The history of fires north and west of Boulder, from 2000 to October 18, 2020.
The map shows the history of fires north and west of Boulder, Colorado from 2000 through October 18, 2020. It includes two fires that are currently active, the Lefthand and Calwood Fires.
The fire on the map that is most notable for many Coloradans is likely the 6,200-acre Fourmile Canyon Fire on Labor day of 2010:
It burned 169 homes.
12 of those were firefighters’ homes.
This was one of the first fires where it became known that private firefighters hired by an insurance company defended homes of policy holders that were valued at more than $1 million.
The state of Colorado did not apply for disaster assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide help for the property owners that were affected by the fire. If a disaster declaration had been requested and then approved by the President, FEMA may have made assistance available for individuals including temporary housing, disaster losses not covered by insurance, related medical costs, replacement of vehicles and clothing, moving costs, and disaster unemployment insurance.
A documentary that appeared on Colorado Public Television last year about the Fourmile Fire told the story of the fire through the eyes of local residents, including the filmmaker who lived in the area. The fire burned 6,200 acres and destroyed 168 homes west of Boulder, Colorado on Labor Day in 2010.
The film is excellent and well worth your time. The story of the first four days of the fire is told almost entirely through interviews with residents, some of whom decided not to evacuate in order to take personal responsibility for protecting their own house. Others found paths around roadblocks and went into the fire area to save their own and other houses. A quartet of men self-described as gay went from house to house putting out fire as it approached homes, keeping about a half dozen from burning. The film also has some very good footage of fire activity.
After it was over, I realized that the film did not show or interview a single professional or volunteer firefighter. I believe it had a photograph of one fire truck. It did have a small amount of audio of firefighters giving a sizeup on the radio during the early stages of the fire. Ms. Michelle Bauer Carpenter, who directed, produced and edited the film told Wildfire Today that she attempted to interview numerous firefighters but they all declined to participate.
We have embedded the documentary below.
Below is the description of the film from YouTube:
Above the Ashes is an award winning documentary that reveals untold heroes, the strength of mountain communities and the devastation caused by the catastrophic Fourmile fire.
Above the Ashes documents the Fourmile fire through the eyes of Sunshine residents who joined together to fight fire, taking action and saving numerous homes in the Sunshine community. Using haunting visuals Above the Ashes reveals tales of bravery, family, friends, loss and the rebuilding of a community.
A long time Boulder resident Michelle Bauer Carpenter and her family live in the historic mining town site of Sunshine located in the Fourmile fire burn area. “The losses our friends suffered are absolutely heartbreaking. Over half of the homes in our neighborhood were lost to the fire. As soon as we were allowed home I began documenting the devastation”.
Above the Ashes was directed, produced and edited by video artist Michelle Bauer Carpenter, presently assistant professor in Digital Design at the University of Colorado Denver College of Arts and Media.
Above the Ashes features original score by Brandon Vaccaro and closes with the musical piece Smoke and Tears composed by long time Sunshine resident and nationally acclaimed singer/songwriter Rebecca Folsom. The piece features a haunting 5.1 surround sound mix by sound editor and re-recording mixer David Bondelevitch, MPSE, CAS.
Above the Ashes was recently awarded two Heartland Chapter Emmy Awards in the categories of best topical documentary and best program editing. The Heartland Chapter is a chapter in the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS)
and the Emmy Award represents the best in the television industry. The entries were judged by seven chapters from across the county and included San Francisco/Northern California, Miami/Suncoast, Chicago, Michigan, Lone Star, Mid Atlantic, and the Rocky Mountain Southwest chapters.
I wish I had known about it earlier, but last night Colorado Public Television aired a documentary about the Fourmile Canyon fire that burned 6,200 acres and destroyed 168 homes west of Boulder, Colorado on Labor Day in 2010. The documentary tells the story of seven residents who refused to evacuate but fought the fire on their own.
A draft report has been released about the the Fourmile Canyon fire. The fire started on September 6 and burned 6,200 acres and 168 homes a few miles west of Boulder, Colorado. The fire was devastating to local fire districts within the burned perimeter in several ways, including the facts that a firefighter’s burn pile escaped and started the fire, the homes of 12 firefighters burned, and one fire station and an engine inside it burned. Wildfire Today covered the fire extensively.
Map of the Fourmile fire near Boulder, showing heat detected by the MODIS satellite at 4:18 a.m. Sept. 8.
One of the interesting findings was that some fuel treatments done before the fire came through actually increased the intensity of the fire, compared with untreated areas. This was primarily due to the more open stands allowing wind to push the surface fires, and the treatment prescriptions’ emphasis on thinning to a target basal area (density of trees) rather than designing a prescription that accounted for fire behavior during dry and windy conditions. In addition, a significant amount of surface fuels remained, including slash piles in some areas that had not been burned after the treatments.
Another finding was that 83% of the homes that burned were ignited by surface fire, rather than a crown fire, which is typical.
The report includes some statistics on the use of aircraft on the fire. I broke out a calculator and did some analysis, arriving at these numbers:
$343,082, total cost of the retardant dropped by air tankers (just the retardant).
$1.97, cost per gallon of retardant (just the retardant).
174,149, gallons of retardant dropped by air tankers.
86, loads of retardant dropped by air tankers.
47.09, total flight hours by air tankers.
3,698, gallons of retardant dropped per flight hour by air tankers.
$3.55, total cost per gallon for the delivery of retardant by air tankers.
$619,483, Total cost of the air tankers, including retardant and flight costs.
0.55 hour, the average time for each air tanker drop. (This is extremely low and is due to the fact that the air tankers were reloading at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Boulder, Jeffco air tanker base, about 15 air miles from the fire. This helped keep the cost per gallon of delivered retardant lower than on your typical fire, which is normally much more than 15 miles away from the reload base.)
As a comparison, on September 9 there were three large Type 1 helicopters dropping water:
$99,284, Total cost for the three Type 1 helicopters on September 9.
71,950, gallons of water dropped by the three helicopters.
12.9, hours flown by the three helicopters.
5,577, gallons of water dropped per flight hour by three Type 1 helicopters on September 9.
$1.38, cost per gallon of water delivered.
(?) the number of loads of water delivered was not specified.
A decision about using helicopters vs. air tankers should be based on more than just the above numbers. Retardant, sometimes known as “long-term retardant”, slows the spread of a fire more effectively and for a longer period of time than plain water. And helicopters cruise at a much slower speed than an air tanker, so depending on their location at the time of initial dispatch, it can take much longer to arrive at the fire.
Scroll down to see a map showing the location of every drop by a large air tanker on the fire.
Moving on to the rest of the report, here are some excerpts:
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Fuel Treatments
Thinning trees to a specified density (residual basal area) or spacing was the prescription often negotiated with land owners. In addition, the treatments were often focused on improving the health of the forest (removing diseased and malformed trees, i.e., dwarf mistletoe) rather than modifying fire behavior.
Pervasive spotting observed during the Fourmile Canyon Fire easily breached the narrow fuel treatment units and rendered them of limited value to containment efforts.
The abundance of grasses, forbs, shrubs, and often branches and twigs that could have been removed through judicious surface treatments (e.g., prescribed fire) occurring within the areas where the fuels had been treated contributed to the high fire intensities and fire spread rate observed.
Post-fire satellite imagery clearly shows the absence of changes in stand condition inside treated areas compared to neighboring untreated stands. In some cases, treated stands appeared to burn more intensely than adjacent untreated stands, perhaps because of additional surface fuels present as a result of the thinning. One clear example of this comes from near Gold Hill where the piles of slash were scattered in the understory of a thinned stand but had not been burned.
A woman wears a mask in central Moscow to "protect" herself from smoke from fires outside the city. August, 2010. Photograph: Mikhail Voskresensky/Reuters
When the Fourmile Canyon fire was burning west of Boulder, Colorado in September, 2010, Jim Roberts, a chemist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, was surrounded by something he had previously studied at the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Science Laboratory in Montana — smoke, and lots of it. In Missoula he used a new instrument they had built, a custom mass spectrometer, to examine the levels of isocyanic acid in the atmosphere and in smoke. Isocyanic acid has been difficult to detect with conventional measurement techniques. At Missoula, he measured the levels of the chemical in smoke generated when the researchers burned vegetation in the lab and in cigarette smoke.
When the Fourmile Canyon fire started, Roberts had the mass spectrometer at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
Here is an excerpt from the Daily Camera:
Isocyanic acid easily dissolves in water, which makes it possible for the acid to also dissolve into moist tissues in the body, including the lungs. The full health effects of exposure to isocyanic acid in the air aren’t fully understood, but the chemical has been linked to cataracts, cardiovascular disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
Last September, the researchers had the opportunity to measure the presence of the acid in a real wildfire. On Labor Day, the Fourmile Fire began burning in the foothills west of Boulder, just a few miles upwind of the state-of-the-art atmospheric instruments housed at NOAA’s campus on Broadway.
“Boulder has a world-class atmospheric chemistry building and only once in its lifetime is it going to have a full-on hit from a wildfire,” said Joost de Gouw, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Science. “So just everyone in that building turned on their instruments.”
CIRES is a joint institute of the University of Colorado and NOAA.
The sensitive new spectrometer used in Missoula also picked up the isocyanic acid in the plume of smoke from the Fourmile Fire.
More information
Smoke from the Fourmile fire as imaged by the MODIS satellite on September 6, 2010.
Air tanker making a drop on the Fourmile fire, Sept. 6, 2010. Photo: InciWeb
The Fourmile fire, which burned 169 homes and 6,200 acres west of Boulder, Colorado, in September, 2010, was ranked as the 4th most significant wildland fire story of 2010 in a poll on Wildfire Today. In spite of the devastation, the state of Colorado did not apply for disaster assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide help for the property owners that were affected by the fire. If a disaster declaration had been approved by the President, assistance for individuals from FEMA may have included: temporary housing, disaster losses not covered by insurance, related medical costs, replacement of vehicles and clothing, moving costs, and disaster unemployment insurance.
The Fourmile Fire was Colorado’s largest wildfire disaster in history. But in terms of becoming a declared federal disaster with assistance for individual homeowners who lost their property –- 169 homes lost to the tune of an estimated $214 million in insured loss -– last September’s fire never made it past the starting blocks.
County officials are still shaking their heads at the fact the state of Colorado never even submitted the fire to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for consideration. As reports of underinsured homeowners have surfaced, local authorities now nervously wait to see how many homeowners can afford to rebuild, all while watching for potentially disastrous spring flooding in the foothills west of Boulder.
“Whatever the rules are, I think they should be applied evenly across the country,” Boulder County Commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “My goal was just to be treated like any other community across the country … and we saw that other fires in other locations across the country may have gotten different treatment.”
At a glance, that would appear to be true. Many smaller and similarly sized disasters—measured by the only yardstick available, estimated insured homeowner loss—have received FEMA emergency grants for individuals. According to FEMA records, that includes the 2008 Windsor, Colorado, tornado ($193.5 million); the 2002 Colorado fire season as a whole ($82 million, adjusted for inflation); and the 2009 Oklahoma wildfires ($30 million).
Ultimately, Colorado Division of Emergency Management Director Hans Kallam said he made the decision not to recommend that then-Gov. Bill Ritter request a disaster declaration from President Barack Obama. Kallam said he did so on the advice from FEMA Region VIII officials that the high percentage of insured homes in the 7,000-acre fire area, together with the emergency resources already in place, made such a declaration unnecessary, perhaps illegitimate.
The fire started on September 6, 2010 and burned 6,200 acres and 169 homes a few miles west of Boulder, Colorado. The fire was devastating to local fire districts within the burned perimeter in several ways, including the facts that the homes of 12 firefighters burned, one fire station and an engine inside burned, and the fire districts will be facing a major reduction in revenues due to the lost homes which will reduce the tax base.
A December 22 article at New West provides more details about the effects of the fire on the local fire districts. Here is an excerpt:
…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…
Sam Wallace has created another cartoon about wildland fire. This one refers to the Chubb insurance company sending fire engines to protect the homes of their policy holders during the Fourmile fire last month near Boulder, Colorado. At his web site, Mr. Wallace wrote this about the cartoon:
This is not a jab at firemen or the fire department. They do a great job. This is for the private fire fighters hired by insurance companies. (Extra special coverage, as long as you have paid for it.) Why would they help, if you were not a policy holder. Some how it does not seem right to me.
Earlier we showed you some of Mr. Wallace’s other cartoons about wildfire. His work appears at the Longmont, Colorado Times Call and at his own web site. The cartoon is published here with his permission.
Firefighter unlikely to be charged for starting Fourmile fire
The District Attorney for Boulder County, Colorado, announced Wednesday that their office will not file charges against the volunteer firefighter whose debris burning fire escaped and started the Fourmile fire that burned 169 structures and 6,400 acres earlier this month.
George Fairer told investigators he burned debris on September 2, and that he applied water and stirred the ashes that day and the following day. The Fourmile fire began on September 6.
Ecologist says climate change will increase the number of fires
Utah experienced fewer wildfires than usual this summer, but the number of blazes will likely increase over time as a result of climate change, according to a local expert.
Michael Jenkins, Utah State University associate professor of disturbance/wildfire ecology, says there is good evidence that rising temperatures will boost the available fire “fuel load” by killing trees, particularly conifers. In addition, heat and low humidity are conducive to blazes.
“Given that the climate is warming, fuels are drying and it’s stressing plants,” Jenkins explained. “I think that has been reflected in the number of acres burned per year over the last 10 or maybe 20 years.”
Jenkins also pointed to intensive firefighting practices that suppress blazes quickly, but boost the “fuel load” by sparing vegetation that would have burned. As a result, when fires do get out of control, they find plenty of shrubs, grasses and trees to feed them.
You can monitor the Antelope fire in Yellowstone
One of the two live web cams on Mt. Washburn in Yellowstone National Park has an excellent view of the 2,800-acre Antelope fire in the northeast area of the park. Here is a screen grab of an image from the cam taken at 11:49 a.m. today. The fire at that time was not very active; earlier in the morning the camera was shrouded in fog. More information about the fire can be found on InciWeb.
The image below was taken by the cam on September 21.
Home owners thank “Bulldozer Man” for saving their houses
The Unified Fire Authority is giving a dozer operator and his D-9 Cat from the nearby landfill credit for saving 32 homes that were threatened by the Machine Gun fire. The fire started during .50-caliber machine gun target practice at a National Guard base near Herriman, Utah.
This gives us an excuse to post this photo of an air tanker working on the fire. Am I the only one that is not fond of the paint job on Tanker 48? Here is a Google search link to a few more photos of the air tanker.
Photo by David Cise
Minimal hero-worship of firefighters
Michael Wolcott writing about the Schultz fire near Flagstaff for Writers on the Range has some interesting thoughts. Here is an excerpt.
My own response was intense curiosity. I wasn’t worried about “destruction” of the San Francisco Peaks: About the only thing that could destroy the mountain is the same thing that created it — a volcanic eruption. As for the threat to Flagstaff’s neighborhoods, I’m glad nobody’s home got burned. But houses built on the forest edge are obviously at risk. The people who choose to live in them are presumably aware of this, and so take their chances. And, having worked on wildland fire crews, my fund of hero-worship for the firefighters was minimal. It’s just a job. Most firefighters will tell you that they are in it because the money is good and because they like the “juice.” Like the rest of us, firefighters are fascinated by fire.
Can the entire New York Fire Department stop an enormous wildfire?
Pam Slater-Price and Howard Windsor, writing for SignOnSanDiego, say no. Here is an excerpt from an article about preparing for wildfires:
Some critics believe only a blank check can solve our fire problem. Yet fire losses still occur because there are times when fire conditions exceed all reasonable capabilities. To be blunt, you could put the entire New York City Fire Department in front an enormous wildfire and the wildfire would still win.
It is interesting that of all the fire organizations the authors could choose from, they picked New York City, a department not best known for their wildfire prowess, although they probably handle structure fires very well. Here is a photo we posted in an article on September 8 about a fire on Staten Island:
You gotta love that full turnout gear on a vegetation fire. Photo: FDNY
