World News
Residents are unsure whether to stay or go
As wildfires burned thousands of acres across the Front Range on Wednesday, some residents heeded early morning calls to leave, while others opted to stay on land that already required extra self-sufficiency.
At Dakota Ridge High School, the evacuation site for the quarry fire near Deer Creek Canyon in Jefferson County, John Banks coughed in the parking lot as smoke from the blaze threatening his neighborhood hung heavy in the air.
Banks and his wife Diane fled the fire early Wednesday after a 2:30 a.m. phone call ordered them to evacuate.
The couple slept in their car overnight with their rescue cat, Mea, and the few items they had taken from their home after the evacuation call: medicine, some clothing, John’s oxygen tanks and cancer drugs, and Mea’s food and litter.
They left everything else in the house where they lived for 34 years.
“These are just things,” says Banks, 78.
He paused, emotion seeping into his voice.
“When you lose things, you still have your friends, your family.”
The couple found a hotel to stay the next night and planned to spend Wednesday attending pre-scheduled doctor appointments.
“Life throws spitballs at you,” said John Banks. “But you keep going.”
When the couple arrived at the Dakota Ridge High School evacuation center at 3 a.m. Wednesday, they were among the first to arrive.
At 9 a.m., dozens of cars were parked at the school — some of the nearly 600 households that had to be evacuated because of the quarry fire. A few evacuees took time to walk their dogs. In the next lot, a Denver Fire Department crew was ready to respond to the fire.
Elden Coombs, 85, sat in the parking lot with his neighbors, waiting for news. He moved to the Homewood Park neighborhood in 1969 and has lived through two other fires, a snowstorm and two floods.
He left his home after receiving an evacuation call around 2 a.m. He grabbed some clothes, important documents and his medicine and fled.
“I haven’t gone to bed,” he said. “I just hope they get the fire under control.”
On the front lines of the Stone Canyon fire north of Lyons, Sgt. Cody Sears patrolled the unburned areas where the flames were flaring and spreading.
“So far so good. We’ll see what the wind does,” Sears said Wednesday as he rode out around 11 a.m
He first went to an area where flames had spread northeast and threatened evacuated homes a few miles north of Lyons, then headed to terrain spanning Boulder and Larimer counties, a few miles south of the Alexander Mountain Fire – where residents had apparently chosen to stay and settle on their land.
Through the smoke on Dakota Ridge Road, Sears saw two horses: one brown and one white. He alerted county animal control crews by radio of a possible rescue. He felt uncomfortable. “This fire is still very active,” he said.
But when he and fellow officers reached homes there, they noticed that the residents had everything under control.
At a nearby front door, Carmen Roberts, 50, came to the door and told him she and her family had spent the night. They had water tanks and heavy equipment and were ready to evacuate with their horses if the flames got too close, she said.
“We have been here for over thirty years. We’ve been through these things several times,” Roberts said. “We packed everything, outside the door. If necessary, we will go.”
They had slept a little all night. “If it happens over and over again, the stress is less,” she says.
Still, fire danger appears to be increasing along Colorado’s Front Range, Roberts acknowledged. The problem is that more and more people are moving in, she says. “Fire is worse now because it affects more people. It threatens more homes because there are more homes around.”
Near the top of Stone Canyon, business owner Matthew Lee had also spent the night on his property — 34 acres where he had been grazing cattle this spring before moving them away about three weeks ago, leaving the grass short enough to ease his concerns . .
The fire burned within a quarter mile of his metal-roofed home.
He had parked down the hill and, leaning on the back of his truck, looked up. On Tuesday night, the power went out at 10:30 p.m. and his cell phone went dead, Lee, 55, said.
On Wednesday, he told Sears that the flames were leaping over the ridge. Slurry bombers dropped red fire retardant on that property as he watched.
He had refused to evacuate – as had other self-reliant residents in the foothills north of Lyon. He praised Colorado’s approach to aggressive firefighting, which involves extinguishing flames before fires can run their natural course.
“The most I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Yesterday it was an air show. Fine.”
Originally published:
