El Paso County’s week of fire: ‘Very happy no loss of life’

Tim Emick peered out the window of his eastern Colorado Springs office on Tuesday at thick waves of blowing dust to the south.

"My God," he recalled thinking, "If there's a fire that starts today, people's homes are going to be lost."

His words proved disastrously prophetic.

Within an hour, a spark from something off Interstate 25 ignited a blaze that rolled across southern El Paso County with devastating speed, consuming 23 houses, 42,795 acres of prairie and an untold number of outbuildings.

It signaled the climax of El Paso County's worst week of fire in five years, and fire experts say it's a bad omen for the drought-fueled season ahead.

For Emick, who has spent 35 years running Timberline Landscaping in a fire-prone region, it delivered a heartbreaking blow he thought he'd guarded against.

His company has handled a number of high-profile projects in Colorado Springs, including the Manitou Incline. And as he finished lunch Tuesday afternoon, a neighbor called asking if he was OK.

"He said 'The fire,'" Emick recounted hearing. "And I say, 'What fire?'"

Within minutes, he was behind the wheel of his company's water tanker, praying he could cover the 30 miles between him and his property at the western edge of Hanover in time.

Not long after he arrived, flames erupted in the eaves of his house. He was elsewhere, clearing debris from his barn. And by the time Emick realized what was happening, it was too late.

All he could do was watch.

Airport blaze a precursor

Tuesday's firestorm ravaged El Paso County with terrifying speed.

Residents and firefighters alike were blinded by a dust storm similar to those that ravaged the Eastern Plains during the Great Depression. Only this time, a potentially deadly wall of flames lurked behind it.

Hanover-area residents had only minutes to flee the advancing blaze, their phone lines and electricity down and their means of receiving evacuation orders limited. Many drove through flames to escape.

Firefighters rationed water and made split-second decisions on which homes would get help, and which ones would burn. Ranchers cut fences, unable to load their horses and livestock in time. Many animals - kittens, cows and pigs - died.

It wasn't the only blaze to set emergency resource agencies statewide scrambling, as if in the heat of summer.

A three alarm fire at the Colorado Springs Airport late Monday night proved a precursor to the chaos that unfolded in El Paso County over the next 24 hours.

A fire tore through the building's roof and parts of its ceiling, leaving it closed for the day. But as airport repair crews worked away, far more destructive blazes were igniting across El Paso County.

The first of those reports came in at 12:46 p.m. Tuesday: A power line blew onto cars at the Midway Landfill, setting them ablaze a mere half-mile from a tire-storage facility. Hanover Fire Department Chief Carl Tatum raced to it, his memory fresh with a fire a few weeks earlier involving hundreds of tires.

He'd barely arrived when another alarm sounded - this time, for a blaze off I-25's mile marker 117.

Fountain Fire Chief Darin Anstine was en route to the landfill when he got the call. As he drew close to what would come to be known as the 117 fire, he could see a 100-foot strip of flames bending east in the wind.

His firefighting crews were slowed by the lack of any nearby exit off the interstate. By the time his crews got into position, the fire already had outpaced them, jumping railroad tracks and a creek, and heading straight toward the community of Hanover.

Both fire chiefs estimate the first house - a property in the Wigwam Road area - ignited 15 to 20 minutes after firefighters had been called.

Peril of statewide drought

The same strong winds that fueled the 117 fire also sent firefighters across the state scrambling to contain blazes of their own.

Multiple houses in Castle Rock burned, thousands of acres were scorched in Baca County and the Pueblo Chemical Depot also was threatened by a grass fire.

None of it should have come as a surprise, fire experts say.

The current drought conditions took root last year, when a wet spring and summer gave way to a long, dry fall.

"Typically, winters aren't a very moist time of year, but the real problem is it hasn't been all that wet this spring," said Paul Wolyn, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Pueblo.

Grasses and small shrubs become crisp fuel when the humidity is low; when they're tamped down, embers can creep underneath, spreading a blaze and complicating firefighting efforts.

At 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, wind gusts peaked just shy of 70 mph and humidity along the southern Front Range was a barely detectable 7 percent, Wolyn said.

"Pair high winds in an area where we haven't had a lot of precipitation in the last few months, and not a lot of snowfall this last winter, you're definitely going to have extreme fire behavior," said Jessica Gardetto, spokesperson for the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center.

Her agency is bracing for an extreme wildfire season. The area where the 117 fire burned is "either within or close to one of the more severe areas of drought right now in the United States," she said, adding that such conditions are expected to persist at least through May, and likely into June, thanks to a climate pattern working to "dry things out."

"This year especially has highlighted that we are now dealing with fire years, not fire season," said Ashley Whitworth, the Colorado Springs Fire Department's wildfire mitigation program coordinator. "It's 365 days a year. Anything can happen at anytime."

Flaming tumbleweeds catapulted

Kimberly Barre never saw a fire move so fast during her 20 years in Hanover.

She first watched the mountains to her west disappear behind a veil of white smoke. Then that cloud glowed red.

When she phoned 911, the dispatcher told her just to pack her belongings. Five minutes later, that same dispatcher called back yelling for Barre and her family to flee.

"It came up on us very, very quickly - very, very quickly," Barre said.

She grabbed a couple outfits, shoes, her dog and a toothbrush before driving away while her husband, Jason Bywater, stayed back to help their neighbors evacuate before barely making it out.

Three miles away, Collin Kellett, 26, and his 18-year-old friend stayed behind.

Kellett had moved here with his wife and three small kids a mere three months earlier, having moved to Colorado from Oklahoma with all of their belongings stuffed inside their car. They lived in a hotel for six months before finding the quaint brick house atop a small hill with pastoral views of Pikes Peak and Colorado's Front Range.

He was damned if he'd leave.

For three hours, the two men wielded garden hoses and snuffed out flames with beach towels. Only then did firefighters arrive, and they worked another five hours as flames lapped around several houses along Loop Road.

All the while, wind-whipped, fiery tumbleweeds flew through the air as if catapulted in a long-ago war.

"It felt like I was fighting hell itself," Kellett said.

When they were done, Kellett's house remained standing. But his friend lost the yurt he had been living in on the edge of Kellett's 40-acre property.

The bottom of his arms were singed brown and black. But he didn't complain about losing his home.

"I'm alive," the friend said. "It's awesome, dude. I'm alive."

Firestorm clocked at 35-40 mph

The fire needed less than a day to become the state's eighth-largest on record in acres burned.

It knocked out phone service to much of Hanover early in its march across the plains - complicating evacuation efforts in an area that already had spotty cellphone reception. At that point, firefighters and sheriff's deputies started going door-to-door telling people to leave.

They raced against a firestorm that a sheriff's deputy clocked at 35 to 40 mph, Tatum said. Tankers and helicopters were grounded by those same winds, he added.

"If this would have been on a weekend or a holiday or something, I think it could have turned out a little bit worse," Tatum said. "But I'm very happy that there was no loss of life."

Fire departments from across the Pikes Peak region converged on Hanover. As they worked, one sheriff's cruiser became stuck and burned. So did a fire truck.

In many cases, firefighters were able to "walk" the fire around the house - allowing it to burn on the ground while keeping it mere feet from the foundation and eaves.

But if embers had already hit a house and smoke began to show, Tatum's crews wrote it off and moved to the next one. He said there just weren't enough people to fight it.

"They felt like they failed, because they lost homes," added Tatum, choking up and near tears. "We had to pick and choose - and that's the most gut-wrenching thing."

After the blaze

When Kimberly Barre returned, everything but their house was gone.

Their barn, all of their ranching equipment and a 100-year-old homestead the couple had just finished restoring were turned to ashes.

Two of her five cows died, as did a litter of kittens born a month ago in the fire-ravaged barn.

On Thursday, she and her husband debated how best to care for a pregnant cow ready to give birth that had been burned in the blaze.

"We don't know if we're going to have to do a C-section and put her down," Barre said. "Jake said she doesn't look good, but he couldn't get close enough to her to tell."

There would come a time for insurance - a looming headache that will not cover all of their losses. And there would be more second-guessing about not having done enough fire mitigation.

But not yet.

All she could do was watch and thank a cadre of neighbors outside her house, who stopped by to fix her fence.

"Right now, we're all just pulling together," she said. "And we're going hour by hour."

Picking up the pieces

Tim Huffman, 65, has seen others lose their homes to wildfires. But this week, the former firefighter of 20 years learned how that loss feels firsthand when the blaze reduced his home to rubble.

He was at work at a Colorado Springs construction company when he heard about the fire from a local TV station, he said. The house he's lived in since 2003 was gone before he made it down Peyton Highway, he said.

"Of course it's devastating when you work your whole life to having everything you want and need to see it gone," Huffman said late Thursday afternoon.

He paused, standing next to the debris-strewn remains of his house.

"Then, you pick up the pieces and move forward."

Family heirlooms gone

Tim Emick sifted through the smoldering ruins of his French Colonial home on Thursday, hoping to find any surviving heirlooms - "a little piece of heaven" - for his wife.

"My mother-in-law ... my wife's china. We tried to find that, we hope to find at least one piece," he said. "Her mom and dad have both passed. Mine are still here. I can go take more pictures, but all of their stuff was given to us and it was in a closet. It's all gone."

Emick didn't find any more spared heirlooms that afternoon. But he did find a community - friends, neighbors, family - waiting, with picnic tables, lunch and embraces.

Here in Hanover exists a bond woven together by the common challenge of working the land despite the acres-wide breaks between their houses. They constitute a mix of lifelong ranchers and newcomers seeking peaceful solace or affordable land. Most understand that ranch work isn't easy.

And knowing that, they've traditionally banded together, searching for each others' livestock when their own went missing, and delivering food for each other.

For those whose property was spared, they've yet to deem this as a godsend or a disaster.

If the area gets moisture - the first drops of which helped extinguish the blaze Friday - then it could be a "miracle," one that could bring this grazing land back better than it was before, said Ann Hanna, who has lived in Hanover for 30 years, and whose family's name graces several prominent landmarks.

But if the rains don't come, then the land could be ravaged by winds and made inhospitable to the livestock that rely on it for food.

"If we don't get rain, it's devastating - I mean devastating," said Hanna, whose buildings were saved by a wind shift on Tuesday. "But if we get rain, it's like money in the bank."

And for those whose properties were lost, they had each other to lean on.

"I just can't say enough about them," said Emick, choking up. "They were here Tuesday, fighting the fire with shovels and garden hoses. Nobody asks you to ... it's just what you do."

The Gazette's Rachel Riley, Ellie Mulder and Liz Forster contributed to this report.

Credit: Stephanie Earls