Boulder County residents had little warning and little time to get out as a ferocious wildfire swallowed 1,600 acres in a matter of hours
Amid historically powerful winds, some 370 homes were destroyed in a single subdivision just west of the town of Superior, while another 210 homes may have been lost in Old Town Superior, the sheriff said Thursday. No deaths or missing people were reported immediately.
“I called my wife, and she started collecting valuables and clothes to evacuate,” Smith said. He drove through smoke on his way there and on his way back.
Across the fire zone, roads were blocked by smoke and traffic gridlock as people tried to make their way out.
At a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Superior, families with young children could see smoke out wide windows and made their way toward an exit, video taken by Jason Fletcher shows.
“Right now,” one woman said. “It’s OK.”
“I’m scared,” said a child as another woman leaned hard into the front door to pry it open against blowing wind.
At a Costco store in Superior, shoppers were told to calmly leave their carts and go, said Hunt Frye, who took video from the hazy parking lot. A shopping center and a hotel in Superior also burned Thursday, Pelle said.
From an ICU room at Avista Adventist Hospital in Louisville, white smoke clouded a charcoal sky just across the parking lot and a street, video from Kara Plese shows. The hospital was fully evacuated and patients transferred or discharged, officials there said. Good Samaritan Medical Center in nearby Lafayette also began transferring some of its most critical and fragile patients, according to a news release.
Downed power lines may be the cause
Downed power lines appear to have caused the Marshall Fire, said Sheriff Joe Pelle, citing preliminary reports. Deputies confirmed downed lines in the fire zone, and a final determination will be made in the coming days, he added. Also sparked was the Middle Fork Fire, which was quickly “laid down,” the sheriff said in a news conference.
Winds had dropped by early Friday to below 20 mph, and the area is under a winter weather warning, with heavy snowfall expected by sunrise in the drought-stricken state, CNN meteorologist Robert Shackelford said.
Wind gusts Thursday — some surpassing 100 mph in Jefferson and Boulder counties — pushed the blaze “down a football field in a matter of seconds,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said.
“There’s no way,” he said, “to quantify in any financial way, the price of a loss — of losing the chair that was handed down to you from your grandmother, of losing your childhood yearbooks, of losing your photos, of losing your computer files — which hundreds of Colorado families have experienced today with no warning.”
Recovery plans are already underway
“It’s just something you don’t plan on. It’s just devastating,” she said.
The sheriff would not be surprised if the numbers of casualties or missing people soon change, given the fire’s size and intensity, he said Thursday.
“This area, for those who don’t know this area of Boulder County, is right and around suburban subdevelopments, stores. It’s like the neighborhood that you live in; it’s like the neighborhood that any of us live in,” the governor said Thursday.
