There are two fast spreading grass fires in Boulder County, Colorado, being driven by up to 100 mph winds. Very scary footage on Twitter of fire sweeping across roads and toward buildings. I’ll grab some cites in a moment. Two towns are ordered evacuated Superior and Louisville.
My kids and spouse are in Gunbarrel, packed up and ready to evacuate if necessary.
AP article:
My sister and nephews are in Lafayette.
Here’s another.
There’s a tweet with video of parents inside a Chuck E. Cheese seeing flames coming toward the building, scrambling to get their kids and get into cars and go. The parking lot is full of smoke and falling ash. They can’t get the doors open at one point due to the wind.
Here’s the tweet:
Are they under a “get ready” order? It seems like that’s very close to the areas that evacuated.
I’m trying to get ahold of them now; they may all be at work.
ETA: I’m told they are all okay and getting ready to evacuate if given the order. < phew! >
Glad you got ahold of them.
My nephews say they have already left the house. They sent pics:
A video from a tweet showing how fast the fire is moving. Camera is outside someone’s home (they were obviously elsewhere).
My house is in Gunbarrel, but I’m not at it. My sister is keeping an eye on things. Fortunately it looks more like we’ll be taking in evacuees than becoming them at this point.
This exact fear (high winds and fire on the Great Plains) is why I am committed to buying a home that is built as much like a concrete bunker as possible, and preferably surrounded by gravel rather than grass. Unfortunately, I don’t know that such a home exists.
But, yeah, that’s pretty intense.
Welcome to the apocalypse. Yikes.
I heard about this earlier on “All Things Considered” and wondered how they could have grass fires when the region just got heavy snow. And that’s the problem - the REGION got it, but not the immediate area.
Hope the fire only affects unpopulated areas and that everyone is safe.
Reports are at least 580 homes burned in Superior. This is a suburb, not a rural area.
Off topic, but regarding @Duckster’s link–having grown up just before the World Wide Web really took off, I still find it slightly bizarre that I can read a newspaper that’s based several thousand miles away from me about an event that’s less than 200 miles from me.
I’m very sorry to see that. They didn’t have damage reports at the time, primarily because the information was changing so rapidly.
There are supposed to be huge storms coming in late tonight & tomorrow. Let’s hope it helps put out the fires.
I saw news coverage of folks being told to leave a grocery store. One could see thick smoke as they were leaving. Why in the heck were they shopping when an event like that was going on?
I think you underestimate how strong the winds are, and how quickly the fire moves. It is entirely possible that the fire wasn’t apparent when they entered the store.