Marshall Fire in Superior CO

[Starbuck]

BOCO Sheriff Joe Pelle is holding a presser this morning at 1000.

https://www.boulderoem.com/summary-o...y-information/

I live near 95th & Arapahoe about 4-5 mi NE of the evac zone so my house is safe. Very hard to see such devastation.

[DDT951]

I have an extra room in my house if anyone from the Marshall fire is in need.

[Wulf202]

If you have insurance questions about homeowners, commercial or personal property, I'll do what I can to help.

[hollohas]

Some aftermath.

https://twitter.com/bclemms/status/1476921494617747457

[KAPA]

I have not really watched much local news the last 5 or 6 years. Local news has been leaning left for years but once Trump became politically popular they basically became local CNN affiliates. At any rate, like many in the area I watched the local channels yesterday, 4, 7, 9, 31, to try and get info and holy smokes I didn't expect to get a dose of liberalism thrown at me during an emergency situation. Lots of subtle digs at conservative ideas, blaming global warming, and clearly republicans are to blame for all this.

Weatherman Mike Nelson made sure and directly blame Global Warming and fossil fuels for this thing, while Karen's favorite soy boy Kyle Clark claims that thankfully we now have sane politicians in charge and we should rest assured that they will lead the recovery efforts.

It used to be that real news was exempt from the spin, at least in emergency situations while they were happening... Guess those days are loooong gone!

[hollohas]

9news was awful yesterday especially. Dumb dumb weather guy who's been on there forever (Ed Greene I think) was watching it roll through Superior around 3pm and said, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, "the good news is this is moving so fast and hot. It's so fast it's just going to burn through the grass and keep moving. It won't burn long enough anywhere to burn the houses."

My jaw dropped when he said that. The level of stupidity in that statement is mind-blowing.

[.455_Hunter]

I have not really watched much local news the last 5 or 6 years. Local news has been leaning left for years but once Trump became politically popular they basically became local CNN affiliates. At any rate, like many in the area I watched the local channels yesterday, 4, 7, 9, 31, to try and get info and holy smokes I didn't expect to get a dose of liberalism thrown at me during an emergency situation. Lots of subtle digs at conservative ideas, blaming global warming, and clearly republicans are to blame for all this.

Weatherman Mike Nelson made sure and directly blame Global Warming and fossil fuels for this thing, while Karen's favorite soy boy Kyle Clark claims that thankfully we now have sane politicians in charge and we should rest assured that they will lead the recovery efforts.

It used to be that real news was exempt from the spin, at least in emergency situations while they were happening... Guess those days are loooong gone!

We had a wet spring / early summer, and a dry late summer / fall, making for extensive desiccated vegetarian. Dry dormant grass burns not matter who is in the White House, especially in a Colorado wind storm. Prairie fires happen, and there is not a lot you can do about it without drastic building code changes. Maybe building urban canyons out of 2x4's and particle board isn't such a good idea in dry high wind areas.

[KAPA]

We had a wet spring / early summer, and a dry late summer / fall, making for extensive desiccated vegetarian. Dry dormant grass burns not matter who is in the White House, especially in a Colorado wind storm. Prairie fires happen, and there is not a lot you can do about it without drastic building code changes. Maybe building urban canyons out of 2x4's and particle board isn't such a good idea in dry high wind areas.

Bingo!

I took one of those Environmental Sciences classes up at CU years ago, it was one of those classes full of Green Peace hippy types and we went around campus studying the different types of vegetation and then compared that with photos from the 1870s. Boulder didn't have any trees back then. For the most part everything you see up there today has all been planted by humans. Back in the 1800s, fires every few decades kept that area naturally clear. The more development and people living here, the more fuel is created making that inevitable fire much bigger than what would naturally occur. The big take away was at some point in the future there will be a huge fire, bigger than anything that would naturally occur, and it will rage from Boulder down to Denver and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Well here we are, if not for the wind stopping and the snow coming this thing would still be raging.

Knowing we we knew from that class, you would think they would not approve building houses 10 feet apart and so many non natural trees. All those trees may as well have been huge matchsticks. Another thing I noticed was the wooden privacy fences that every HOA requires acted as a huge source of fuel. Cities and developers love cramming houses in as many as possible so they can get more taxes. I see this now in Castle Rock, no one is building neighborhoods with acreage, its all homes 10 feet apart. Same thing will happen down here some day.

[BPTactical]

It's difficult to prevent grass fires, because it doesn't take much to start it burning in a low RH situation. Here is a resource to check out. https://www.nps.gov/articles/underst...22%20diameter.

Dead fuels in NFDRS have four time lag classes:

1 hour—Fine flashy fuels, dried herbaceous plants or round wood less than 1/4" diameter. Also includes the uppermost layer of litter on the forest floor. Responds quickly to weather changes. Moisture in these fuels varies greatly throughout the calendar day and is principally responsible for diurnal changes in fire danger. It is computed from observation, time, temperature, humidity and cloudiness.
10 hour—Round wood 3/4" to 1" diameterand the layer of litter that extends to 3" to 4" below the surface. Moisture in these fuels is computed from observation, time, temperature, humidity, and cloudiness, or may be a standard set of "10-Hr Fuel Sticks" that are weighed as part of the fire weather observation.
100 hour—1" to 3" diameter.Moisture in these fuels is computed from 24 hour average boundary condition composed of day length, hours of rain, and daily temperature and humidity ranges.
1000 hour—3" to 6" diameter.Moisture in these fuels is computed from a 7-day average boundary condition composed of day length, hours of rain, and daily temperature and humidity ranges.
Live Fuel Moisture

Thanks for posting that HBAR. It is a tremendous tool for gauging fire risk.

[hollohas]

Wildfires are absolutely shocking.

I drove my girlfriend (now wife) back to her home in Trout Creek the day Hwy 67 opened after the Hayman Fire. I think they had been evacuated for 4 weeks or something. (There was another fire that had them evacuated the week before too. Only got back to their house for a couple days before they had to evac for Hayman).

In any case, the scene will forever be in my mind. It's was absolutely surreal. Purely apocalyptic. All that was left for a couple miles leading up to her neighborhood was white/gray ground, rocks and smoking holes of what used to be trees. Literally nothing else. Even the stumps and underground ROOTS had burned to nothing. Most of the holes in the ground still had smoke coming out of them like some sort of mini volcano vents. Some still had dancing flames peeking out of the holes as we drove by.

Many of the homes in the neighborhood had burned. Hers fortunately didn't because their entire 5 acres had been thoroughly grazed. The fire burned up their fence line and stopped. However the smoke smell in their house and smell of rotted food from the fridge was hard to clear for some time.

The homes were all rebuilt and they don't have to worry about fire too much even now almost 20 years later.

Praying for the folks in Superior and Louisville. What they are going through is extremely hard and will be with them forever. Even more so because of the speed that this happened. They didn't have time to prepare themselves emotionally like folks had in many of the large fires in the past.