Megafire

by Michael Kodas

  Historic treasures from his grandfather’s presidency filled the house: Gold-inlaid flintlock dueling pistols and a hunting rifle. The president’s smoking pipe. Cases of books, including a mining text from 1556 that President Hoover, who was also a mining engineer, translated from Latin into English. China that the president had brought home from Beijing shortly after the Boxer Rebellion, including an urn from the imperial palace. The porcelain alone, Andy said, was worth more than his entire house.

  Andy built and repaired historic furniture, and he was restoring his grandfather’s fishing gear cabinet in his elaborate basement woodshop. A nearby wine cellar held two brandies with Napoleonic seals from 1818.3

  Eventually Andy planned to give it all to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in Iowa. For now he enjoyed living with his legacy.

  He kept binoculars at the ready to scan for wildfires and often spotted them before any alarms went out. When the earlier Colorado State Forest Service burn on the Denver Water land jumped its containment in October 2011, the Hoovers’ home on the south side of Kuehster Road looked right down on it.

  Despite his diligence, Andy wasn’t the first resident to report the slop-over on Monday, March 26, 2012. At 12:43 that afternoon, more than an hour before the calls to the Elk Creek and North Fork fire departments, a caller to Jefferson County dispatch reported, “I’m looking down toward Platte River Road. I think the prescribed burn down there is fired up again.”

  When the dispatcher asked if the resident saw gray smoke, the caller responded, “Whitish gray. It’s flat, going with the wind.”

  The dispatcher said he would ask the fire department to look into the source of the smoke. But as the smoke and 911 calls thickened, dispatchers were less helpful.4

  Kim Olson grew up having to practice escaping from her home on her hands and knees and memorizing meet-up points. She was just as diligent now that she had her own home and family. She often called the lookout in the fire tower at Devils Head to find out where the smoke she smelled was coming from.

  “I’m the first one to call [911] whenever there’s a lightning strike,” she said. “I’ve called a lot . . . and I [wonder] if that had something to do with how I was treated that day.”

  March 26 was the first day of spring break, so she and her husband both decided to stay home with the kids. Doug was outside washing his car as Kim sat at the computer and telephone trying to find out what was causing the smoke she smelled.

  She checked more than two dozen websites, rang her neighbors, and called the local fire department. “You don’t need to call every time you smell smoke,” the dispatcher told her when she called 911.

  At 2:21 Sam Lucas called 911 as well. “It looks like there’s a fire right at the foot of Cathedral Spires,” he reported.

  The dispatcher interrupted to say it was a controlled burn that flared up.

  “We’ve got 79-mile-per-hour winds and they’ve got a controlled burn?” Sam responded. “Oh, wonderful. Thank you.”

  Thirteen minutes later Ann Appel, a normally spry 51-year-old who was housebound and frail while undergoing chemotherapy, called 911 to ask about the fire that was clearly burning somewhere nearby. “It’s blowing smoke right over my house,” she said with a nervous laugh.5

  Her husband, Scott, a contractor, was away on business. Leaving the house would be difficult, not only because of her illness and treatment, but also, according to a friend of hers who called dispatch as well, because her car had a flat tire.

  As with the Lucases, the dispatcher who responded to Appel’s call told her the burn was nothing to worry about. Dispatchers advised nobody who called about the fire to evacuate.

  At 2:31, however, three minutes prior to Ann Appel’s call and 40 minutes after Chiefs McLaughlin and Rogers headed to the slop-over, dispatch asked a third area department, Inter-Canyon, to investigate the smoke reported from Kuehster Road.

  Dave Brutout, a firefighter with that department, was already on it. He’d just finished lunch near Denver when he received a text from the sheriff’s office alerting firefighters that the prescribed burn had escaped.

  Brutout, a local rancher, had been a volunteer firefighter in the area for more than 25 years. He had worked on prescribed burns with state foresters in the Lower North Fork, and he knew many of the residents on Kuehster Road. Although the text noted that “fire spread was minimal,” he suddenly had a feeling that he should head up to the neighborhood rather than go to the fire station or look for the source of the smoke. “I took a 90-degree turn east,” he told me. “Just poking around to see who was home and who was at work.”

  He arrived around 3 p.m. and could see that the fire had moved into the valley below. It was so windy he had to hold on to his helmet. The smoke plume was headed east—straight toward him—but it wasn’t yet leaning over his head.

  “I tried my damnedest to make contact with the group that was on scene [at the fire],” he said. “We were surprised they weren’t calling us. The Hail Mary just didn’t happen.”

  The rest of his department was sent to head off the fire before it got to Pleasant Park. Brutout knew they had no chance of doing that. “It was utter suicide to send 10 or 20 trucks down that road,” he said.

  There was still no call for an evacuation, but Brutout took it upon himself to initiate one. “People were gathering, and I had them all look down into the valley at what was boiling below,” he said.

  By 3:20 he was advising residents he found on Arrowhead Springs Trail and then Elk Ridge Road to get out. Around 4:20 he started going door-to-door. When one woman asked when the fire would get there, he responded, “Could be two days or two hours.”

  Or two minutes.

  On Eagle Vista Drive he advised Sam Lucas to evacuate. Sam and Moaneti loaded their pickup truck, and Sam called his son-in-law to say they were getting out. Their neighbor Eddie Schneider decided to leave after Brutout visited, and he called the Lucases to ask if they were evacuating, too. “Oh, yeah,” Sam told him. “Just waiting for the 911 call.”

  Schneider later reported that he never received a call.

  At 14141 Broadview Circle, Brutout encountered a chain across the bottom of a long driveway and heavy machinery nearby. Trees shaded the drive. Brutout turned away rather than risk getting trapped. Inside the house at the end of the drive, Ann Appel, despite her call to 911, couldn’t know what was racing up the mountain toward her.

  AT THE SCENE OF THE ESCAPED BURN, Chief McLaughlin assigned one of his assistants, Joe Page, as a lookout on a ridgeline. He stationed an engine along the flank of the fire. He had firefighters spray a wet line around it, but the timber dried out and reignited minutes after it was soaked. He assigned firefighters to dig a “scratch line”—a fast, improvised fire line—but the fire was too hot and fast for the firefighters to stand near it.

  Communication disconnects continued to plague them, recordings of radio traffic later revealed. A supervisor trying to send an engine crew, ambulance, and brush truck held them back because he couldn’t reach any leaders on the scene. “I have additional resources,” he called over the radio at 3:57. “I’m holding them until we have a definite assignment.”

  McLaughlin warned dispatch again to prepare for evacuations. “We’re working toward the trigger point for evacuating Pleasant Park and Kuehster Road,” he reported.

  The gully between the fire and the slope it had to climb to reach Kuehster Road was the boundary at which the fire passed out of CSFS control. As soon as the fire crossed into their jurisdiction, Rogers and McLaughlin would ask the sheriff to start evacuations.

  The chiefs hoped that people in the neighborhood weren’t waiting for that order, but they knew that many residents wait for authorities, or for technologies like reverse 911 calls or text messages, to tell them to get out. Homeowners tend to stay in their properties until the last minute. By then it’s often too late to leave safely. They can find themselves trapped in traffic on smoke-filled roads.

  At 4:41
Jefferson County dispatch reported that the fire had just leapt the gully and was making a “major run” that would necessitate evacuations. In seconds the blaze that crept down into the gully was leaping from treetop to treetop up the other side.

  McLaughlin and Rogers immediately let Michalak know that they were taking over the fire. At 4:54 they called to get everyone out of Pleasant Park and Kuehster Road.

  “Be advised we just requested Jeffco to initiate an evacuation,” McLaughlin called over the radio. “This thing is off to the races.”

  “It’s a running crown fire at this point,” Rogers reported six minutes later.

  McLaughlin looked up at the ridgeline for his lookout. He could see his portly assistant jogging as fast as he could from the flames.

  “He was literally running,” McLaughlin reported. “Running for his life.”

  The chief knew that anyone in the neighborhoods beyond his lookout would soon have to do the same. Rogers estimated the fire would reach the closest of the homes within two hours. Instead, the first homeowner would report his house burning 13 minutes later.6

  McLaughlin ordered firefighters to give up trying to put the fire out and instead try to save the homes it was headed for. He called for five strike teams—25 engines—to protect structures and assist with evacuations.

  By the time that call went out, two other fires were threatening homes in Jefferson County, and many of the fire trucks that had started out for the Lower North Fork were diverted to the other blazes. “Instead of them showing up in 45 minutes or an hour,” McLaughlin said, “resources were taking three and four hours to get here.”

  There were other things that weren’t going as planned. Many of the reverse 911 calls notifying residents of an evacuation rang phones far from the blaze. Changed or disconnected phone numbers, difficulties matching incident maps with phones, short-term renters, residents who didn’t sign up, and technological glitches gave Colorado’s various reverse 911 services a 50 percent call completion rate on good days. This wasn’t a good day. Wayward evacuation notices went to residents hundreds of miles away from the fire. The dispatchers, already overwhelmed, now had another flood of calls from confused people who mistakenly received notices to flee their homes. And almost nobody who actually needed to get the calls—Ann Appel and the other residents around Kuehster Road—received any evacuation notice at all.

  AS SMOKE FROM the Lower North Fork Fire filled the sky, an official driving through the neighborhood advised Sharon Scanlan not to worry, but she decided to round up the animals she and her husband, Tom, kept. By the time she loaded their last skittish horse into a trailer, the fire was in their pastures.

  “I knew that probably within five minutes my house was going to be gone,” she said.

  KRISTEN MOELLER SPENT MUCH of the morning and early afternoon watching the smoke from the window of the dream house she and her husband, Dave Cottrell, had spent years searching for. She never took the view of the mountains and crags for granted, even on a day like this, when the wind was so strong it upset their dogs.

  Kristen was due to catch a flight to California, but rather than packing for her trip, she packed up what she could from her house. A friend came by to help. When Kristen’s husband, Dave, called to inquire what was up with the fire, they could see flames in the forest below the house. Kristen broke down and handed off the phone.

  “You’ve got 30 seconds to tell me what you want to save,” their friend told Dave.

  KIM OLSON WAS A LITTLE ANNOYED that her husband wasn’t taking the situation as seriously as she was. “You don’t need to panic,” Doug told Kim as he washed his car. “We’ve seen this before.”

  On their deck, Kaleb, their oldest child, was cleaning the car’s floor mats.

  During the Hayman Fire, 10 years earlier, Kim and Doug had seen the red sky and put wet towels around their doors and windows to keep out the smoke. This didn’t seem as bad, but not knowing where the fire was terrified Kim.

  Kuehster Road residents hadn’t been notified of the controlled burn the previous October. That fire had also escaped, she had learned. A sheriff’s deputy who had noticed the fire spreading behind a locked gate had called the state foresters back to put it out. Kim couldn’t remember the CSFS ever having notified the residents of Kuehster Road of their nearby burns—or when they escaped. “Never, ever,” Kim said.

  Other residents drove through the neighborhood to try to get a fix on where the fire was and where it was going. Kim got out a topo map and looked at where the earlier escaped fire had burned. The wind was blowing eastward, and her house was directly east of the previous blaze. “That’s when I started throwing stuff in the car,” she told me.

  She had her daughter, Rhoanabella, age nine, videotape the house’s contents and called Doug to the computer, where Pinecam.com was putting up all the scanner calls related to the fire. He called their neighbors Dave and Carol Massa, who had called 911 about the burn the previous Thursday and reported more smoke coming from the Lower North Fork over the weekend. Doug told his neighbors that he didn’t think there was anything to worry about.

  Kim, however, was adamant. “I’m leaving,” she told him. “This is the big one.”

  As they led the kids outside, with Doug carrying their youngest, Quillan, age four, the sky had turned from gray to a dark black and red swirl. “In 15 or 20 minutes it went from something we had seen before to a red hurricane,” Kim said.

  A freight-train roar came out of the woods around their home. Big chunks of debris from houses, along with paper and ash, started to rain down on their yard as they ran to their cars. “That was probably the Appels’ house,” Kim realized, unaware that Ann Appel had also called 911 and been advised that there was nothing to worry about.

  Kim could see fire at the end of her driveway. “It’s too late,” Kim thought. “We’re not going to make it.”

  Doug threw the keys to their Jeep to Kim and loaded the kids and their dog into his car. Kim led the way in the Jeep up their drive and out to the road. “This is stupid,” she thought. “We should all be in the same car.”

  Doug’s car was filled with the panicked panting of his children. He handed his smartphone to Kaleb to record a video.

  “Daddy,” Quillan gasped, as sparks and embers flew past the car and bounced off the windshield.

  “We’ll make it,” he told them. “We’re going to be fine.”

  “Where’s Mom? What’s she stopping for?” his son cried.

  The only way out of Kuehster Road was to turn right at the top of their driveway. But the dead end to the left was, for the moment, clear of fire and smoke. Other escape routes for residents of Pleasant Park involved unmaintained tracks behind gates that were often locked. Kim started to turn away from the smoke onto the dead end, but another car raced out from it. It was Eddie Schneider, who had evacuated after his last conversation with the Lucases. Later, she would nickname him “Lucky Eddie,” but at the moment Kim had no idea who was in the car in front of her.

  “We should try to make it through,” she thought. She turned right and pulled in behind the other car.

  Ahead, the road vanished into a point of orange that looked like the light at the end of a tunnel but offered anything but hope. Doug followed, pointing out the red glow in the woods just below them on the right side of the road. “It’s down there,” he said as his son pointed the phone. “It’s down there now.”

  The crowns of trees just to the left of the road burst into flames. The children gasped as the fire closed in on them. “There it is,” Doug shouted, “right here.”

  From her father the firefighter, Kim had learned that an exploding wildfire can suck so much oxygen from the air that cars stall. The heat can melt their tires. She sped up into the blackness.

  “We’re out, we’re out, we’re out,” Doug shouted to his kids as they passed beyond the wall of smoke.

  Kim and Doug stopped beside a sunny pasture just outside the forest, embracing each other and their c
hildren as they looked back at the black smoke mushrooming over the road they had just driven on. A motorcycle vanished into the smoke, then raced back out seconds later.

  Doug turned to his wife. “I think I just killed Dave and Carol,” he said, recalling that not a half hour earlier he had nonchalantly told his neighbors that the smoke wasn’t anything to worry about.

  “We have to go,” Kim said as the smoke rolled toward them.

  When Kim realized that her husband had had her son shoot a video of their escape, she was furious. “How could he detach himself from the crisis like that?” she later fumed.

  But within days, as the video appeared on screens around the world, she realized how important the document Kaleb had created was.7

  DAVE BRUTOUT, GOING DOOR-TO-DOOR to warn residents, saw the fire roll onto the south end of Kuehster Road shortly after 4:45—about four minutes, he guessed, after he’d finished talking with Sam and Moaneti Lucas. “It was just folding over on top of itself,” he said. “What it was curling over was already bursting into flame.”

  It crashed up the road from the west in four or five waves, each one rolling farther north into the neighborhood. The flames leapt 100 feet into the sky and ran 200 feet per minute. “It took out a 10-acre [swath] at the end of Kuehster Road, and then it took [out] another 10-acre swath, and then another,” Brutout said. “The first one hit me in the ass as I was leaving.”