Firefighters See Fate’s Fickle Side

There is no official name for the line in the dirt that divides the rambling timber house--clean and unscorched--and the smoking, charred remains of forest just 10 feet away, the line where the fire burned and smoked and raged, and then simply turned and moved elsewhere, sparing the house.

Many would call it the line of sheer chance. How else to explain what a firestorm kills and what it passes by? Here at the Mountain Communities Volunteer Fire Department, these were lines of war--the place where dozens of firefighters stood in or near their own neighborhoods, hacked out fire lines, hosed down woodpiles, hauled out brush, and dared the largest wildfire in Colorado history to take their own homes.

By Friday, two sides of the fire station were ringed with a line of scorched earth, and volunteer firefighters from all over the timbered hill communities near here fanned out into the canyons, stamping out still-smoldering ash piles, cutting down trees that nursed fire deep inside them, and driving by their own homes to see which had been saved and which had not.

“We actually thought we lost our home the first time. It was pretty emotional. Then, the fire came back, and by that time, it was, ‘OK, you’re either going to take my house or you’re not. Just get on with it so we can get on with doing our jobs,’ ” said Mary Reeder, a volunteer paramedic supervisor and the mother of a preschooler, who was on mop-up duty Friday.

The 137,000-acre Hayman fire--still raging along a 100-mile-long perimeter--passed through these communities twice in the last week. Each time, volunteers and professional firefighters from nearby Woodland Park, Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs put up a ferocious defense, sometimes fighting to save a house as a 150-foot-tall wall of flame sweeping through the crowns of trees roared over their heads only a few feet away.

They set up firebreaks around homes, hosed down houses as a firestorm that sounded like a freight train marched on their backs, sometimes dropped and ran for their lives when the fire got too close, came back and fought for the same house again when the firestorm started to move on.

“One of the statements that’s been made is that firefighters were running. It made it sound like some were heroes, and some weren’t. No, that’s not the way it was. I know, because I was one of those who ran,” said Mike Dannenberg, who strategizes housing protection for the Northern Rockies National Incident Management Team.

“The house we got chased out of, one tree torched, another tree torched, and within seconds all the trees torched. Yeah, we ran. We didn’t even have time to unplug the hose from the engine. We took off dragging the hose, because of the heat of the thing,” Dannenberg said. “But I want to tell you that the firefighters up here were some of the bravest firefighters I’ve ever seen. They were protecting their neighbors’ homes, and in some cases their own homes.”

When it was over, at least two firefighters had lost their homes. Reeder, who had dropped off her 3-year-old daughter with her husband’s parents and came back to work, returned to her house after the fire passed and found the line of fire within 30 feet of the side door.

Alex Henson, an 18-year-old volunteer, watched as his parents were evacuated from the neighborhood and stayed behind to fight with the department. He dropped by the house with a video camera shortly after the fire so he could tell his parents of the family’s fate: The shed is gone, he said, but “the house is fine.”

Henson said firefighters spent most of the first week of the fire preparing the Westcreek neighborhood’s 60 or more houses for the inevitable approach of the fire, making sure as much brush, wood, and other fuel as possible was cleared away. Then, on Monday, as the fire began to burn along the ridges behind the fire station, they gathered around the station and waited. When burning ashes rained down on the station house and the fire roared less than a quarter of a mile behind them, they climbed into the trucks and drove down to a staging area.

“It was the most intense fire I’ve ever seen,” said Tyler Lambert, a professional station captain from the Northeast Teller Fire Department who has been volunteering his days off on the wildfire. “It was moving fast. It came from Sheep Nose to Trail Creek--two miles--in 15 minutes.”

In nearby Turkey Rock Estates, a combination of volunteer and professional firefighters mounted a daylong stand against a massive firestorm that swept through Tuesday. In some cases they fought house to house as it roared through the wooded drainage.

Crews had come in five days earlier and triaged houses in the subdivision--figuring which ones were hopeless, which ones were safe and which ones could be saved with a little preventive action. When the fire roared in Tuesday afternoon, four-member units were dispatched to designated areas; a safety zone was identified where they could retreat if things went bad. Then the fight began.

“It looked like a quarter-mile of just torching trees just coming right at us, and at that point there were just too many houses to save,” said Shane Coyne, an Air Force captain and part-time character education instructor at the Air Force Academy. Coyne volunteers with the El Paso County Wildfire Team.

“I tell you, for the rest of my life I may never see something like this again--I hope I don’t,” he said. “The fire is just such a massive creature, it pretty much does what it wants. They show you videos about what to do when something like that happens, they teach you in class, but I was pretty much relying on the more experienced people. When they said hang in there, we hung in there. When they said let’s break and run, we did.”

Carrick Patterson, a driver-engineer with the Manitou Springs Fire Department, was one of several members of the Colorado Springs Strike Team that made the stand at Turkey Rock. He tried to describe “an entire canopy of trees up in flames.”

“I don’t have any words to explain it,” he said.

The air was so hot, strike team members said, that the smoke itself was ablaze, forming its own walls of fire. Visibility was so bad at times that they could see only inches in front of their faces.

Most of the professionals on the team were city firefighters, many of them from Colorado Springs, who were used to rushing to a house fire in town and making an all-out effort to save it. Here, houses were threatened all across a burning landscape.

“When we’re in the city and we lose a home, that’s a kick in the butt to a professional firefighter,” Matthew Clark said. “And to see several of ‘em go, it’s just--oh. Really hard.”

Individual units were hosing down houses in Turkey Rock as fire loomed up and crested in the trees, literally over their heads. They would back away, wait for the fire to retreat, then advance to the now-burning house and trying to extinguish the flames.

“We were there at a house putting out a spot fire. The fire would go up into the crowns and go over us, and at that point we’d pull back,” Clark said.

“We backed out of one house twice because of a crown fire and went back in twice, and still saved that house. It was just a very emotional thing for me.”

With the water in their engine units depleted, firefighters turned to nearby ponds, a cistern, even hot tubs to refill their tanks. In all, they used more than 14,000 gallons of water--but saved, by their own rough estimate, the majority of the houses.

Scott Reeder, a mechanical engineering technician and chief of the Mountain Communities Volunteer Fire Department (his wife is the paramedic supervisor), said they also were able to save the majority of the houses in Westcreek.

It has not come easy to the department. Of 20 volunteers normally available, only 12 offered to fight the Hayman blaze. By now, they are down to five. Some left to recover what remained of their burned houses. Some, after two weeks, had to return to their regular jobs.

“For some people, the magnitude of the fire is more than some of them can handle,” Reeder said. “But if it hadn’t been for these people in this area, the losses would have been staggering.”