Steve Riker, a captain with the Colorado Springs Fire Department, ended up as the incident commander inside the city. Riker started his firefighting career in the U.S. Air Force two years after Harvey started fighting wildfires. His father had been a Marine Corps firefighter at Pearl Harbor. Among the firefighting memorabilia on the mantel of Riker’s home is a black-and-white photo of his father carrying a young woman out of a burning house in Flint, Michigan. That woman died, but he recalls another woman whom his father saved when she was a child calling him more than 20 years later to thank him. “That’s the only time I’ve seen my dad cry,” Riker said.
The captain was a heavy rescue specialist, but had no current wildland firefighting certification. And despite his experience and the long lineage of firefighting in his family, Riker had advanced as far as he could in the Colorado Springs Fire Department because he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. Still, he would hold the position of incident commander on the largest fire in Colorado Springs history.
Riker was on his way to officiate a basketball game when he heard that a fire had broken out in Waldo Canyon. He left the gym to oversee a handful of engines that patrolled the western edge of the city looking for firebrands or embers that could start spot fires. He could see flames from the growing wildfire in a canyon. It was as close to the city as he’d ever seen a forest fire. That night, while they watched over the Glen Eyrie estate, his crew bedded down wherever they could to grab a bit of rest for the next day.
On Monday, while he was patrolling, residents in Mountain Shadows asked him if he thought they should evacuate. “I would have left 24 hours ago,” he told them.
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY MORNINGS Riker and his firefighters held their briefings jointly with Harvey’s Type 1 team. After the briefings, however, the two teams split up and worked independently. The federal firefighters confronted the blaze on the mountain, while the city firefighters set up to keep it there. This is just one indication of the increasingly complex and confused response.
The city had no experience with this kind of fire. While most of the firefighters on the west side of Colorado Springs were trained to fight forest fires, only about half the city’s firefighters overall had “red cards” certifying that they had trained for wildland firefighting. Communications, maps, staging areas, and mobile command posts would all have to be arranged on the fly.
The division between the federal and city firefighters was just the beginning of the jurisdictional complications. El Paso County sheriff Terry Maketa was the county fire marshal, so he managed evacuations and the firefighting response there. Air force firefighters would protect the academy. Even the Colorado Springs Utilities had its own fire crews and command structure.
The different jurisdictions had different types of radios that did not necessarily communicate with one another. When Riker picked up a vehicle at the start of the fire, he was initially given a maintenance truck with no radio at all. He switched that vehicle for a Tahoe that had a radio and a lot more power. But it didn’t have a map book.
Maps would be a challenge, whether there was one in the truck or not. “We have 21 fire stations,” Riker said. “I doubt you’ll find two map books that are identical [between them].”
He stopped at a fire station with a large printer and made several copies of the station’s large map of the western edge of Colorado Springs. At least he and his subordinates would be on the same page.
Diana Allen, a fire behavior analyst, arrived as part of the Type 1 Incident Management Team on Monday and immediately saw that the fire was launching embers up to half a mile away. Instead of cooling off that night, she said, the temperature remained high and the humidity stayed low. Firefighters working overnight reported that the blaze raged right through the dark, heating and drying the fuels that it didn’t consume. They would ignite easily the next day. The Haines Index, which measures how moisture and stability in the lower atmosphere drive fire behavior, was at a 6—the highest level. Early Tuesday the National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning, and at that morning’s briefing Allen warned firefighters to expect extreme fire behavior that afternoon.1
Eyes across the country were on Colorado Springs. In California, David Blankenship, a former employee of the city’s fire department, was watching the fire through a software system he designed that analyzes satellite images to predict wildfire behavior for the U.S. Forest Service. For the first time in the years that he had used the program, the very pixels seemed to be shouting a warning. “Something bad is going to happen,” he said.2
But not everyone was getting the message. The city had yet to call in additional firefighters from other municipalities, and had no maps to give them if it did call them in. City leaders had just that morning started drafting an evacuation plan for the northwest corner of the city. And while firefighters were briefed about the potential for the fire to burn into Colorado Springs, city officials announced that residents who had been evacuated over the weekend, including those in the Mountain Shadows neighborhood at the edge of the national forest, could make visits back to their homes.
THEY WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES HEADING HOME.
Jim Schanel had only taken catnaps since arriving in Colorado Springs that Saturday, after two weeks spent fighting the High Park Fire, so Tuesday morning commanders sent him home.
But he couldn’t sleep. From his house he had a panoramic view of the city and the mountains. A pyrocumulus cloud, formed when the superheated column of air blasted burnt particles high enough into the atmosphere for water to condense on them, piled up thousands of feet above the mountains. The thunderhead teetered on top of the smoke column, leaning toward the city.
Fire clouds can bring rain, which may assist firefighters but usually falls far from the blaze, or they can start new fires with lightning strikes. Their greatest threat, however, is when the column supporting them collapses, and the superheated air that was aimed skyward blasts horizontally across the landscape. Schanel hadn’t seen many column collapses early in his career, but had noticed more of them recently. Increasingly unstable atmospheric conditions, combined with heavy fuel loads that sent more particles into the air, created tippy, top-heavy smoke columns.
“That smoke . . . [is] so inundated with millions of tons of carbon particulate and needles and shingles and yard debris and all those things that the convective column pulled up,” he said. “It [doesn’t] have enough thermal energy to keep itself aloft.”
Ten miles to the west there were other clouds. A storm cell was building over the 10-year-old burn scar from the vast Hayman Fire, and winds flowing out from it pressed against the smoke column above Colorado Springs. “The indices were setting up for that fire to take a big run,” Schanel told me.
He kept waking up to look at the fire. Around 2 p.m. he could see the weather starting to spin behind it, and by 4 p.m. he could see the fire making a hard run at the city. He put on his fire gear and headed back out.
THAT MORNING, TUESDAY, I stopped off at the High Park Fire’s press briefing, then drove to Rocky Mountain National Park to tour the neighborhood that had burned there the weekend before. As I walked through the cinders of the razed houses, my phone rang with a text from my wife. Yet another new fire had broken out, this one on Flagstaff Mountain above Boulder. Pre-evacuation notices had gone out to the neighborhood where we lived. “Just find the cat,” I texted her, and started driving back south.
Another Type 1 Incident Management Team had just arrived in Colorado and barely had their feet on the ground when they were assigned to Boulder, along with an air tanker that firefighters in Colorado Springs had hoped would be working the Waldo Canyon Fire. Suppression efforts are most likely to succeed immediately after a blaze starts and is still small, so dispatchers prioritized getting resources onto the fresh fire. By the time I returned to Boulder, air tankers were bombing the fire behind the Flatirons. I organized the most critical of our files and photos in case we needed to move out of our house quickly, then photographed
the blaze above Boulder. From the National Center for Atmospheric Research, below Bear Peak, I could see the flames on the mountain.
Within a few hours the Flagstaff Fire was under control, and I was back on the highway, heading to Colorado Springs—the fourth wildfire I’d visit that day.
21
Firestorm
Colorado Springs—June 26, 2012
DURING THE EARLY AFTERNOON ON TUESDAY, the Waldo Canyon Fire steamrolled toward Rich Harvey and the firefighters holding the blaze west of Rampart Range Road outside the city. Spot fires popped up a mile or more ahead of it. Firefighters reported that a flaming deer jumping across the road ignited one of them.
At the massive High Park Fire still burning above Fort Collins, the Horsetooth Reservoir kept the fire from the city. But even a lake wasn’t stopping this blaze. “It spotted across the Rampart Reservoir,” Harvey told me. “It spotted across the reservoir!”
As the commander in the mountains tried to slow the fire’s push to the north, Steve Riker, the commander in the city, moved some of his resources in that direction. His crews and trucks ran parallel to the fire’s progress like defensive backs mirroring a shifting offense before a football is snapped. The city limits were effectively the line of scrimmage. Riker and his crew would engage the fire as soon as it crossed the line.
But there weren’t many resources to move. He had only four fire trucks to protect everything from Mountain Shadows to the Air Force Academy—subdivisions with thousands of homes. At the edge of Mountain Shadows, Riker noted that Chipeta Elementary School would be the best safety zone for firefighters to fall back to if things went to hell.
Then he looked up warily at a quarry above Queens Canyon. “Where we have that rock pit,” he said, “that’s where we’d probably see it come.”
The two incident commanders—Harvey with the feds and Riker with the city—were like generals from neighboring nations fighting a common enemy on different fronts. They weren’t in contact, but they had the same worry. If the fire made it past Rampart Range Road and into Queens Canyon, it could quickly climb onto the ridge above Mountain Shadows.
“Queens Canyon was a trigger point [for evacuations],” Harvey said. “If the fire becomes established in there, there is no good containment, no good place for making a stand between Rampart Range Road and Colorado Springs . . . There are no roads, no trails, no natural barriers.”
By noon the city had shut down visits to previously evacuated neighborhoods, but few residents who had gone home were aware that they needed to leave again. Just before 2 p.m. the city issued pre-evacuation notices for Mountain Shadows and the Peregrine development north of Chuckwagon Road.
A few minutes after the pre-evacuation notice was issued, a lookout posted near the Queens Canyon Quarry scar reported that the fire was approaching the canyon. “It’s the furthest east and north we’ve seen activity so far, and it is very active,” she reported.1
At 2:17 p.m. another lookout standing atop the quarry radioed that the fire was “starting to drop down into the canyon.”
At 2:40 he saw “burning material rolling down into the canyon.”
“The fire is getting down into the bottom of the canyon,” he reported. “Really heavy fire activity on the western lip of the canyon.”
The fire was moving down the canyon, the lookouts reported, and was climbing up the other side.
“We have flames on the ridge,” a firefighter called at 4:06.
Seconds later Steve Riker reported “heavy fire” above Mountain Shadows. “It is just running hard right now.”
A report that the city was in danger went out to everyone: “All units, I have fire on the ridge . . . We need to put that plan in place.”
Despite the fire passing the trigger point for evacuations, the call to start them didn’t go out.
THROUGHOUT THE DAY Riker had grown increasingly concerned that Mountain Shadows wasn’t yet evacuated. At a house below the ridgeline, Riker asked the homeowner if he could use his back deck to watch the fire. The man threw him his keys. “Lock it up when you leave,” he said. “We’re out of here.”
“Flying brands were moving about a hundred yards from the main body of fire,” Riker said. “And then that area would fill in [with flames] in a matter of minutes.”
Riker called in a task force—six engines and four brush trucks—that he had waiting to meet the fire where it entered the city. Despite its rapid spread, Riker thought he could stand up to it. The winds had been low, maybe 5 miles per hour, and there was a flat, grassy meadow between the forest and the homes.
“I’m going to fight this fire,” he thought. “I’ve got 200 feet of level ground and the wind’s not pushing, and I’m going to be able to do this.”
He stationed the engines and brush trucks along the streets that would first encounter the fire and had them deploy their wildland hoses, which are lighter and easier to carry and pack up than structure firefighting hoses. Wildland firefighters usually connect their hoses only to trucks or portable pumps, in case they need to get away fast, but Riker encouraged anyone who wanted to tie into a hydrant to do it. One thing Colorado Springs has, due to its position at the base of the Rockies, is terrific water pressure. He told his firefighters to spray as much as they needed to.
“Push comes to shove,” he said, “if you need to leave that hydrant, that’s what we have an axe for. You’re just going to hit that hose and leave.”
Mike Myers, the chief of the Colorado Springs Utilities fire crew, had been working side by side with Riker through the day, and Lieutenants Bill Pellegrino and Steve Wilch of the Colorado Springs Fire Department joined them to prepare for the fire’s arrival.
“It’s about a third of the way down, and it’s starting to move a little bit fast,” Riker relayed to his men over the radio.
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE THE FLAMES HIT the ridge above Mountain Shadows, Mayor Steve Bach was in an interview with CNN in which he reported that the city was not in danger and businesses were open. The city’s biggest sporting event, the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, in which race cars from around the world fishtail up switchbacks to the mountain’s summit, would go on as planned two weeks later, the city announced, as would a two-day festival in downtown Colorado Springs before the race. In the end, the race would be delayed by more than a month.
Ten minutes after the mayor’s interview, at a press briefing in the parking lot at Coronado High School, Bach joined a lineup of federal, state, county, and city officials that reflected the increasingly complicated nature of the response.2 When they weren’t at the microphone, they looked over their shoulders at the flames on the mountainside. Outflow winds from the storm cell building behind the fire tipped the smoke column toward the city.
Jerri Marr, the U.S. Forest Service supervisor for the Pike National Forest, responded to a reporter’s question: “I’d say that we’re still on the offensive today.”
Incident commander Rich Harvey stepped up to the microphone. “In some of those places, we’re still on the offensive,” Harvey said. “In others . . . we’re transitioning from offense to defense.”
AT 4:13 RIKER RADIOED from Mountain Shadows, where the flames were closing in. “We did do mandatory evacuations?” he asked fire battalion chief Ted Collas.3
“Negative,” Collas radioed back. “I will confirm that and make sure it is happening.”
The fire, Riker noted, was about halfway down the slope above Mountain Shadows and moving fast. “It’s coming down the side of that hill,” Riker called back. “I’ve got spot fires moving in below.”
AT THE PRESS CONFERENCE aides to Mayor Bach beckoned him into a huddle away from the other officials while Rich Harvey took questions.4
“What are the consequences of the fire getting into Queens Canyon and if it keeps running?” a reporter asked.
“That’s a good question and a tough answer,” Harvey responded. “Rampart . . . Range Road was one of the best . . . high-probability success points for
the containment of this fire.”
Mayor Bach stepped back to the microphone and cut off the commander. “We’ve just been told that there is now an evacuation order for the balance of Mountain Shadows up through Peregrine,” he said. “Please get that on your newscasts right away.”
“Is that mandatory or voluntary?” a reporter shouted.
“Mandatory!”
The first evacuation calls to upper Mountain Shadows came at 4:24, nearly 20 minutes after the fire hit the trigger point. A second round went out at 4:37.
AT 5:11 THE STORM CELL 10 MILES WEST of Colorado Springs splashed gusts of wind over the Front Range.5 They pushed hard on the smoke column teetering toward the city. As it leaned over ground that wasn’t burning, the smoke no longer got lift from the heat of the flames. The column collapsed onto Mountain Shadows like a chimney falling down. The superheated air that had been rising from the fire into the sky blasted down the slopes onto the city. Thousands of airborne embers, some weighing more than a pound, showered the neighborhood. Winds gusted more than 65 miles per hour, and the fire came down from the mountains like an orange avalanche.
DURING THE HAYMAN FIRE 10 years earlier, Cindy Maluschka and her husband, Mark, lived in Woodland Park, in a forested bowl on the other side of the Rampart Range. Although that fire only came within about six miles of their home, it was terrifying enough for them to rent a storage unit and fill it with the things they couldn’t bear to lose. “We kind of did a little move,” she told me. “We took boxes and boxes.”
But when they moved to Mountain Shadows, they had little fear of wildfire. “There were more streets and more services, and the distance from the forest itself,” she said. “We certainly felt safer from a wildland fire.”
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