NFPA Journal - September/October 2012 - (Page 62)

AFTER WALDO CANYON tially spread from Waldo and Williams canyons, located west of Colorado Springs, and headed east toward the nearby Cedar Heights neighborhood. Firefighter efforts, a wind shift, and a strategic mitigation project prevented the fire from entering the neighborhood, but on the fourth day, aided by 65-mileper-hour (105-kilometerper-hour) winds, the fire ran down the northeast ridge of Queen’s Canyon, north of Cedar Heights, and slammed into Mountain Shadows. In total, the fire damaged or destroyed 392 homes, all of them located in Mountain Shadows. Two people died in the fire, which also burned Andrew Notbohm of the CSFD (top) conducts a tour of the more than 18,000 acres Mountain Shadows neighborhood, where resident Diane Paton (below) lost her home to the Waldo Canyon Fire. (7,284 hectares) and forced the evacuation We reach Majestic Drive and stop at a of more than 32,000 people. The fire police checkpoint. Notbohm flashes his resulted in an estimated $350 million credentials and a big smile to the police in property damage, making it the officer monitoring traffic through costliest fire in Colorado history. An Mountain Shadows. As we cruise slow- additional $15.7 million was spent on ly down Majestic, though, Notbohm’s firefighting efforts up until July 8, the grin fades. Fulks, with me in the back date of containment, according to the seat, goes quiet. I, too, have no words Colorado Division of Fire Prevention for the sights outside my window. and Control. The cause is still under Along Majestic Drive, home after investigation. home has been completely erased, We park the car and begin walking reduced to little more than a concrete past the warzone-like destruction. Notfoundation. Some fared better and are bohm has spent years urging residents only missing their roofs. Tightly packed to safeguard their homes against fire, house lots are filled with charred heaps and now he’s coming face to face with of barely recognizable items—satellite his worst nightmare. Only an estimatdishes, patio furniture, stoves, refrigera- ed five percent of Mountain Shadows tors. Burned-out cars line the street, residents participated in wildfire their tires having melted off the wheels. mitigation efforts assisted by the CSFD, The devastation only hints at the according to the department. “I’m still intensity of the 16-day Waldo Canyon processing it all,” Notbohm says. “I still Fire that began on June 23. The fire ini- look at these homes and I go, ‘Oh my gosh, this is catastrophic.’” One resident, Diane Paton, is using a gardening tool to sift through the ash that was once her three-story home. Surprisingly chipper in a sleeveless gray top and blue plaid shorts, Paton, 49, points to what’s left of her more sizeable possessions, including a grand piano, reduced to a piece of burnt wood, and the charred remains of her Saab 9-5. “It was a sweet ride,” says Paton of the car. Her smaller finds—a diamond ring, pottery, assorted paper documents—fill boxes along the lot’s perimeter. I ask her what it was like to return to her home after the fire, and her sense of heartbreak and disbelief mirrors Notbohm’s. “I saw so many pictures [of the destruction], but to drive on this street and see it yourself…it was so hard to process,” she says. “When you see your grand piano—something so solid and big— destroyed, you can’t believe how hot this fire must have burned.” Though Paton supported the neighborhood’s mitigation efforts, she admits it wasn’t a top priority at her home—the structure’s foundation, she says, was already surrounded by noncombustible materials like gravel and wasn’t near mulch or patches of trees that could have aided the fire’s spread. She says she was seriously considering replacing her cedar shake roof with a noncombustible or fire-resistive alternative when the fire hit. Of the 392 homes damaged or destroyed, the CSFD estimates that roughly a quarter of them had wood shingle roofs, which can make homes more susceptible to ignition and can encourage fire spread. Mitigation is why Notbohm, Fulks, and the rest of us are traversing the neighborhoods of Colorado Springs. For three days in July, a dozen representatives of the organizations that make up the newly formed Fire Adapted Communities™ (FAC) coalition—among them NFPA, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Insurance Institute for Business and 62 NFPA JOURNAL SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012 Photographs: David Kosling/USDA

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - September/October 2012

NFPA Journal - September/October 2012
Contents
First Word
Mail Call
In a Flash
Perspectives
Firewatch
Research
Heads Up
Structural Ops
In Compliance
Buzzwords
Outreach
Electrical Safety
Wildfire Watch
Lessons of Comayagua
After Waldo Canyon
Catastrophic Multiple-Death Fires in 2011
Fire Loss in the United States in 2011
Section Spotlight
Research + Analysis
What’s Hot
Looking Back

NFPA Journal - September/October 2012