Most of Cindy’s friends and neighbors didn’t even know the name of Queens Canyon. The initial evacuation zone ended at Chuckwagon Road, two streets away from them. “Once that boundary line was drawn,” Cindy said, “it created . . . a very false sense of security.”
Still, she and her husband gathered documents, family photos, and the tooth their daughter, Amber, had recently lost. They put a clothesbasket in the little girl’s room. “Pack this with all your most important things,” her mother told her, limiting the number of stuffed animals the six-year-old could bring with her.
They took a fraction of what they had stored during the Hayman Fire and moved into Cindy’s father’s house, far from the evacuation zone. Three days later, when city officials announced that residents who had been evacuated could visit their houses, Cindy and Mark returned home to get some work done on their computers. Their house was still outside the evacuation zone.
“There was absolutely no more urgency on that day,” she said. “We weren’t on mandatory evacuation. We weren’t even on pre-evacuation.”
At one that afternoon much of Mountain Shadows was again given a pre-evacuation notice, but few of the residents who had returned to their homes got the word. When the clouds turned orange during the afternoon, Cindy thought it was just the sun reflecting off them. She watched the 4 p.m. news conference on television and saw nothing to worry about until the mayor’s sudden announcement that all of Mountain Shadows was on mandatory evacuation. Reverse 911 calls went out, but many residents who had signed up for the service didn’t receive one.
“I ran up the stairs and opened the garage door, and the mountain was on fire,” she said. “I felt the heat. I felt . . . kind of like tornado pressure.”
They had 10 minutes to pack the last things they would save—computers and clothes—and get out. Outside the house Mark shouted to his wife that he needed to go back in to rescue the family’s goldfish.
“I am not going to do this for goldfish,” she replied as she drove away, leaving him to make his way out with the couple’s other car. “Screw the goldfish.”
Racing off, she was stunned to see many of her neighbors standing in their driveways, gazing at the flames. “You have got to leave!” she screamed at one of them. “Quit taking pictures!”
When her husband caught up with her at her father’s house, he had the goldfish and a photo of a wall of flame coming down their street. “I knew, absolutely, that our house was going to be gone,” she said. “I didn’t see how it could not be.”
The Colorado Springs Police and Fire Departments evacuated some 26,000 people on Tuesday, most of them after the 4 p.m. press conference.6 By nightfall evacuations would extend from Cedar Heights all the way to the housing at the Air Force Academy and include 32,000 people.
In the minutes after the mayor’s announcement, front doors and garages opened simultaneously on densely developed suburban streets throughout Mountain Shadows. Flames leapt on the ridgeline above the rooftops and splashed down the hillsides. Residents ran to their cars with boxes, children, and pets. Others dashed to the homes of neighbors and pounded on the doors. A few pulled away in their cars with their homes already burning.
As the smoke column collapsed over the city, it turned the bright afternoon dark. Chuckwagon Road and Centennial Boulevard were backed up with hundreds of cars, their lights on to cut through haze the color of orange juice. Initially only pine needles and tree bark fell with the ash and embers, but soon roofing shingles, wood siding, and paper rained down.
Michael Duncan had come home from work earlier that afternoon, after a friend called him to say the fire was threatening the city. He made a phone call for his job around 5 p.m., but when he finished, he and his wife and children could see fire up the street that leads from the mountains straight to their house. The rest of his family evacuated, but he stayed, hoping he could save their home. He hosed down the roof. His daughter, Peri, called him repeatedly asking him to retrieve photo albums, then her brother’s guitar.
When the fire was half a lot away, the smoke got so dense he couldn’t see up the street. The smoke alarms throughout the house went off. “I decided I didn’t want to stay and die to that kind of noise,” he told me.
As he pulled away in his truck, all he could see along the street were pine trees torching and homes burning.
THE COLLAPSING COLUMN LANDED on Steve Riker and his firefighters.
“It went from 5-mile-per-hour winds to 60 . . . in a matter of minutes,” he said. “And that [turned] a two- to three-foot brush fire that I was looking at into a massive fire coming in our direction.”
A helicopter made a water drop about 200 feet in front of them, then banked over them. The pilot made eye contact and swirled a hand in the air.
“I think he wants us to get out of here,” Riker told the chief of the Colorado Springs Utilities fire crew, who was standing beside him.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he’s telling us to do,” the chief responded.
They ran back from the flames to the relative safety of the pavement.
“I had firebrands the size of a fist fly past my head,” Riker said.
He called for all of the firefighters to retreat about a quarter mile to the Chipeta Elementary School safety zone he’d scoped out that morning. None of them had to chop their hoses loose from a hydrant with an axe, but a few left their hoses behind altogether. They headed up streets clogged with evacuating residents. Riker was the last to leave. Just before he climbed into his rig, he looked up and saw 100-foot-tall flames “as far as I could see north and south.”
His visibility dropped to 100 feet and then to 50 feet. When he finally started driving, he couldn’t see past the hood of his truck. He tried not to rear-end the fire truck in front of him.
The fire came into the city in three phases. First, the fire front ripped through the trees, scrub, and grass. Then an ember attack showered firebrands miles ahead of the front. Finally, the fire leapt from house to house. Entire blocks went up, with each burning house spreading flames to the next one down the street. Some homes ignited deep in neighborhoods where nothing else was burning.
“We’re talking about an urban conflagration,” Riker said. “Going from house to house . . . going from back deck to back deck.”
He was terrified that a firefighter had become trapped between the fire front and the dozens of spot fires and burning homes, become lost in the darkness of the smoke, or gotten stuck in a traffic jam that had been overrun by the fire. During their retreat police cars passed them, racing back into the neighborhood. Out-of-town relatives called the police about family members they thought were still in their homes, and officers were knocking on doors to check.
“There’s nothing we can do at this point,” Riker called over his radio to the police. “If you’re . . . in that area, you’re going to die.”
When the caravan of firefighters reached Chipeta, Riker was ecstatic that he could account for everyone on his rosters, but his relief didn’t last long. When he turned around from his roll call, the heat from the firestorm slapped his face.
“It’s right on us again,” he said. “We’ve got to leave this area!”
The entire force retreated again, this time to an old telecommunications building at the intersection of 30th Street and Garden of the Gods Road. But again the fire was right behind them. They’d only been there a few minutes when 30-foot flames rose in the thick vegetation behind the building, one of the dozens of spot fires sprouting throughout the neighborhood. The firefighters’ third evacuation would have been to Station 9, more than two miles into the city. Riker began to worry that the fire would threaten his own home, some eight miles from Mountain Shadows. “I didn’t think we were going to stop this thing,” he said.
He turned around to see six green buggies of hotshots from the U.S. Forest Service behind him. He didn’t know where they had come from. Rich Harvey had sent crews from the firefight he was leading in the mountains to assist the
firefighters in the city.
“Can you guys stop this right here for me?” Riker asked the hotshots’ supervisor, referring to the spot fire that was threatening them. “Can you put a line down and stop this?”
The hotshots had no water, but that didn’t seem to worry them. They ran at the blaze with Pulaskis and chainsaws, digging and dropping trees like badgers and beavers. In minutes most of the field was just a patch of dirt. The spot fire died.
“The most amazing thing I’ve ever seen . . . in my career,” Riker said.
They wouldn’t be retreating again.
Riker took the large map he’d had printed earlier and taped it to the hood of his truck. Then he started writing lists and notes on the truck. In the next few hours the notations would run like hieroglyphics from the map, across the hood, and down the fenders of the Tahoe.
FOREST FIREFIGHTERS SPILLED IN from the smoking mountain, and municipal fire crews arrived from cities and towns all along the Front Range. The manager of the Loaf ‘N Jug, a convenience store on Garden of the Gods Road, opened up for a Forest Service crew from the Tahoe National Forest that had fought fires from Alaska to the Australian Outback.7
“Where are your maps?” a firefighter asked, and then took every one of the area that the store had.
Other Forest Service crews were lost on Mountain Shadows’ byzantine roads, often working alone with no time to pick up their radios.
Jim Schanel had trouble getting back into Mountain Shadows—traffic evacuating the neighborhood clogged both sides of the streets. When he finally managed to weave through the oncoming vehicles, he met up with Steve Riker and his firefighters as they regrouped. Riker had tears in his eyes when Schanel saw him.
“I think we lost people,” Riker said.
Schanel was sure he was right. Hundreds of homes were burning. Many of them looked like they were still occupied, with two cars in the driveway or lights on.
Riker, Schanel, and Mike Myers, the Colorado Springs Utilities fire chief, gathered around the map taped to the incident commander’s truck and divided up the western edge of the city into three sections. Each of them took a piece. They couldn’t stand up to the fire front any more than they could stand up to a tornado or a tsunami. So they would follow behind it, saving what they could after the leading edge of the conflagration passed.
The first crews Riker sent to try to keep the flames from passing 30th Street saw they would be overrun there and pulled back.
Schanel headed into the most northerly section of Mountain Shadows and the Peregrine neighborhood above it. He tried to steel himself as he looked up each burning street he passed. “You’re going to see an engine company burnt over,” he told himself.
Schanel led about 18 of Colorado Springs’ largest fire engines, several smaller engines, and a couple of strike teams from Denver, as well as the Redding, Vandenberg, and Tahoe Hotshots and some other Forest Service crews.
Colorado Springs fire trucks carry both heavy structure firefighting gear and the lightweight Nomex firefighting clothes of wildland firefighters, but few of the crews that arrived from other cities and towns were trained or equipped to fight both a structure fire and a wildfire. None of them had ever fought a fire like the one they were facing. In addition, the Colorado Springs firefighters had no maps to give the visiting crews.
The structure firefighters’ oxygen tanks would run out within an hour, and their heavy gear made it impossible for them to quickly chase down or escape a fire spreading through the neighborhoods’ landscaping. Wildland firefighters were fast and nimble and could go for eight hours straight, but they had nothing to help them breathe in the heavy smoke of a structure fire. They’d work until their vehicles were running out of fuel or water and discover they had no place to refill. The different crews’ radios couldn’t talk to one another. Even their hose fittings were different, so they couldn’t tap into one another’s water trucks or pumps.
“Communications, command and control, interagency doctrine, standard operating procedures, I mean, pick something,” Schanel said. “[We have] completely different agencies with different philosophies.”
But if they didn’t stop the fire in Mountain Shadows, it would spread through the city.
“We need to do this or die trying,” Schanel told his crews. “We’re the only people here right now. This is all we have, and if we don’t stop this, it’s gonna be beyond devastating. Let’s go to work.”
Schanel built his tactics around each team of firefighters’ training and equipment. He positioned his largest fire trucks from the city at hydrants. They sprayed down burning homes to try to reduce the heat that was pushing firefighters back and igniting other houses. The wildland crews chased down spot fires that were igniting a mile or more from the burning homes.
A crew from Denver had no wildland training or gear. Their battalion chief still had his tie and badge on. “I thought we were going to back up a few of your stations,” he told Schanel. “I didn’t come for this.”
“Well, Chief, we’ve got hydrants,” Schanel replied.
Don’t think of it as a wildfire, he told him. “It’s like we had a gas explosion,” he said. “You could take that block.”
When he returned an hour later, the Denver crew had knocked down the fire there and kept it from spreading.
Riker split up his Colorado Springs firefighters with wildland training and knowledge of the city to assist the out-of-town crews. One Denver crew was about to be burned over when the Colorado Springs firefighter with them had them retreat.
Lieutenant Dave Vitwar, who, like Jim Schanel, had been working on the High Park Fire until the Waldo Canyon Fire threatened his home turf, had one of his Colorado Springs firefighters assigned to each truck of a strike team that arrived from Denver. They found streets where every home had burned and collapsed in on itself, leaving only a foundation filled with rubble. They abandoned those streets, but if a street had only one home burning, the strike team surrounded it and sprayed curtains of water to keep it from igniting other houses. On one street where a single home survived, Vitwar noticed a puff of smoke come out of the bricks like a snake’s tongue, then get sucked back in.
“Chief, you see this?” he asked the strike team leader working with him.
Firefighters cut through the garage door and tore into the drywall inside to extinguish the hidden flames.
At the edge of Mountain Shadows closest to the forest, the fire front had burned every home. But elsewhere in the neighborhood, the destruction was random. Blocks burned to the ground inside neighborhoods where no other homes ignited, as if bombs had gone off in the middle of the subdivisions.
The Denver firefighters, still working in their heavy bunker gear, were getting spent after an hour or two on the fire. Vitwar had them all pull the insulation out of their fire coats and pants, leaving only the flame-retardant shells. They were going to be at this for a long time.
Other crews found themselves on roads with fires burning below them, the most dangerous place to be in a wildfire.8 Escape routes and safety zones on the winding streets were often hidden by the dense smoke. Some decks were surrounded by scrub oak, and houses were so close together that firefighters in between them couldn’t extend their arms. Flaming houses teetered like they were made of cards, threatening to fall on the ones beside them. Wooden siding ignited just from the radiant heat.
The federal wildfire crews’ safety protocols forbid them to enter burning buildings, and they didn’t have the oxygen equipment or heavy bunker gear needed to fight structure fires. But they could pull fires away from homes before the flames ignited them. Hotshots with chainsaws cut down fences carrying the fire and sawed burning decks off houses. One of their supervisors pulled his truck into a backyard, wrapped the cable from its winch around a burning deck, and ripped it free of the house.
Firefighters grabbed garden hoses and ladders they found outside houses and put them to use fighting the blaze. When they tripped over sprinkler systems or hoses
in yards, they turned them on and left them running. Others pulled propane tanks from barbecue grills and threw them into the street, away from the flames. Exploding tanks at the homes that were already burning blasted into the sky and landed with a thud.
STEVE WILCH, A LIEUTENANT with the Colorado Springs Fire Department, had seen wildfires burn into cities in Southern California, where he grew up and learned to fight fires. Although that had never happened in Colorado, he knew it was just a matter of time.
On Tuesday he was working with a team that bulldozed miles of fire lines around Mountain Shadows but had more to go when they saw flames leaping on the ridgeline above them. They were out of time.
“Game on,” Wilch thought.
Within an hour he and the dozer crews joined Riker’s retreat to their safety zones.
WILCH WENT BACK in at the head of a task force that included pumpers, four-wheel-drive brush trucks, and both structure and wildland firefighters. They battled traffic as dispatch called them repeatedly to knock on doors where people might still be home. One man walked out his front door and ordered firefighters to surround his home with hoses. The firefighters stuck to their plan and told the man to evacuate.
“I’m staying with my house,” he responded, and walked back inside.
“In Mountain Shadows . . . those homes [had] green lawns. They were landscaped. We had asphalt streets. It pretty much seemed to be an area that already had enough defensible space around it,” Wilch told me. “But the wood decks that we build off of our houses, the wood chips that we put around our house, the lawn mower that still has fuel that we store under our deck, all of these things are flammable.”
“Loser . . . loser . . . loser,” firefighters would chant like a mantra as they drove past hopeless homes while looking for ones they had a chance of saving.
STEVE SCHOPPER, A FIREFIGHTER and videographer for the Colorado Springs Fire Department, was amazed to see that the flames had reached Centennial Boulevard, well into the city, and were trying to burn across the four-lane road.
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