Megafire by Michael Kodas

Author:Michael Kodas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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.

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