After observing some teams monitoring the weather and climate, and others managing hundreds of fire crews, dozens of aircraft, and thousands of other pieces of equipment sent to wildfires around the country, I walked through warehouses of portable weather stations, communications equipment, and airborne fire surveillance and suppression technologies. In Missoula, 350 miles away, I watched scientists create fire whirls in a test tube the size of a small silo. But as impressive as those resources were, in the weeks that I studied the maps of population expanding into Colorado’s Red Zones, I also learned that the flashy science and cutting-edge technologies available to study and respond to wildfires don’t always translate into advantages in fighting them.
I saw one of the more colorful firefighting technologies in a baby pool that sat atop a table in the Grand Ballroom of the Boulder Marriott. The blue tub decorated with cartoon octopuses and sea horses was half-filled with sand. From a pole above it, a digital projector and camera pointed straight down into the pool.
Rodrigo Moraga turned on the projector, spraying splotches of colored light onto the sand. The words “Wildfire” and “Black” appeared at the edge of the projection, along with backward and forward arrows, like those that control a tape player.
Half a dozen firefighters pressed in shoulder to shoulder around the pool as the ballroom lights dimmed. The training conference for emergency responders was planned before wildfires ravaged the state, but it was nonetheless an indication of a community awakening to how flammable it was. To Moraga, Boulder County’s residents couldn’t wake up fast enough. He was the first firefighter to respond to the Fourmile Canyon Fire, which broke out on Labor Day 2010 and was the first of four fires in four years that would set records for destruction and expense in Colorado. To Moraga, the smoke had hardly cleared before the Fourmile Canyon Fire was forgotten. But he wasn’t likely to forget it anytime soon.
He had hoped for a better turnout at his demonstration of the Simtable, a wildfire modeling tool. Yet the audience he managed to gather responded to the light show with the enthusiasm of high school boys playing a new video game, leaning in with murmurs and gasps.
He stabbed his hands into the glowing sand to model the Boulder Range according to an elevation profile projected by the simulation, then waved a laser pointer like a magic wand to raise a vision of the mountains above Boulder like a hologram. Forests glowed in different shades of green, grasslands in yellow. Some buttons and dials made of light controlled the weather in the simulation—wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature. Others assigned bulldozers, different types of aircraft, fire engines, and crews of firefighters. With his pointer he drew in fire lines, fuel breaks, and, finally, fire.
He used the laser to hit a Play button to start a time lapse, and the colored lines, dots, and splotches began to move. The fire grew in response to the weather, fuels, and firefighting efforts programmed into the simulation. Lines growing around it reflected the training and fitness of the crews he had chosen to fight the blaze and the terrain where they were working.
Moraga pointed his laser at the compass rose indicating wind speed and direction, spun its arrow, and pulled it longer, thus turning the gusts and increasing their force. The fire overran the line of firefighters.
The scene looked like the work of a sorcerer, and Moraga fit the part. He’s five feet six and wiry, with a shaved head and a soul patch that can make him look impish one moment and sinister the next. Rather than a fire department T-shirt, he wore the type of short-sleeved plaid shirt popular with the town’s rock climbers and mountain bikers.
He called up a fire that burned in the mountains above Santa Fe. The city’s grid projected on the sand reminded me of the nighttime view of Boulder from my porch. White dots representing cars marched like ants along the grid of roadways in a simulated evacuation from the spreading fire. Highways turned into gorged white lines as they backed up with gridlock. Eventually the red blotch of fire seeped over the thick cords of traffic.
“Those people are toast,” Moraga said.
“You just destroyed a town,” one of the firefighters watching the simulation said. “How do you feel about that?”
Moraga looked up with a wicked grin. “Pretty good,” he answered.
When I asked him if he’d run a simulation of the Fourmile Canyon Fire, his smile faded. “It wouldn’t have made a difference,” he said. “Except that I would have put a lot of retardant on my house.”
He handed the pointer to another firefighter, who set the program to read the laser flicking the sand as lightning strikes above Santa Fe. Other firefighters just held their Bic lighters to the sand to start new simulated blazes.
Moraga was born in Chile but grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. He came to Boulder to work as a ranger, with dreams of getting paid to backpack. Instead, he found himself fighting fires. He was on the first controlled fire the county set outside Boulder, then became its prescribed burn manager and an ignition specialist. After training as a fire behavior analyst, his first assignment was on the Hayman Fire (2002)—the largest fire in Colorado history. “Fire was my friend,” he said.
But he learned he preferred modeling it on a computer to fighting it with a Pulaski. “I was a terrible firefighter,” he said. “Digging line is not for me. But I can understand it. I knew what it was going to do. I was lucky to find an adventure that allowed me to use my brain and be on the fire, too.”
A company he cofounded, the Anchor Point Group, specializes in reducing the threat of wildfires to communities. The fact that he lived in a house along Fourmile Canyon was just another layer of expertise.
When the Fourmile Canyon Fire broke out on Labor Day 2010, Moraga was the first firefighter on the scene. “I called the chief. ‘Just send me an engine and a five-person hand crew,’ ” he said. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”
At a table across the ballroom from the high-tech simulation, Moraga drew the Fourmile Canyon Fire on a piece of hotel stationery. He marked the bonfire lit by an elderly volunteer firefighter that started the blaze, drew a long arrow to show the downburst of wind he believes blew it up, and then scrawled a blotch shaped like a holly leaf to show the spot fire it ignited.
The steep canyons above Boulder are perfect chimneys, and the winds on that Labor Day gusted hard. They squeezed the fire like springs. The flames bounced back up the canyons to the north, east, and west.
With flicks of his wrist, Moraga scratched lines to the edge of the paper from the blotch of fire. The line across Fourmile Canyon Drive to the gorge’s north-facing slopes was straighter and darker than the rest.
Northerly aspects above Boulder are generally wetter, which, counterintuitively, often makes them more likely to burn. Fire-prone Douglas firs flourish on the cold, moist slopes, and the wetter soils support more vegetation to fuel a fire. After years of fire suppression, some of the ponderosa pine forests in the canyons had more than 10 times the number of trees they would naturally carry.
Property owners with no view of their nearest neighbors made for another unhealthy crowd. According to a 2013 report from Headwaters Economics, Boulder County has developed more than half of its wildland-urban interface—the highest proportion in Colorado. The 5,409 homes that Headwaters identified in Boulder County’s WUI increased the fire risk just as much as the unhealthy forests.7
The land is a jigsaw puzzle of old mining claims, many now occupied by private homes, cut into public forests. Steep, zigzagging roads—some of them bulldozed without permits by the residents themselves—are difficult for fire trucks to navigate.
After telling a local reporter that the fire was “no big deal,” Moraga stopped by his own home, a 2,300-square-foot ranch set on five acres of pines and firs.
“I wasn’t very concerned about my house,” he said. The blaze was above it, and “fires back down slow.”
He’d cut down the trees to create defensible space, sited the propane tank far from the building, and kept pine needles and flammable furniture
off his deck. None of that made a difference.
“When I showed up, the hillside beside my house was on fire. But I couldn’t get an engine,” he told me. He was in charge of assigning resources to fight the fire and had already sent all the available engines elsewhere.
“We could have saved any one of the houses that burned in the Fourmile,” he said. “But when you’ve got all these houses threatened in different canyons, in absolutely terrible places as far as fire is concerned . . .
“I could have saved my own house with just 50 gallons of water,” he said. Instead, he watched the fire creep down the hill and onto his porch.
He stayed on the fire for two days. “Which is a day longer than I should have,” he said. “Considering that by the second day, my wife and kid were homeless.”
Eleven firefighters lost their homes in the fire, which also destroyed the Fourmile Fire Department’s firehouse, Moraga’s station.
Even a fire truck couldn’t save some homes. Tom Neuer, a former California firefighter who lived about a quarter mile from where the fire started, had an 8,000-gallon underground water tank and a fire truck retired from the Fourmile Fire Department that he had purchased to protect his property. He and his new wife spent the Labor Day weekend clearing trees and brush from around their house and driveway, part of the fire hazard mitigations Tom had been doing for a decade. They were gathering up the wood they had cut down when they smelled smoke.
The crown fire came over a nearby ridgeline with 100-foot flames that raced through the treetops with a roar his wife mistook for a retardant bomber. “It didn’t even touch the ground,” Tom told me.
He turned on the fire truck’s pump but abandoned it when he realized he had no chance of stopping the flames. “I left the engine running, and I left the hose running,” he told me. “The fire boiled over the house like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
He raced away in his van, bouncing into the air down switchbacks through walls of flame that rolled across the windshield like water and melted the side mirrors. Tom cursed loudly, recalling a fire truck driver he knew who died in a California wildfire. He survived, but his house did not.
The blaze burned 168 homes—multimillion-dollar mansions, single-wide trailers, and shacks built in the 1800s. More than $80 million worth of property burned. The National Interagency Coordination Center, the wildfire war room I had walked through in Boise, sent upwards of 1,000 people from 192 agencies and 20 states to join the fight.
Moraga handed me his sketch of the fire that destroyed his home and glanced back at the firefighters playing in the sandbox with the computer’s fire simulation.
“Fire big, man small,” he said. “We’re done living in the mountains.”
PART IV
Turning Up the Heat
13
Playing with Fire
Jamestown, Colorado—March 31, 2012
ON SUNNY SUMMER DAYS, Lefthand Canyon Drive, half a mile north of where the Fourmile Canyon Fire burned, fills with an average of 750 bicycles climbing to the hippie hamlets of Jamestown and Ward.1 Fishermen stand in Left Hand Creek, while motorcycles and ATVs join hikers at trailheads. But to many people who live in the canyon, the sportsmen who stand out the most aren’t the crowds visible on and along the road, but the ones they hear out in the woods. Gunshots on the nearby Forest Service land can make both the riders and residents nervous.
The week of the Lower North Fork Fire I biked up the canyon to find half a dozen firefighters mopping up a charred quarter acre at a turnout just west of Jamestown. It was one of two wildfires that broke out in the canyon that weekend. When I asked how the blaze had started, one of the firefighters pointed out the tattered targets hanging from some of the trees. Nearby I saw spent bullet casings on the ground.
The fires left residents of the canyon on edge about the risk of ignitions from gunshots in the woods. “It’s just potentially a deadly combination,” Mike Matzuk, a resident of Castle Gulch, told the Boulder Daily Camera, “. . . a scary combination for residents.”
A week later yellow tape blocked trailheads in the Roosevelt National Forest. Campfires still start most of the wildfires in the woods, but bullets and hot motorcycle engines ignite plenty, the rangers enforcing the ban told me.
In the days that followed, however, the concerns of the Forest Service were more than matched by the anger of shooters and bikers who were blocked from their forest playgrounds. Some barked about their Second Amendment rights or denied that bullets could start fires. But even sports not usually associated with sparks were igniting blazes.
In 2010 a golfer chipping his ball out of the rough at the Shady Canyon Golf Club in Orange County, California, hit a rock with his club, sparking a 12-acre fire that took helicopters and 150 firefighters nearly seven hours to extinguish.2 A year later a golfer at another Orange County course looked up from his chip shot to find himself surrounded by flames on a grassy hillside. Neither stomps from his feet nor ice and beverages from his cooler could snuff the fire, but a turn in the wind contained it against a cart path.3 In 2014 the Poinsettia Fire ignited on the seventh hole of the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa and went on to destroy five homes, 18 apartments, and a commercial building in San Diego County.4 One person was found dead in a transient camp burned over by the fire. Investigators never determined a definitive cause but identified a spark from a golf club as the likely culprit.
In 2012 shooters started far more wildfires than golfers. On the first day of summer in Saratoga Springs, Utah, more than 9,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes by the Dump Fire, which ignited when two riflemen were shooting in a landfill. The blaze threatened to overrun an explosives manufacturer.5 Sheriff James Tracy also worried that it would take down the area’s power grid (scores of utility poles burned). It was the 20th fire ignited by target shooting in Utah so far that year. Although the governor asked target shooters to refrain from firing in forests, a recently passed bill deprived Utah’s sheriffs of the authority to restrict gun use. Firearm enthusiasts, among the most diffuse and control-resistant recreational groups, continued to blast hot lead into paper-dry woodlands.
In the Dump Fire investigators eventually implicated a product that had become increasingly popular among marksmen—exploding targets, which were igniting woodlands across the country.6 These targets make it easier to see if a distant mark is hit, but their popularity is largely due to the entertaining flash and bang. “They tie a couple of them together and soak them in gasoline,” one forest firefighting friend told me.
The Springer Fire in Park County, Colorado, which burned more than 1,000 acres in 2012, was one of three fires started by exploding targets documented in the state and 16 noted by the U.S. Forest Service in 2012 and 2013. The website Wildfire Today counted 27 fires ignited by exploding targets in those years. One killed a marksman with shrapnel, another blew the hand off a man who was mixing the explosives, and a third killed a shooter and left a 10-foot-wide crater in the Oregon woods. In Pennsylvania an exploding target seriously injured two game commissioners who were fighting a fire at a gun range.7
In August 2013 the Forest Service outlawed exploding targets in national forests in the Rocky Mountains. They were already banned in Lefthand Canyon when I bicycled up to the firefighters there. But many shooters use the targets on private land, and the fires they start pay no heed to forest boundaries.
As U.S. forest managers struggled to reduce that risk, another, more family-friendly form of entertainment—paper sky lanterns, which rely on a small open flame to ascend into the sky—started carrying fire even farther than the exploding targets, igniting forests and structures around the world.8
14
Nuclear Frying Pan
Los Alamos, New Mexico—June 3, 2014
ON ANOTHER BIKE RIDE I learned about more worrisome weapons in the woods. From downtown Los Alamos, New Mexico, I biked west on Trinity Drive past the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed during World War II. The lab sit
s between the Rio Grande Gorge and the Jemez Mountains. The Pajarito Plateau rolls away from the forested peaks, its mesas spreading like tentacles toward the Rio Grande.
The lab’s 43-square-mile reservation is filled with ponderosa pines, some scattered among the cliffs and gullies, some in dense stands, and some just burnt, shattered trunks. Signs on the fence around the lab warn “No Trespassing, Explosives.” I wondered how fire or firefighters could interact with a landscape filled with bombs, atomic or otherwise.
In the Jemez Mountains above Los Alamos I could see remnants of 2011’s Las Conchas Fire, which threatened both the town and the laboratory. When I turned back east, I descended past scars of the Cerro Grande Fire, which burned in 2000 from Bandelier National Monument, the site of ancient Native American cliff dwellings and ruins, onto the lab’s land. The two blazes highlight a dangerous dilemma in the forests around Los Alamos.
For more than half a century after the founding of the nuclear lab, firefighters attacked every natural fire in the surrounding forests. Heavy grazing removed the grasses that carry the low-intensity ground fires that thin the understory. In the past, fire normally burned the area about every 10 years, but after decades without it some forests had 10 times the number of trees they had historically.
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