Megafire

by Michael Kodas

  The wind blew off his helmet, chin strap, and goggles. A firebrand struck him in the eye.

  “Kids were running down the road with their stuff in plastic bags,” he told me. “Their bags were melting. One resident drove off the road and off the embankment and had to climb into a fire truck.”

  Some people were headed back into the neighborhood, so Brutout blocked the road.

  “Residents in town saw the smoke and drove around roadblocks and through creeks and through fences to get to their homes,” he said. “A deputy drove . . . at 40 miles per hour past my roadblock into a smoked-out road.”

  Jefferson County deputies David Bruening and Jason Hertel helped a homeowner on North Trail Court load his horses into a trailer. Then the man announced, “I’m not leaving. I’ve built this all by myself.”8

  The deputies couldn’t make him leave, but they weren’t staying. Around 6:20 they and two other sheriff’s deputies lined up their four cars in a caravan and began driving out Kuehster Road toward Pleasant Park. Visibility was near zero, with ash, smoke, and flames hiding the road. Deputy Bruening navigated by GPS in his car but veered off the pavement. He pinballed in and out of a ditch, then hit a small tree. When he tried to back away from it, the car got stuck on some large rocks. Flames surrounded him.9

  The other deputies turned on all their lights to guide Bruening to their vehicles, but in the dense smoke he still couldn’t see them. Deputy Jerry Chrachol pulled behind the stuck patrol car and radioed Bruening, who ran to the other vehicle and dove in. The cars retreated to an open pasture and waited for a fire truck to lead them out.10

  ANDY HOOVER WAS HOME ALONE when he heard the fire chiefs recommend an evacuation over his police scanner. He called his wife to tell her what was happening and repeatedly called his friends the Lucases, across the street, confirming that they planned to evacuate.

  A few minutes after they last spoke with Andy, Sam and Moaneti were ready to pull out, but Sam ran back into the garage, where he had a fire suppression system that could cover his house with foam. His wife waited outside.

  Meanwhile, Andy moved furniture and valuables away from windows, then, although he was confident his house could endure the flames, loaded up his truck to escape. He saw the sky flashing black and orange. Sparks and firebrands filled the air. It was safer inside the house, he decided. “This might be my last day,” he thought.

  He hunkered down in a hall as the firestorm raced over his house, which heated up like an oven. Window glass cracked, shattered, or blew out. He heard a propane tank explode.

  The tempest moved fast. Andy saw flames on his decks. He went out and doused one, but the fire on the other, outside Jeanie’s greenhouse, grew quickly. With the power out, Andy lost water pressure before he could extinguish it. When he went back in, the house was filling with smoke. Something was burning inside. He got on his hands and knees and made his way to the garage. Andy started his truck, but the garage door didn’t respond when he pushed the opener. He pulled at the door but couldn’t budge it, so he got back in his truck, floored the accelerator, and smashed out of the garage. “They don’t build them like they used to,” he joked afterward.

  Outside, trees were charred, but the flames were subsiding. A mountainside covered with spot fires looked like the Milky Way. Andy stopped his truck and looked back at his house. Slowly the windows lit up orange and flickered with flames, like a jack-o’-lantern’s wide eyes and grimacing mouth. The house built to endure a fire on the outside burned from the inside. He saw the president’s library burning. Herbert Hoover’s china, guns, wine, and furniture would soon be rubble.

  Andy called a 911 dispatcher to report that his home was burning but declined the dispatcher’s advice to keep driving out of the neighborhood. “I think I’m going to hang out here until I know a better idea,” he said. He was safely in the black—parked on pavement surrounded by charred ground. “It seems like a dumb idea to move.”

  Andy turned up the air-conditioning in his truck. Around 7 p.m. he stepped from the cab to shoot a video of the flames exploding through the roof and windows of his house. Across the street, the Lucases’ home was a blackened heap with a burnt truck outside it. In the driveway Moaneti still waited for her husband to return from the collapsed, smoldering garage.

  12

  Red Zones

  DAVE BRUTOUT, THE FIREFIGHTER who had warned the Lucases and many other homeowners to evacuate, met up with his captain near the radio towers along Kuehster Road. “There are people that did not make it out of there,” Brutout told him.

  With the winds and the temperature dropping, the flames were starting to calm, but there was smoke in the air, fire in the trees, and rubble on the ground. Brutout walked back into the neighborhood in front of two fire trucks. In a long driveway he moved fallen limbs so they could get an engine to the burning house.

  “When I moved the fourth one, it wasn’t a log. That was the resident I’d talked to a few minutes before,” he said of finding the Lucases. “To look at my friends [lying in] the driveway . . .”

  FROM MY HOME IN BOULDER, 45 miles to the north, the smoke of the Lower North Fork Fire rose like a thunderhead out of the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies.

  At Bill McLaughlin’s firehouse, television satellite trucks and reporters crowded the parking lot, while inside firefighters and sheriff’s deputies scrambled to put together their incident command post. I stood in the station’s garage, empty of trucks, as leaders of the incident clustered in a corner away from the chaos.

  Three people were dead. The Lucases had already been found, but Ann Appel’s body, buried in the rubble of her home, wouldn’t be discovered for days.

  Some evacuees moved in with family and friends nearby, but most gathered at a motel a few miles from Pleasant Park. They frantically tried to account for their neighbors—knocking on the doors of one another’s rooms, calling one another’s cellphones, and conferring in the lobby. Some were unable to speak and others incapable of stopping. Most had no idea whether their own homes were burning. Kim Olson and Doug Gulick’s house survived, although their property was badly burned. Tom and Sharon Scanlan, and Kristen Moeller and Dave Cottrell, would lose their homes.

  Whether they were officials wearing a uniform or evacuees wearing the only clothes they owned after the fire consumed all their belongings, they had one question in common.

  “How did a fire set to protect us turn into our destroyer?”

  WHILE OFFICIALS AND RESIDENTS POINTED to the overgrown forest, the drought, confused communications, failing emergency notification systems, and the very wisdom of lighting a forest heavy with fuel and parched with drought on fire, another part of the answer could be found simply by looking at a map and the local census. It wasn’t just trees overcrowding the forest.

  Laura Frank was an investigative reporter at the Rocky Mountain News until that newspaper’s sad closing in 2009. The following year she and I were journalism fellows together at the University of Colorado. We spoke often about the state’s rapidly expanding wildland-urban interface, or WUI—the term firefighters use to describe the area where communities abut fire-prone landscapes. During her fellowship Laura founded I-News, an investigative journalism operation, then hired Burt Hubbard, another veteran investigative reporter from the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post. Burt took maps that the Colorado State Forest Service had made over the previous decade showing the state’s “Red Zones”—its most flammable forests—and overlaid them with maps of Colorado’s previous three censuses.

  When I saw his maps, just a few weeks before the Lower North Fork Fire, I was dumbfounded. On Hubbard’s computer screen the expanding population rushed into Colorado’s most fire-prone forests like an invading army.

  Between 2000 and 2010, more than 100,000 people had moved into the state’s Red Zones. When we looked back another 10 years, to the 1990 census, that number rose to a quarter million new residents. By 2012, 1.1 million Colorado residents and half a million homes—that�
��s one in four homes in the state, and one in five residents—risked burning in a wildfire.

  In Jefferson County, where the Lower North Fork Fire burned, 28 percent of the population lived in a Red Zone, a 24 percent increase over 10 years earlier. In other Colorado counties like Summit, Teller, and Pitkin—home to Aspen—more than 90 percent of the residents lived in Red Zones.

  Across the West, the story was the same. A 2015 report by CoreLogic, a company that analyzes data for the global real estate and home insurance industries, identified 1.1 million homes in 13 western states as highly vulnerable to wildfire. Rebuilding those homes would cost $296 billion.1 CoreLogic counted only homes in specific zip codes that were built with flammable materials and located close to vegetation that could put embers on their roofs. A 2013 study by the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station noted that nearly a third of all U.S. homes were in the wildland-urban interface.2

  So it should come as no surprise that four times more homes burned in U.S. wildfires in the 2010s than in the 1990s. In 2008 the International Code Council reported that, on average, 932 structures burned in wildfires each year during the 1990s, but in the first eight years of the twenty-first century, 2,726 structures burned annually.3 From 2011 to 2016, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s annual wildland fire reports, an average of 3,754 structures burned each year—quadruple the average of the 1990s.

  As frightening as those numbers are, they’re likely just the beginning.

  In 2012, according to Headwaters Economics, a think tank in Bozeman, Montana, the cost of protecting homes in Montana from wildfires was $28 million. At the current rate of development, that figure would increase to $40 million by 2025. Add a one-degree increase in summertime temperatures—which researchers predict would lead to a 125 percent increase in the number of acres burned in wildfires in the state and a doubling of the cost of protecting homes from those fires—and that one state would need to spend $84 million a year defending homes from forest fires.4

  In the 1990s, according to the Headwaters research, the average cost of wildfires to the federal government was less than $1 billion a year. In the decade leading up to the Lower North Fork Fire, that average increased to more than $3 billion.5

  Then there’s nearly $2 billion spent annually by state governments, and similar costs borne by local governments and fire protection districts, like the Elk Creek, North Fork, and Inter-Canyon fire departments that responded to the Lower North Fork Fire.

  Yet 84 percent of the private land in the WUI of the western United States remains undeveloped. Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters, estimates that if just half of that land were developed, the costs of fighting wildfires for the federal government alone would run as high as $4.3 billion a year. That’s nearly 80 percent of the Forest Service’s average annual budget.

  Headwaters’ studies show that 30 percent of all the money spent on wildfires is associated with keeping homes from burning. Currently, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that protecting homes accounts for somewhere between 50 and 95 percent of its funds for fighting wildfires.

  While Laura, Burt, and I studied the Red Zones, Tania Schoennagel, a researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, was looking at how areas zoned for future development are at even greater wildfire risk.

  Earlier housing developments in Colorado’s Red Zones were generally at lower elevations, had more widely spaced trees, and were located in less steep terrain—those parklike ponderosa pine woodlands that Mike Battaglia showed me. The fires in many of those forests, if excess fire suppression didn’t let them grow unnaturally thick with vegetation, tend to burn along the ground with low intensity. In most of those forests, if they were restored to their historic density and health, homeowners would likely confront more manageable, less intense fires.

  But new developments in the Red Zones are increasingly at elevations above 8,000 feet, in forests often dominated by lodgepole pines that naturally burn in large, intense crown fires that destroy entire stands of trees. Other, “mixed-conifer” forests, which grow above about 7,500 feet, depend less on fire than lodgepole forests, but still burn more intensely than most ponderosa pine forests. Steep slopes and chimneylike canyons in the high country can magnify the intensity of the fires in lodgepole and mixed-conifer woodlands.

  “As you move up in elevation you get . . . very dense forests—those lodgepole pine forests,” Schoennagel told me when I visited her. “Characteristic of those are these high-severity fires that happen very infrequently and burn through the treetops. They’re very difficult to fight.”

  Topographic maps show that all of the homes destroyed in the Lower North Fork Fire were above 8,000 feet. But the fact that more trees burn in a forest doesn’t mean that more homes have to.

  Jack Cohen, of the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, has walked through neighborhoods across the country after wildfires reduced them to rubble, and crawled through countless incinerated homes on his hands and knees trying to track down the culprit in their demise. He’s seen hundreds, like Andy and Jeanie Hoover’s, that ignited after the fire passed, sometimes hours later. Often green, unburnt trees surrounded the charred houses.

  Cohen came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, and his obsession with what he’s come to call the “home ignition zone” grew out of his own playing with matches as a child. “I really didn’t know I was a prescribed fire–lighting boss when I was 12 years old, but that’s basically what I did,” he told an audience at a fire conference in Denver a few months before the prescribed burn exploded onto the homes of Kuehster Road.

  Cohen grew up in Southern California’s chaparral, where both fuels to burn and the supplies to ignite them were easy to find. “In the fifties,” he said, “everybody smoked, so there were matches everywhere.”

  He lit a teddy bear cholla, or jumping cactus, near the outbuildings on his family’s property. “I wasn’t totally stupid,” he said. “I had a hose across the fence and turned on. But by the time I got the hose, [the cactus] was gone.”

  The fire burned a swath of the family’s land but didn’t destroy any of their buildings. Years later, as a college student studying wildfire, he watched a film of the 1961 Bel Air–Brentwood Fire.

  “I had this impression of wildfire spreading to and igniting the [houses],” he said. “The video showed flames doing that, but also igniting houses one to two blocks away.”

  In fact, in Brentwood houses more than a mile away from the fire ignited.

  “It’s not necessarily the big flames [that are the most dangerous],” he told me. “That’s the thing that captures our attention. It’s clearly the thing that would threaten us the greatest as people. But . . . one of the products of those extreme fire behavior situations are firebrands. People tend to ignore the firebrands because [they’re] not mortally threatening.”

  While 100-foot flames in the trees may pass by a home or neighborhood, a few needles in a gutter, grass under a deck, or a broom leaning on a porch can catch a tiny ember that will ignite a house. Or a puddle of flame, just inches high, can work its way to the wood siding.

  “Instead of thinking about it in terms of the big flames causing the ignitions, let’s think about it in terms of the massive amounts of firebrands that are lofted into the residential area,” he said, “and the houses themselves becoming the primary fuel source.”

  Firebrands can fly more than a mile, so keeping the forest far enough from homes so that no embers could land on them would require massive clear-cuts. Cohen doesn’t think that is necessary. Rather than cutting down all the trees, according to Cohen’s research, diligently picking up tree needles, keeping woodpiles and propane tanks far away from structures, and installing metal roofs are more effective methods of keeping homes from burning. “We can . . . have extreme wildfire behavior and still not necessarily have . . . a residential fire disaster,” he told me.

  Yet in the Lower North Fork Fire, many of the owners of h
omes that burned, like the Hoovers, had done all of those things.

  When Tom and Sharon Scanlan began building their home in the Kuehster Road community six years before the Lower North Fork Fire, they could see mountainsides scarred by 2002’s Hayman Fire. “We looked at it every single day,” Tom told me as we walked through his charred home and woods after the Lower North Fork Fire.

  Tom, a retired U.S. Air Force general who oversaw rocket launches, knows a little bit about combustion. Those charred mountainsides inspired him to build his mountain home out of fire-resistant, insulated concrete; to bury the propane tank far from the house; and to cut scores of trees to create defensible spaces around the house and barn.

  “We often had guys come up and talk to us from the state tree forestry,” he said. “We understood the risks, and we . . . did everything . . . more than was recommended. I was cutting down trees every year.”

  Even so, the Lower North Fork Fire left the Scanlans’ home a charred ruin.

  “There was no mitigation that could possibly be done to stop what happened here,” he said.

  COLORADO, LIKE THE WEST as a whole, saw a marked increase in the number of wildfires during the 2000s. State records show that 217,960 acres burned from 1990 through 1999. In the following decade, from 2000 through 2009, 889,343 acres burned—a fourfold increase.6

  What caused this increase? The warming and drying climate extended the fire season. Excess suppression of fires and resistance to prescribed burning and thinning projects left some forests with dangerously heavy fuel loads. But what turned the subsequent fires into disasters was the booming population in the forest.

  THE UNITED STATES HAS DEVELOPED a vast collection of cutting-edge technologies that can be used to look at how the weather, climate, vegetation, topography, and human development drive wildfires around the planet, as well as to manage the response to them. At the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, I stood in a room the size of a small grocery store amid an array of computer screens and large television monitors overseeing the nation’s fight against wildfire. In its ability to monitor hundreds of fires at a time (as well as to respond to everything from hurricanes to terrorist attacks), to oversee as many as 30,000 firefighters, and to manage everything from shovels to satellites, the command center is often compared to a war room at the Pentagon.