Hundreds of Colorado residents lose their homes in ferocious wildfire

No deaths or missing people were reported immediately.
Site Staff,
(CNN)A vicious wildfire that began Thursday morning in Boulder County, Colorado, swallowed about 1,600 acres in a matter of hours, burning hundreds of homes and prompting orders for some 30,000 people across two communities to evacuate.
Amid historically powerful winds and drought-parched land, 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 Boulder County sheriff said Thursday.
No deaths or missing people were reported immediately.
As quickly as the winds began, they were due to subside overnight and the weather to swing quickly to the other extreme: The fire-ravaged area is under a winter weather warning Friday morning, with 5 to 10 inches of snow expected to fall by Saturday, CNN meteorologist Robert Shackelford said.
Downed power lines appear to have caused the Marshall Fire, Sheriff Joe Pelle said. About 15,000 customers had no power early Friday in Colorado, most of them in Boulder County.
“One minute, there was nothing. Then, plumes of smoke appeared. Then, flames. Then, the flames jumped around and multiplied,” said Boulder Heights resident Andy Thorn, who’d always worried about wildfires during periods of high wind. He watched the flames and smoke spread Thursday from his home in the foothills.
A home burns Thursday after flames swept through the Centennial Heights neighborhood of Louisville, Colorado.
Wind gusts Thursday 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.”
Among them is a University of Colorado assistant football coach who said his family lost “every material possession” Thursday in the wildfire.
Hundreds of Colorado homes lost and tens of thousands of residents told to evacuate due to fast-growing wildfires
“Our home, cars, and everything we had in our home lost to the fires that ripped through our community,” Mark Smith tweeted. “Thank you to those who reached out. Processing how to completely start over and grateful for our health.” Former Boulder Mayor Sam Weaver evacuated animals Thursday afternoon from the home of his brother, who with his family is out of the country, he told CNN on Friday. “The winds were going crazy strong. We saw two different flame fronts near their house about half a mile away,” said Weaver, who’s also the former fire chief for the community of Sugarloaf. “We spent a couple hours loading the animals into trailers and trucks and taking them away, pulling out the computer and photo albums as the flames got closer and closer,” he said. “By the time we left, say around 4, the flames were a few hundred yards away — maybe 300, 400 yards away. So, we had to leave.”
“We hope the house is OK,” Weaver added, “but have no word yet today.”

Tags: , ,

You Might Like