Last Saturday a fire started near Colorado Springs. I first heard about it on the airplane back from vacation on Sunday night, but all day Monday it didn’t seem all that close:
The picture (like most of the following ones) was taken through the window at work, so you can see reflection of the metal ring around my phones camera as well as possibly some blurry shapes reflected.
There were C130s out dropping slurry starting on Monday, but we only saw them flying around since we didn’t have a direct view of anything relevant at that point. Tuesday morning I actually got to see the ends of a slurry drop on the far side of the ridge that’s in the first picture, but I wasn’t quick enough and my phone camera doesn’t have the zoom to have made it visible in a picture anyways.
Tuesday afternoon the wind picked up to gusts of 65 MPH blowing towards Colorado Springs. A few people were listening to the radio scanner online and someone announced that they’d seen fire on the ridge. In the short time it took for us to get to the window to look we could already see huge flames well down the slope. This picture was taken a just few minutes later (from outside this time):
Everything was quickly obscured by smoke since the wind was blowing it toward us, but about ten minutes later flames broke out in sight farther north:
The picture didn’t really turn out, but there were flames visible from where we were at the bottom of the column of black smoke.
Just another couple minutes later I finally got a shot where the flames are visible in the picture (bottom left edge of the smoke – faint but you can see the glow of it without even looking at the full sized image):
Shortly after that our view was completely blocked by a low cloud of dense smoke. I took a picture but it really doesn’t do it justice. Basically the sky was significantly darkened and we completely lost sight of the ridge where the fire came over, but looking north it was clear and sunny.
Tuesday night listening to the scanner it was clear that the fire was actually down in neighborhoods burning houses, so I registered my phone/address with the local 911 system in case they started making evacuation calls for my area and packed some small stuff in my car.
By Wednesday morning the fire wasn’t really moving my direction, but it sounded like there were still structure fires going. For a while late afternoon the wind was mostly calm and all we could see was smoke:
Thursday and Friday the weather was good for fire fighting and they made a lot of progress containing it, but it’s still expected to burn for about another two weeks according to the last estimate I saw.
News sources:
News
Fire/evacuation map