“The smoke came across the roadway, and we just didn’t have visibility anymore,” Justin said. “We went off into the steeper part of the ditch.”
Flames engulfed their old fire engine, but the Wagers boys managed to escape.
When I heard about their truck getting burned over, I thought of the Struckmeyers, who had been burned over in their fire truck by the Heartstrong Fire about 75 miles to the west three months earlier. They were with the Wages Fire Department, so they were easy to confuse with the Wagers family, even without the remarkably similar circumstances.
Prairie fires typically stay close to the ground and burn so fast that they do little to hardwood trees and telephone poles. Not so in Last Chance. The grass fire burned down nearly 100 utility poles. “Grass that was maybe two to three inches tall was burning flames that were starting telephone poles on fire, 20 feet in the air,” Justin said.
The fire jumped roads, and where it couldn’t, it blasted through the culverts beneath them.
“I’d never seen anything like it. It was about 107 degrees that day. The humidity was two percent . . . perfect conditions for a fire,” he recalled.
Part of those conditions, he said, was the invasive grass that draws fire like flowers draw bees. “I guarantee there was lots of cheatgrass that was burned,” he said. “When you get a really wet fall and a really wet spring, you get a lot of cheatgrass that gets real green and nice, and then it’s dead by the middle of June. After that it’s nothing but a bunch of fuel for fire sitting out there.”
Efforts to level the playing fields where the cheater now has an advantage include prescribed burns, herbicides, and fuel breaks. Researchers are even experimenting with absorbent polymers, like those found in disposable diapers, which can deprive the early-sprouting invasive of the moisture it needs to get a head start on native grasses. None have had much success in stopping cheatgrass’s spread.
19
Forest Jihad
AS THE HIGH PARK FIRE burned through beetle-killed forests, and invasive weeds sped the Last Chance Fire across the plains, a different kind of firebug threatened the forests above Colorado Springs and others around the world.
Just weeks before the Colorado fires, Inspire, the online magazine for Al Qaeda, charged jihadists to ignite wildfires as tools of terrorism.1 The 11-page article titled “It Is Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb” noted that “in America, there are more houses built in the countryside than in the cities.”
It cited the hundreds of fatalities and towns burned over in Australia as something terrorists could replicate, or even surpass. Instructions detailed how to construct “ember bombs” and timing devices, and described the forests and weather conditions in which they would burn most destructively.
“Fire is one of the soldiers of Allah,” it announced.
The article wasn’t the first to encourage using wildfire as a tool of terrorism.2 “Summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad,” the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network advised in a posting discovered by U.S. intelligence officials in 2008. It quoted imprisoned Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Suri calling on “all Muslims in the United States, in Europe, in Russia, and in Australia to start forest fires.”
“You can hardly begin to imagine the level of the fear that would take hold of people,” the posting noted.
Alexander Bortnikov, chief of Russia’s Federal Security Service, cited jihadist websites when he blamed terrorists for a series of fires in Europe that summer.3 “This method allows al-Qaeda to inflict significant economic and moral damage without serious preliminary preparations, technical equipment, or significant expenses,” Bortnikov said.
Captured terrorist Assem Hammoud, who was charged in 2006 with plotting to blow up train tunnels in New York, also admitted to planning arsons in California forests. Another Al Qaeda operative admitted to plotting wildfires in Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, using timed devices that would ignite after the pyro-terrorists left the country.
Wildfire has long been a weapon. Native Americans and Australians used fire to push back white settlers. During World War II Japan launched more than 9,000 “fire balloons” over U.S. forests. They were largely ineffective, but in one case killed six Oregon picnickers who were attempting to drag a balloon out of the woods when it exploded.
While there are actually few substantiated cases of wildfires started by terrorists, arsonists started six of the nine fires studied in the United Nations’ global assessment of megafires in 2011.4 At the time of that report, the largest wildfire in Arizona history was 2002’s Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which grew out of two arsons, one committed by an Apache looking for work on a fire crew, and the other by a woman signaling for help when her car ran out of gas. The report also listed Colorado’s largest wildfire, the Hayman Fire, which burned during the same summer as the Arizona fire and turned into a legal drama.
Terry Lynn Barton, a Forest Service ranger, found the Hayman Fire while patrolling during a fire ban. Later, she admitted to starting it, claiming she was burning a letter from her husband denying her a divorce. Investigators, however, found no evidence of burnt paper in the ring where the blaze started, Barton’s husband denied writing the letter, and she had recently asked to attend a wildfire investigation class, leading to suspicions that she started the blaze to make herself into a hero by discovering it.5
During Colorado’s explosive fires of 2012, firebugs again plagued the area. The Teller County sheriff reported that a half-acre blaze outside Woodland Park was suspicious, while during a single two-hour period that same day firefighters in Divide responded to seven arsons in the forest. In Colorado Springs, a bastion of conservative politics, the arsons in the forests near the city sparked chatter of terrorism in coffee shops and online. FBI agents joined with Colorado Springs police to investigate them.
“It infuriates me and it just makes my blood boil,” Colorado governor John Hickenlooper said of the possibility that the Waldo Canyon Fire was arson. “It creates a physical reaction in me.”6
Wildland arson was increasingly seen as a serious crime. Three years earlier, in California, a jury sentenced arsonist Raymond Lee Oyler to death after convicting him of murder for starting the Esperanza Fire that killed five firefighters on a U.S. Forest Service engine crew in 2006. Oyler was the first person sent to death row in the United States for starting a wildfire, but just three years after his sentence, prosecutors asked for the death penalty for Rickie Lee Fowler, who was convicted of starting a 2003 wildfire in the San Bernardino Mountains blamed for five fatal heart attacks.
ARSONS, IN REALITY, make up a small portion of the wildfires humans start. Research from Jeffrey Prestemon of the U.S. Forest Service and economist David Butry showed that arsons in national forests declined by more than 80 percent per capita between the late 1970s and 2008. Fires ignited by discarded cigarettes, another popular scapegoat for wildfires, declined by 90 percent. Railways, which once started myriad wildfires with sparks from their wheels and engines, also start fewer fires today, largely due to spark arrester technology.7
Still, as communities and roads encroach deeper into wildlands, human ignitions, most of them unintentional, increasingly outstrip natural starts. Power lines, trash burns, campfires, and sparks from engines, wheels, and machinery ignite thousands of blazes every year. In February 2017 Jennifer Balch, a fire ecologist at the University of Colorado, and several of her colleagues released a paper that looked back over 20 years of government agency wildfire records in the United States. They found that between 1992 and 2012, humans started 84 percent of the nation’s wildfires. Humans also tripled the length of the fire season by starting those fires at times of the year when lightning ignitions were rare, and spread those blazes over an area seven times larger than that affected by natural blazes.8
One investigator I met described a suspicious fire that ignited along a roadway. He dug through the charred weeds, certain he’d find some type of incendiary device, but instead discovered a culprit that left him shaki
ng his head and laughing. A broken bottle had magnified a sunbeam to ignite flames in the parched grass.
PART V
Extended Attack
20
Mountain Shadows
Colorado Springs—June 23, 2012
FROM HIS TRUCK RACING SOUTH on Interstate 25 on the Saturday in which the most wildfires on record exploded across the state, Jim Schanel could look down the length of the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. The plume of the High Park Fire above Fort Collins filled his rearview mirror. His windshield framed the billowing cloud of the Waldo Canyon Fire outside Colorado Springs.
“This is beyond what mankind can deal with,” he thought. “This is going to be catastrophic. We don’t have the resources [or] any idea how to manage it.”
For more than 30 years Jim drove at columns of smoke with the adrenaline rush of a kid on Christmas morning. “This is going to be a good firefight,” he would think as he approached big ones. This time, however, he had a knot in his stomach.
“I saw the header in my rearview from High Park and a header in my front windshield,” he said. “[For] the first time, I think in my career, I was terrified.”
During the previous 13 days at the High Park Fire, he’d fought to save homes scattered throughout the mountains. On his last day on the blaze above Fort Collins, flames climbed out of Poudre Canyon and charged north at Red Feather Lakes and the Glacier View Meadows subdivision. “We were hoping it wouldn’t,” Schanel told me. “But it did.”
He was working with a federal team on structure protection, side by side with state, county, and local crews, as well as National Guard troops. “We put a lot of resources in there,” he said. But the fire behavior was like nothing Schanel had ever seen. “We pulled a lot of firefighters back to safety zones,” he continued. “We lost some structures, and we went back in after the fact and we were able to save some.”
When Schanel could get a view to the south, he could see the smoke rising above his hometown.
Schanel, a structure protection specialist on the federal Type 1 Incident Management Team fighting the High Park Fire, was also a battalion chief on the Colorado Springs Fire Department. Burly, with a graying mustache and worn-out knees, he was the city’s most experienced forest firefighter. He still had a day left in his two-week assignment with the feds when he told the High Park leadership that he needed to go home. “My backyard is having their day,” he told them. “It’s . . . the big one.”
But it wasn’t the only big one. Multiple large fires were going to make getting resources for the new ones difficult. There already weren’t enough planes or retardant to drop from them.
“If there’s no slurry, what do you do? You can’t put firefighters in front of that kind of extreme fire behavior,” he said.
“Driving down the Front Range and seeing that header, I knew we were in trouble and that we didn’t have the infrastructure in place to handle it,” he continued. “. . . A lot of fires were going to go unattended or unchecked. I knew the behavior of these fires and the condition of the fuels. They were going to become big and fast and impact a lot of people.”
THE WESTERN EDGE OF COLORADO SPRINGS is about 10 miles due east and 8,000 feet below the summit of Pikes Peak, the most eastward of the seventy-six 14,000-foot mountains in the United States. The peak is more than twice the height of any mountain between it and the Atlantic Ocean. At its foot the forests are decidedly drier than those at the north end of the Front Range, with oily and fire-prone Gambel oaks mixed among the ponderosa pines. A series of ridgelines and wooded canyons descend into the city of nearly 440,000 people. Colorado Springs presses so hard against the mountains that one-third of it is in the wildland-urban interface, where homes are threatened by wildfire.
Waldo Canyon cuts into the mountains about a mile northwest of Manitou Springs, a quaint hamlet of artists and tourists that is effectively the western arm of Colorado Springs. Another gorge, Williams Canyon, rises due north out of Manitou like a long funnel. Three miles to its northeast is Queens Canyon, which spills southeast from the mountain slopes to Glen Eyrie, a Christian conference center and castle, and then onto the Garden of the Gods, the red, 300-foot-tall fins of rock that mark the western edge of Colorado Springs like the relics of an ancient wall.
Mountain Shadows, a suburban neighborhood dense with housing on wide, paved streets, lies within that imaginary wall just north of Queens Canyon. Even though the subdivision abuts the Pike National Forest, most of its residents didn’t consider wildfires a threat. Most of the neighborhood’s trees had been planted there by its residents, and lawns provided most of the grass. It seemed impossible that a fire could burn downhill from the mountains into the suburban development. To add to their sense of security, just north of the suburb is the 18,500-acre grounds of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Cedar Heights is outside the imaginary wall—a half mile west of the Garden of the Gods, and the same distance east of Waldo Canyon. Dozens of roads, at least 15 of them dead ends, burrow through the woods atop a foothill between Williams and Queens Canyons. As opposed to Mountain Shadows, Cedar Heights seemed an easy target for the fire.
WITHIN HOURS OF TRYING to hold the High Park Fire back from the homes of Glacier View Meadows, Jim Schanel was 170 miles south preparing Cedar Heights for the arrival of the Waldo Canyon Fire. Bulldozers carved a line between the development and the forest. Planes painted the edge of the evacuated neighborhood with retardant. Teams set up trucks and hoses to protect homes, a microwave tower, and infrastructure for the city’s water department.
I joined spectators crowding near the Garden of the Gods to watch bombers dropping slurry as 100-foot flames leapt close enough that we were convinced the clouds of black smoke came from burning houses. But late Monday the fire retreated without having burned any homes. The work put in by firefighters and residents preparing their properties and neighborhood—Cedar Heights was one of the most “firewise” communities in Colorado Springs—paid off. The fire burned northwest, away from the city.
“People kind of relaxed a little bit,” Jim recalled. “It wasn’t right at our doorstep anymore.”
At a community meeting, evacuees demanded to know when they’d be allowed back into their homes. Other residents called the county to complain about neighbors who had allowed branches, pine needles, and weeds to accumulate in violation of fire codes. Monday’s temperature reached 98 degrees, the fourth record-hot day in a row.
“If you looked at what was going on in the rest of the Front Range, we probably should have been hypervigilant the entire time that fire burned away from us,” Schanel told me.
RICH HARVEY IS ONE OF 17 Type 1 incident commanders in the nation. His day job is with the Nevada Division of Forestry, but he puts that aside when the federal government taps him to manage the response to the largest, most complex fires in the United States.
The National Incident Management System categorizes fires from Type 5, which can be taken care of by just a handful of people and a truck or two, to Type 1, which usually has more than 1,000 personnel as well as aircraft and support equipment. Management runs from the National Interagency Coordination Center, the huge war room in Boise, Idaho, watching over the responses to fires across the country, through 11 regional coordination centers, and down to state and local governments. Harvey was called up by the feds in Boise, but he would have to work with the locals who had already responded.
Lanky and folksy, he started fighting fires 35 years earlier, when Colorado was known for its “asbestos forests,” which rarely burned big enough to require a visit from a Type 1 incident commander. Now the state was having so many big fires, it seemed like Harvey’s second home. In 2012 he fought fires in Colorado from March until December, starting with the Lower North Fork Fire, the controlled burn that ran wild and killed Ann Appel and Sam and Moaneti Lucas.
“The Lower North Fork was surprising,” he told me. “It’s March and you’re at 8,000 feet . . . That’s not normal. It was just too
early and too high of a place.”
But the Waldo Canyon Fire, three months later, was in the middle of Colorado’s fire season.
Harvey and his crew of about 50 wildfire managers took over the blaze at six Monday morning. He could see that all the windows of opportunity for a bad fire were wide open and lined up, just waiting for a strong wind to blow through them. Record temperatures and extreme drought had stressed overgrown forests of ponderosa pines. Oily and fire-prone Gambel oaks had been nipped by a late frost, killing their flat leaves, which now rode the wind like flaming papers to start spot fires. High-elevation forests of lodgepole pines had historically low moisture content and tended to burn in “stand-replacing” conflagrations.
“Colorado had a bull’s-eye on it for fire potential,” Harvey said.
There was another complication that he had never seen in Colorado before. The fire was running at a city of nearly half a million people.
“Every direction the fire [could] move in [was] a bad direction,” he told me.
Harvey started trying to connect the dots that could keep the fire out of Colorado Springs. Bulldozers and hand crews dug a fire line between the forest and the city, anchoring it in the already burnt land of Cedar Heights. He sent other crews and engines up Rampart Range Road, which switchbacks up a ridgeline northwest of the city into the mountains. Air tankers could help hold the ridge with retardant drops. But if the fire made it past the road, it had an open run at Colorado Springs. And once it hit the city, there didn’t appear to be much he could do about it.
Harvey’s command ended at the city line. Colorado Springs is a “home rule” municipality. If the fire crossed into the city, Mayor Steve Bach and his fire chief, Rich Brown, announced, the decisions to evacuate and how to fight the blaze were theirs.
Megafire Page 20