New West Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
On Sept. 6, volunteer firefighters from four mountain districts west of Boulder were thrown into a nightmare of fire fronts erupting without warning. Firefighters battled where they could make a stand, but near-gale-force winds churned the Fourmile Fire into the most devastating wildfire in Colorado history.
Much of the damage would occur in that first day of the blaze, as the Fourmile Fire would consume 169 homes and cause $217 million in damages, about four times that of the second most expensive fire, the 2002 Hayman Fire.
But for many of those volunteers, the Fourmile Fire continues to be daunting months after the embers have cooled, leaving an aftermath that firefighters continue to battle on many fronts.
“The fire continues every day for everyone involved in the department. It permeates everything you do,” said Brett Haberstick, chief of the Sunshine Fire District, the hardest hit agency in the blaze. “You can’t escape it. There are times when it’s just too much, and you have to take a break, but it’s a job you never leave.”
Haberstick faces severe revenue loss, manpower shortages, and wide-scale rehabilitation and erosion-control needs amid the loss of the departmental records. He and the other chiefs from the affected districts work daily on a complex set of needs from constituents, who individually face a baffling array of insurance, erosion, forest rehabilitation, disposal and building issues complicated by the predictable entry of a few charlatans and thieves.
“It’s been hard, but the district remains strong and continues to provide coverage for our constituents,” Haberstick said. “Sunshine took a big blow, but it wasn’t a knockout punch.”
At least 12 firefighters lost homes in districts that typically have 30 to 40 active members. One of those was veteran firefighter Rod Moraga, an expert in wildfire fuels, mitigation, management and pre-attack planning who founded a nationally prominent wildland fire consulting company, the Anchor Point Group. Now building a new home in Boulder, Moraga said he, and that expertise, will not likely return to the Four Mile Fire District.
“I don’t know how many of us are still really active,” he said, “because even the people who didn’t lose their homes are extremely busy – cutting trees around their home, dealing with insurance claims for smoke damage. …
“I had to completely remove myself from that (the volunteer department),” Moraga said. “Every single day I am dealing with e-mail or phone calls from the insurance people, the county, getting debris removed, getting my house (remains) scraped. There just isn’t enough time.”
And for the fire chiefs for the affected districts – Sunshine, Four Mile and Gold Hill took the brunt of home loss, though Sugarloaf was involved to a lesser extent – it will be some time before they are out of the woods, perhaps even another two years, said Allen Owen, the Boulder District Forester for the Colorado State Forest Service.
Rehab for this fire is more difficult, Owen said, because 70 percent of the land involved is privately owned. For rehabilitation efforts to take place on a large scale or landscape basis – such as aerial seeding – permission will have to be granted from each of the landowners, and there are 650 landowners in the fire area.
Boulder County is the lead agency for the rehabilitation work that is largely financed by federal funds, but Owen said there is still reliance on the fire districts to get information to their constituents and help secure permission to begin.
“People see them as the good guys. They are out there doing good things,” he said. “And at least they aren’t under the gun. People believe the firefighters did everything they could.”
Right now the rural fire chiefs are doing everything they can to make sure their districts continue to exist. Sunshine lost about 30 percent of the homes in its district to fire, Haberstick said, and the district is almost entirely funded by a mill levy based on the valuations of homes within the district.
Given that even unscathed homes within the fire area will also lose value, Haberstick said district officials fear that funding from property taxes may fall by 50 percent when the county assessor provides the districts with numbers in February.
Four Mile Chief Bret Gibson said his district lost about 16 percent of its homes, but some of that loss was offset by the passage of a mill levy increase the board had scheduled for a vote before the fire.
However, when all is said and done, Gibson said the loss of homes and the devaluation of the remaining homes may decrease property tax revenue by 30 percent to 40 percent.
Gibson has his own set of problems, including a fire station that burned down along with a fire engine. His district also saw nine firefighters lose their homes, meaning his manpower is even more diminished.
The Four Mile district had the only paid crew – which worked on fire mitigation projects when not answering calls – which for now is only kept going by about $20,000 in donations received since the fire.
The remaining Four Mile volunteers have doubled their shifts, Gibson said. He thought equipment replacement, such as trucks that are more than 30 years old, would take the brunt of any funding shortfall.
“We’re still a good firefighting force and a good medical agency,” Gibson stressed. “Morale has actually been pretty good. We’re all connected to each other beyond the fire department.”
The reality, of course, is that these districts have to remain vital, because they go well beyond providing firefighting and medical coverage. In the absence of town governments, the districts really are the center of these communities.
“We all take pride in the fact that no one was killed or seriously injured,” Gibson said. But replacing the homes, neighbors and the landscape everyone moved here to enjoy is not in the foreseeable future.
“You know this is possible,” Gibson said. “But it’s different when it’s your own district.”
That pain is acutely felt with every drive past the lost home of a neighbor, district board member or fellow firefighter, Haberstick said. It is reinforced by the 6,000 acres of blackened trees and soils burned to the point at which they simply repel water.
The fire chiefs themselves are volunteers, and Haberstick said the 70- to 80-hour weeks he now puts in have been a strain, but he has few options.
“The district has to be in a place to respond, both as fire department and the center of the rural community,” he said. “The community has needs.”
In Gold Hill, Fire Chief Chris Finn said he expects the home loss to be less severe, perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the district total. That was near miraculous as firefighters barely kept the fire out of the center of the town, aided by a last-minute aerial drop of flame retardant that helped turn the tide.
Finn’s 16 years as chief did little to prepare him for these days, he said, including the amount of time needed and the constant reminders of the fire’s devastation.
Firefighter morale, Finn said, is one of the most difficult problems to face.
“We were thrown off that fire three times. Three times we just had to abandon our positions,” he said. “Every time we did that we were walking out on the homes of our friends and neighbors. We knew every one of those homes.”
Somehow those are always the lingering questions for firefighters – could they have done more mitigation, could they have taken bigger chances and saved more homes?
“I have those questions about losing my own home,” Moraga said. “But you have to let go.
“We fought a fire in our own district and we took a pretty good beating. We lost our homes and our neighbors’ homes, and that’s not what you signed up for,” he continued.
“But this was a very large natural disaster we had no business thinking that we could successfully fight. When a fire gets to a certain size we have no control over them. If we have a tornado, a hurricane or an earthquake, no one has expectations that we can save those homes.”
Several charitable organizations are helping firefighters and homeowners affected by the Fourmile Fire. Donations can be made to individual fire districts, or to the Boulder County Firefighters Association through the mGive Foundation through the “text FIRE to 27722″ mobile donation campaign. All donations to the BCFFA will go to firefighters who lost their homes. Donations to all homeowners can be made on The Community Foundation website, www.commfound.org, by clicking the “donate now” button. Be sure to designate gifts to the Boulder Mountain Fire Relief Fund. Or write a check to Boulder Mountain Fire Relief Fund and mail to: The Community Foundation, 1123 Spruce St., Boulder, Colo. 80302.
Jeff Thomas has an masters of science in natural resource management and behavior from the University of Michigan and was a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism.
Be rest-assured that “scientists” continue to say that dead forests don’t burn any worse than overstocked, highly flammable green forests. Just keep repeating that “fires are natural and beneficial” and “people shouldn’t live in forests”, over and over and over. How long will dead forests continue to be “sacred” in the courts?
A question to possibly explore in a followup article: To what extent had home owners used “Fire Wise” principles to protect their homes from wildfire? For that matter, had the fire district that lost a station used defensible space?
If homeowners and the fire district failed to employ Fire Wise techniques of defensible space, then it was simply a matter of time before the local forest burned, and with it, their buildings.
If trees grew right next to buildings and the buildings had wooden shingles and decks, what did they expect?
If, however, there was extensive use of the Fire Wise toolkit and they still lost many structures, then further research is warranted.
And Fotoware: people can live in forests — they just need to be smarter about it.
In answer to Brodie’s question, I’m pretty sure the number of homes that created defensible space in the fire footprint was pretty high. And the vast majority of the homes within the fire footprint were also saved.
On the other hand, I saw photos of a crew near Gold Hill removing stuff from around homes that made me cringe, ….
The question many people had was why so many homes were lost that had created defensible space (Boulder County has required wildfire standards on all new homes for about 10 years, I think). The answer probably lies in the nature of this fire to some extent, homes were probably lighting from hot spots hundreds of yards away. There was also some question about keeping up the defensible space — mainly mowing weeds at least 100 yards around the home, but I think the fire itself was the main culprit.
This was an area that had a lot of mitigation already completed, especially by the state forest service, and the fire districts were very involved in completing community wildfire protection plans and other projects. For instance, there is an ongoing wood utilization project in the Front Range (www.peaktopeakwood.org) and the state forest service also supports other utilization efforts such as Colorado Forest Products.
You can bet that Rod Moraga’s home had substantial mitigation work. The Anchor Point Group is a national leader in wildfire mitigation and wildfire planning, contributing to USFS and FERC reports, including CWPP creation.
The experts here are actually bummed there hasn’t been a fire investigation on the ground, even as we speak. They want to know what fire breaks may have slowed the fire and what ones may have not worked at all.
Anyway, …
How the heck are you Brodie? And where the heck are you? You can probably tell I’m back in the Boulder area.
jeff
Thanks for the followup, Jeff.
It is alarming that this fire overwhelmed even buildings that were “Fire Wise,” yet gratifying that so many structures were also saved. I hope wildfire scientists will dive into the data and come up with guidance on how we can do a better job. We need a better understanding of how fuel, air temperature, slope mix with Fire Wise mitigated properties.
Jeff: been newspapering in Wyoming for a decade, now off on a temp federal gig in Colorado. Hope to keep my hand in New West with future free-lancing.
Was this fire in the area that had a prior fire, maybe 30 years ago or so, and the locals had a “come to Jesus” epiphany and did some sort of a cooperative fuels reduction logging efforts, had fines and litter piles they burned, and generally created a pretty fire safe area that would give them defensible space in which to fight wildland fires? Like the first real effort to this end on the Rocky Mtn. Front Range. Maybe in the West at the time. I am sure I read a very descriptive story about the process and effort, a long time ago. There was horse logging, skidder logging, and pile burning. All in an effort to have healthier trees (all PPine), and a safer environment. At the time, I was sort of amazed because it was behind Boulder, the font of environmental insanity for Colorado. Actual trees being cut with chain saws and people were happy about it. Long ago.
Bearbait, you hit the nail on the head. The fire you are referring to is the 1988 Black Tiger fire, mostly on the neighboring Sugarloaf fire district, which destroyed a lot of homes, as well.
This fire led a great deal of interest in wildfire mitigation, which included both the city and county of Boulder, the latter of which is very involved in utilizing wood coming off county open space. The Winiger Ridge pilot project (around 1998, I think) for wildfire mit, one of 24 originally OKed by Congress, pretty much came from the flames of Black Tiger and included the city, county, state forest service, USFS, Denver Water and other government agencies working across a large landscape on cooperative mitigation for private and public lands.
That may be what you remember, but the commitment to mitigation hasn’t really fallen off here. The county is now building a second biomass burner (this one for the jail), with the aim of using wood coming off of their mitigation projects on open space.
cheers,
jeff
Jeff: I do hope that a concentrated multi-government response to fuels reductions happens, and that it has some wide spread reporting of how it happened, worked out, and who is happy and who is not.
I have said this before, but the seminal moment in my appreciation of fuels management actually was on television news a decade or more ago here in Oregon. There was a fire named Aubrey Butte Fire on the outskirts of, or maybe even in, Bend, Oregon, that burned a passel of high end homes, and many, many are thankful it was not a much larger disaster than it turned out to be. A lot of close resources (like take off and one turn and air tankers were there from Redmond, not 20 miles away and at the same elevation), BLM, State, and USFS resources due to Redmond smoke jumpers, a half dozen hot shot crews within a hour or so drive.
The epiphany for me was the television reporter talking to this man who was pictured against a backdrop of a McMansion, a suburban, a boat, the usual toys in the driveway, and he is talking about how he is being sued by the Homeowners Association for the community in which he lives because he put on a cementaceous roof having torn off the cedar shakes, fire proofed his soffits, had crawl space blockers, no vegetation around his house, all the trees trimmed up high, no ponderosa pine needles on the dirt or lawn, a close cropped lawn green from water and fertilizer, the wood deck gone and replaced with stone and cement. He had gone all out, and some of the stuff he had done was not allowed in the Homeowner’s Assoc. CCRs. And a neighbor was angry and was taking him to task. And the camera was panning back, and as the guy was finishing his explanation of all the trouble he was in, the back drop went from his McMansion to black trees and vegetation on either side of his home, with foundations and standing chimneys on either side. Total devastation of the CCR compliant neighbors on either side. His house appeared to be somewhat smoked up and singed, but it was standing intact. Alone.
A couple of years later, there was a fire north of Bend in a landscape without much zoning or any, perhaps, on an Indian reservation. A helicopter was taking movies of the fire from afar, and you could see this wall of flames rushing through sagebrush and grass, a well kept house directly in its path, with everything looking pretty orderly from the air, but doomed. The adjacent property, a house with rag tag outbuildings, abandoned cars, all the accoutrements of poverty and country living was about three hundred feet away, and did not appear to be where the fire finger would hit. That fire came to the lawn of the kept house, with a flame front maybe 10-15 high, and a tongue of flame started to run along the fence and found its way through the neighbors junk piles and unkempt vegetation, and that fire just by passed that kept up place and consumed the junkyard home next door and continued it run to the south. You could see it back burn around the green lawns, gravel driveway, and along the fence. Never touched a blade of grass on the well ordered place, and totally consumed the junk pile house.
Fire goes to fuel. I have seen lodgpole burning, along with doug fir, spruce, and juniper, in the Rockies, and have the fire come to a ten year old clear cut fully reforested with head high green trees, and just veer around the fuel deficient area and roar off in the direction of standing fuels where it could run in the crown. Never even burn the logging slash in the old clear cut. It is almost like the fire does not have the time nor energy to dawdle with light fuels and young trees, green lawns and no ground fuels. It is like fire is an opportunist, and if you take away most of the opportunity, fire would just as soon bypass the hard work of burning light fuel. Old man musings. Sorry.
The photos I have seen and the view from Baldy Mtn trail showed that many of the homes that burned did not have trees within the recommended 30′ perimeter and if there were trees they actually were not what burned. It was the vegetation. The people that I know that stayed to fight the fire and protect their homes were putting out cinders falling out of the sky and dried grass leading up to the walls of their neighbor’s houses. I am sure that Rod Moraga had followed Firewise as the company that I work for in the summer does work for Rod, and I know the guidelines he follows. And his was the only house to burn on Logan Mill. But this fire does show the value of nonflammable ground cover up to the foundation of houses. Many of the trees are barely burned but the grasses and ground around them are charred. This is where the concern for erosion and flooding is coming from.