Megafire

by Michael Kodas

  The Alpine Hotshots, based in the park, had been furloughed three days before the fire started, having racked up about 1,000 hours of overtime. Nonetheless, those still around got on the blaze fast. Some of their families were among the evacuees. Other local wildland firefighters were on mandatory days off after returning from fires out of state, but they joined rangers and trail crews to evacuate the park. Firefighters from other states arrived as soon as they could.

  Almost all of the other firefighting resources in the region were demobilized for the winter. It was yet another challenge the expanding fire season presented to the country. During the winter wildfire season, college students, who made up a substantial portion of the seasonal firefighters, weren’t available. Contractors had most of their helicopters, planes, and bulldozers in storage. Keeping them available for freak winter fires would add millions to the nation’s firefighting bill. The short, cold days meant that the firefighters stayed in hotels rather than tents, adding even more expense. Helicopters that were available to drop water on the blaze found the lakes they dipped their buckets into freezing over.

  Rich Harvey was once again called in from Nevada and his Type 1 Incident Management Team returned to Colorado to work into the winter.

  Ron Wakimoto, a fire scientist at the University of Montana, once told me that when white settlers first came to the Rocky Mountains, in the early spring they saw native fires on high mountains still thick with snow and wondered how the Indians got up there to set them ablaze. In fact, they learned later, the natives set logs afire just before the winter snows arrived. Their coals would smolder through the winter beneath the heaviest snows, then reignite as the spring warmed and the snow melted away. The resurgent fires improved the wildlife habitat in their summer hunting grounds and signaled it was time to head for the mountains.

  When snow blanketed Rocky Mountain National Park in the winter of 2012–2013, the Fern Lake Fire did the same thing as the Indians’ fires, burning beneath the heavy, frozen blanket in anticipation of running free in the spring.

  Firefighters, land managers, and scientists saw the blaze as both an exclamation point on a Colorado fire season that had been far more destructive than any on record and a harbinger of things to come. “It’s downright shocking that we are dealing with fire in January,” said Jim White, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado.

  It wasn’t just the warming or the drying climate, but the fact that the fuel was warm and dry for a much longer portion of the year, explained Tom Veblen, of the university’s Biogeography Lab.

  “Fire season used to run from late May through September,” said Scott Dorman, the chief of the Estes Valley Fire Protection District, which fought the fire in Rocky Mountain National Park in the dead of winter six months after battling the Woodland Heights Fire in the heat of the summer. “We’re finding out that there isn’t such a thing as a fire season anymore. It’s kind of year-round.”

  “Wherever we look, we keep coming back to climate, climate, climate,” Jason Sibold said. “The next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, are projected to be more of the same, if not more intense.”

  Even with blazes burning right into the new year, 2012 didn’t break the record for acreage burned. But the year did set plenty of other records, including for the Fern Lake Fire, which not only burned in winter among some of the highest mountains in the contiguous United States, but wasn’t out until more than six months after it ignited. So, in the Rocky Mountains, the 2012 fire season was most notable for the fact that it didn’t end, but burned seamlessly into 2013.

  24

  Black Forest

  Black Forest, Colorado—June 11, 2013

  THE FERN LAKE FIRE THAT BURNED through the winter in Rocky Mountain National Park showed no smoke after January, but it wasn’t declared extinguished until June 25, 2013. By then the rest of Colorado was burning again.

  If the Lower North Fork Fire set the direction for the 2012 conflagrations, the following year covered the remaining points of Colorado’s compass of conflagration. The East Peak Fire near Walsenburg destroyed 14 homes, and the East Fork Fire overran the spruce and fir forests of the San Juan Mountains. Lightning strikes near Wolf Creek Pass, also in the San Juans, ignited the West Fork, Windy Pass, and Papoose Fires, which converged and spread over 110 square miles. The combined fire was the fastest and hottest on record in the Rio Grande National Forest, which was so ravaged by spruce beetles that few of its standing spruce trees were alive.1

  “It’s like gasoline up there,” Cindy Shank, a former firefighter and executive director of the southwest Colorado chapter of the Red Cross, told the Associated Press. “I’ve never seen a fire do this before. It’s really extreme, extreme fire behavior.”2

  The fire threatened the Wolf Creek Ski Area, spread south to force the evacuation of more than 1,000 people from the towns of South Fork and Del Norte, and finally turned north into the historic mining town of Creede. A smoke plume rose 30,000 feet into the sky as the blaze came within a few miles of the towns. Thousands of firefighters with tankers, brush trucks, and two very large air tankers, or VLATs—DC-10 jets set up to drop 11,600 gallons of retardant—massed between the blaze and South Fork, but the fire never made it to the town.

  Catastrophe instead returned to Colorado Springs.

  AFTER THE WALDO CANYON FIRE, officials from Colorado Springs, the state, and the FBI spent months investigating its suspicious start. But aside from determining that it was definitely “human caused,” they couldn’t say whether it was arson or an accident. Unless a witness came forward, they would probably never know for sure.3

  On June 11, days shy of the one-year anniversary of that fire’s start, another suspicious fire blew up outside Colorado Springs. This one didn’t come down from the mountains, but ignited on the plains just northeast of the city, in Black Forest. The ponderosa pine woods there were badly overgrown due to decades of fire suppression and were populated with residents who often resisted any rules, restrictions, or suggestions about how to care for their property.

  “Both residents and firefighters, we’ve talked about Black Forest having ‘the Big One’ since I’ve been here,” Jim Schanel, Colorado Springs’ most experienced wildland firefighter, said. “It’s just an unhealthy forest with a lot of people in it, and with poor access and egress.”

  As opposed to the days-long wait for the Waldo Canyon Fire to burn into the homes of Colorado Springs a year earlier, the first flames reported from the Black Forest Fire were coming from a house or shed in the forest.4 In the following 36 hours it burned 488 homes, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado history—the second fire outside Colorado Springs to set that record in a year and the fourth in the state to break it in four years.

  THE DAY OF THE FIRE, a Red Flag Warning predicted temperatures above 90 degrees, low humidity, and winds gusting to 45 miles per hour. Shortly before 1 p.m. another suspicious fire broke out in Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, 65 miles from Colorado Springs. That blaze forced the evacuation of hundreds of tourists and staff, destroyed 50 buildings, and leapt across the deep gorge carved by the Arkansas River.

  When Black Forest fire chief Bob Harvey (unrelated to Rich Harvey, the Type 1 incident commander who would eventually take command of the fire) first responded to reports of smoke, he wondered if it was coming from the clearly visible plume rising from Royal Gorge. But at 1:42 a control tower at the U.S. Air Force Academy reported smoke rising east of the New Life Church in Black Forest. Other calls reported a grass fire that was already spreading into the trees. A resident, Gregg Cawlfield, made a cellphone video of a burning outbuilding near the intersection of State Highway 83 and Shoup Road. But though white smoke spread through the woods, the flames there were initially hard to find.5

  Engines and brush trucks from at least six departments responded, without knowing which jurisdiction the fire was in. The winds were calm when Ric Smith, a Black Forest volunteer with 28 years of wildland firefigh
ting experience, found the fire burning in a heavily vegetated bowl along Falcon Drive. It was creeping along the ground, and in the light wind Smith was confident he could “hook” the fire before it spread to any houses or farther into the forest. He laid about 650 feet of hose along a ridgeline, but at 2:18 the winds suddenly picked up to 30 miles per hour. Firefighters “heard someone yelling over the radio to evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,” as a “wheel of fire” blew into the treetops with a boom. It chased Smith back to his truck, but not before one radio call reported that he was a “goner.”6

  Houses ignited as the firefighters retreated. One of them reported propane tanks exploding like popcorn. The temperature hit a record 97 degrees, and the winds blew the blaze to more than 100 acres in minutes. The flames jumped fire lines and ignited multiple spot fires.7

  Without the slopes of the Rockies, which tended to pull the Waldo Canyon Fire uphill and away from the city, the Black Forest Fire progressed even more erratically. Fire fronts pushed north, east, and south. Flames as high as 300 feet burned homes scattered through the woods. The fire would stretch out in one direction, then turn with the winds into a wide, flaming front. Hot spots blew up almost randomly to destroy neighborhoods, and spot fires ignited up to a mile from the blaze’s many fronts. Evacuations spread over three counties and nearly 150 square miles, removing some 38,000 people from 13,000 homes.

  Marc Herklotz and his wife, Robin, who both worked for the Air Force Space Command, were sitting on their porch watching television while their neighbors, Bob and Barb Schmidt, were racing to save what few items they could after getting a call to evacuate. When Barb departed, she urged the Herklotzes to flee, but they said that they hadn’t received a reverse 911 call and that they’d know when to go. At about 4:20 the couple told a friend over the phone that they could see the glow of the fire and were packing to evacuate.

  “At 5 o’clock there’s another phone conversation,” El Paso County sheriff Terry Maketa said. “The person that [the Herklotzes] were speaking with said he could hear popping and cracking in the background, and they advised that they were leaving right now.”

  The Herklotzes’ bodies were found beside their car in the collapsed garage of their burnt home.

  “I don’t know if it matters,” Maketa responded when neighbors and reporters asked about the lack of a call to evacuate. “They saw the fire. They admitted they saw it. They saw it coming, and I don’t think we need phone calls to tell us when it’s time to go. We can all look up and see orange and fire and know it’s time to leave.”8

  The Herklotzes’ deaths were just one of the controversies Maketa would find himself embroiled in.

  Chief Bob Harvey came to the fire in an unmarked Chevy Suburban with no radio or emergency equipment. As the initial incident commander, he tried to manage the firefighting effort by switching between the channels on a single handheld radio, but the airwaves were overwhelmed with traffic. Firefighters couldn’t reach him, and he missed key transmissions. As resources flooded the staging area, he had only one map book to organize them.9

  Scott Campbell, as the county’s assistant deputy fire marshal, was part of Maketa’s team. He ordered helicopters and two heavy air tankers as he was on the way to the fire, but he was told that at least one of the helicopters was already assigned to the Royal Gorge Fire. They’d let him know later about the other aircraft.

  Right after the fire blew up, Campbell asked to take over command of the incident from Bob Harvey—as the fire grew, standard protocol would have moved it up from local to county and finally to federal control—but Harvey told him it was a bad time to transfer authority and put him off. He transferred the fire to the county’s authority sometime within the next 90 minutes, but afterward there were only a couple of handwritten notes to prove it. It was the beginning of a series of escalating disputes between Sheriff Maketa and the fire chief.

  Those tensions started with Campbell and Harvey, who were less than friendly, but whom Sheriff Maketa told to work together. Instead, Harvey and his men reported being shunned. They were removed from management of the fire, and some members of the new incident command wouldn’t speak to them, preventing them from sharing notes about the fire and the resources available to fight it. Harvey and the other officer who had been managing the blaze left the command post and went “freelancing”—making up their own crew to fight the blaze independent of incident command.10

  By seven that night two helicopters were on the fire. Military planes would start bombing the blaze in the morning. The Black Forest Fire had more aircraft fighting it than even the Waldo Canyon Fire had. But with yet another Red Flag Warning, the fire would remain at 0 percent containment for days.

  On Thursday Rich Harvey, the incident commander with the federal team that had fought the Waldo Canyon, Lower North Fork, Fern Lake, and Fourmile Canyon Fires, arrived from Idaho to lead the fight against the Black Forest Fire. His trips to Colorado were turning into reunions.

  Jim Schanel watched wisps of smoke over Black Forest turn into a plume as he was driving home from an emergency management class in Colorado Springs. Harvey brought him on as a structure protection specialist. Steve Riker, the Colorado Springs incident commander with whom Harvey had worked at the Waldo Canyon Fire, led a task force here as well. He was less than a mile from his home in Monument when the fire forced his team to retreat.

  Riker called his wife to tell her to get ready to evacuate. “If the wind would have kept at that 65 miles an hour, I have absolutely no doubt that Monument would not have been safe, 10, 12 miles up the road,” he told me. “We would have burned that fire probably to Castle Rock before we got control of it.”

  But the winds did die down, the temperature cooled, and it started to rain. Ten days after it began, the Black Forest Fire was fully contained.

  The firestorm between the men who had led the initial attack, however, would continue for more than a year.

  Shortly after the fire Bob Harvey told NewsChannel 13 KRDO in Colorado Springs that evidence indicated the fire was intentionally set. Maketa snapped back that while the fire appeared to be human caused, investigators found nothing to indicate it was arson and attacked Harvey for botching the initial response.

  Chief Harvey then filed a report on SAFENET, claiming that around 2:30 on the morning after the fire ignited, Scott Campbell, the assistant deputy fire marshal who took over the fire, started a burn using a drip torch to remove excess grass and brush.11 The chief noted that there was no safety plan or briefing about the burnout, no communication about it, and nobody left to monitor it. He pointed out that it was a violation of protocol for an incident commander to leave the command post to man a torch or hose. Harvey warned a crew in the path of the burn to get out of the way. Afterward, several mobile homes in the area burned, but nobody can say whether it was the flames from the backburn or the wildfire that destroyed them.

  Nine months after the fire, the Black Forest Fire/Rescue Protection District released a 2,000-page report exonerating Bob Harvey for the mistakes made during the initial attack of the fire and making its own accusations against Campbell and Maketa. Most damning was the allegation that a team of firefighters who had nearly been burned over on the first night of the fire were sent, along with “a very key piece of equipment from Falcon Fire, their 2,000-gallon ‘tactical tender,’ ” on a “secret special assignment” to protect a single home. The home’s address and owner were not to be aired “over any radio channel,” but the property was later revealed to belong to Bob McDonald, the acting commander of emergency services for El Paso County. Steve Thyme, a member of the Colorado Springs Fire Department and the El Paso County Wildland Fire Crew, said the order “came from the top,” which, the report said, was incident commander Scott Campbell. McDonald was Campbell’s boss.12

  The property’s exposure to the fire hazard was well mitigated by defensible space cut into the woods surrounding the home, and it had its sprinklers on, so the firefighters never had to put any water on it
, but a neighboring house burned down. “Protecting a public official’s home at the expense of other residences is poor decision-making at best,” the report said.

  The morning following the firefighters’ efforts, witnesses saw McDonald visit his home, where he hugged the firefighters. Maketa also visited the house, the report said, riding in an SUV with two females. Maketa responded that the firefighters were there to protect multiple homes and the only woman with him when he visited the scene was his wife.

  In a 50-minute press conference, Maketa called the report “garbage, slanderous,” and said “it needs to be burned.”13 He also lashed out at the report’s speculation that there might be a connection between the human starts of the Waldo Canyon Fire and the Black Forest Fire.

  Two months later Maketa released his own report, which was less than 10 percent as long as the previous report and far less incendiary, but made clear that the sheriff blamed the Black Forest fire chief for the chaotic response to the blaze.14

  25

  Trickle Down

  Colorado Springs—August 9, 2013

  THE COLORADO SPRINGS’ FIRES DESTRUCTION came in the form of water as well as flames and finger-pointing.

  Two months after the Black Forest Fire, Laura Hunt, a U.S. Army veteran, was in her small cottage on Canyon Avenue, next to a culvert off Williams Creek in Manitou Springs. “I’m sitting there, and all of a sudden water starts pouring into my living room window,” she told me. “I had no time to gather anything, not my pets or anything.”