COLORADO FIRE GROWS BY MORE THAN 100,000 ACRES IN A DAY
Unseasonable heat, strong winds driving blazes in the state
A dire wildfire crisis is unfolding in Colorado after a blaze exploded sixfold in size in just 24 hours, growing to about 175,000 acres on Thursday morning. The East Troublesome fire, burning in Grand County and extending into Rocky Mountain National Park, forced hundreds to quickly evacuate from Grand Lake and Granby overnight.
The blaze has all the hallmarks of climate change. It’s burning at an elevation of 9,000 feet at a time of year when snow should be falling. The fire is also raging during a severe drought, aggravated by record heat, through stands of trees killed or weakened by a bark beetle infestation.
The East Troublesome fire is now the fourth-largest wildfire in Colorado history. Three of the state’s five largest wildfires on record have now occurred in 2020. The largest, the Cameron Peak fire, is still burning just west of Fort Collins.
Noel Livingston, who leads the team of firefighters tackling this blaze as incident commander for Pacific Northwest Team Three, said that crews saw an “amazing amount of fire spread.”
“We saw about 20 miles of fire growth throughout the day and throughout the night, which equated to about 100,000 acres of additional fire activity,” Livingston said.
At times, National Weather Service Doppler radar showed the smoke
plume from the blaze towering almost 40,000 feet above the surface, a sign of extreme fire behavior. Typically, at such a high elevation in the state, the weather at this time of year would not result in such a high wildfire danger.
Livingston said the fire burned quickly through heavily forested areas north of Granby and Grand Lake. A pre-evacuation notice was issued for Granby on Thursday.
There are indications via satellite imagery and ground observations from park rangers that the fire jumped the continental divide in Rocky Mountain National Park, despite being areas that are above the tree line. That is an extremely rare occurrence and may put new downwind areas to the east, such as Estes Park, at risk. A merging of this fire with the Cameron Peak fire is even
possible, Livingston said during a news conference Thursday.
Evacuation orders for the national park and parts of Estes Park have been issued, with traffic backups reported Thursday afternoon for people leaving Estes Park.
On Thursday afternoon, the sky in Estes Park had turned dark as night, contrasted against the lights from cars backing up on local roads out of town.
The ingredients for the massive, rapid growth of this fire, Livingston said, were the thick stands of trees, many of which had been weakened or killed by beetle invasions in recent years, a phenomenon linked to climate change that is occurring across vast stretches of the West and into Canada.
As temperatures have increased in Colorado, it has given once-scarce pests, in
cluding mountain bark beetles, that were held in check by extremely cold winter temperatures, an opportunity to spread and damage or destroy trees. Studies have shown that in some ecosystems, these dead or weakened trees can accelerate blazes, while in others they may actually slow down some wildfires.
Livingston also pointed to extremely dry conditions and strong winds that pushed the fire through the timbered areas. Winds near the fire were gusting to 60 mph at times on Wednesday.
Winds are predicted to remain strong for the rest of the week, said Nick Nauslar, a predictive-services meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.