his wife, then worked two jobs so she could stay home with their children. They thought of themselves as “mountain people” and didn’t see the land where they eventually built their dream home on Eagle Vista Drive until the thigh-deep snow that covered it when they bought it melted away.
Often hardships in the community turned into social gatherings. Some neighbors would see one another only when a blizzard hit. They’d sit on their plows or lean against their shovels and catch up on grandkids and work and summer plans as the snow piled up around them, then get back to clearing the road and one another’s driveways.
Andy and Jeanie Hoover provided the most popular venue for neighborhood gatherings and were renowned for their annual Christmas party. Andy—the big, jovial grandson of President Herbert Hoover—studied engineering and architecture at Yale University and the Colorado School of Mines. The Hoovers bought 46 acres in 1995 and built a deck, put a grill on it, and spent a few years just looking at the land to figure out what they wanted to do. They initially dreamed of a log cabin, but after Andy sat on his deck and watched slurry bombers and helicopters fighting the Buffalo Creek Fire, four miles away, the following year, he told his wife, “I don’t think we’re going to build a log cabin. I think we’re going to build something out of stone and steel.”2
They sited their house on a knoll to take advantage of a panorama that swept from Denver International Airport in the northeast to Pikes Peak, nearly 50 miles to the south, during the day and included, at least for a few years, hardly a light at night.
The Hoovers and their neighbors were confident that they would be warned of wildfires in the area by a “reverse 911 system” that Jefferson County dispatch would use to call homeowners when a fire threatened the neighborhood. Nonetheless, Andy and Jeanie built their house out of insulated, flame-resistant concrete, rock, and steel. They installed a 24,000-gallon water tank on the slope below the house, a 1,200-gallon cistern inside it, and another 1,000-gallon tank in a nearby shed. With his School of Mines training, Andy approached the threat of wildfire methodically. He read fire reports and bought a scanner to monitor fire calls. He cut down hundreds of trees around the property to create defensible space, and hired the sons of his neighbors, Scott and Ann Appel, to lop off low branches on the trees they left around the house, thus eliminating the ladder fuels that could turn a ground fire into a crown fire.
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