We had gone to run errands at Costco, the one that was evacuated. This is all literally very close to home. The videos of the aftermath - I feel like I’m driving down a generic suburban street, except each of the houses is gone or burned all the way down to its bones. XIRlu08HZP- Veronica Acosta December 31, 2021 this is what one community looks like as the sun starts coming up. That’s a blip on the radar, if it occurred in a remote area these days. It’s a large fire, but in the context of the kinds of fires we’ve been talking about in the wide-open spaces of the West, 6,000 acres is tiny. The final footprint of this fire is probably gonna be about 6,000 acres, which is not small. Whereas this was really burning through that urban environment. And that sets it apart in a lot of ways from some of the Western megafires we’ve been talking about in recent years, that burned hundred of thousands of acres, and sometimes burn hundreds or even thousands of homes, but they do so over a longer period of time. But it was a wildfire that became an urban conflagration pretty quickly - just a matter of hours into the event. It arguably started as a wildfire, mainly as a brush and grass fire, with some woodland near the point of origin. It was absolutely not a forest fire, by any stretch of the imagination. There are lots of people calling this a Colorado forest fire. What we saw Thursday was so different - subdivisions, tract homes, fire just tearing through suburban environments we’ve been taught to think of as safe in every way. But while Paradise was a relatively dense community, it was in what’s called the “wildland-urban interface” - essentially, houses in the woods. For a lot of Americans, the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in 2018 may be the most horrifying recent memory - 18,000 structures burned, 85 deaths. I wanted to start with what feels different about this fire.
The Costco we all shop at, the Target we buy our kids’ clothes at - all damaged.” In fact, though the fire did not begin there, it quickly jumped to a strip of big-box stores and their parking lots - to most Americans perhaps the very picture of an inflammable Anthropocene.* But as Swain told me on Friday when we spoke by phone, “Fire finds a way.” The way, typically, is wind during the Marshall Fire, it carried flames and embers at hurricane-force speed for eight straight hours, consuming “football-field lengths of land in seconds.”
That may sound like hyperbole, but on Friday the governor echoed the language: “It wasn’t a wildfire in the forest, it was a suburban and urban fire. But following the driest and second-warmest fall in 150 years, the devastation was harrowing out of proportion to its scale, since, unlike most wildfire, it was not in wildland or forest but was - as the climate scientist Daniel Swain, who lives in Boulder, put it - an “urban firestorm.” Two people currently remain missing if the death count stays at zero, Colorado governor Jared Polis said Friday, it would be “a New Year’s miracle.”īy the standards of the megafires and gigafires of the last few years, the Marshall Fire was quite small - 6,000 acres, all told, once it was finally, poetically, brought to an end by snowfall on New Year’s Eve.
On Thursday afternoon, in the space of a few hours just a day before the new year, 100-plus-mph winds carried the most destructive fire in Colorado history through the suburban sprawl of greater Denver, destroying much of the towns of Louisville and Superior and forcing tens of thousands to flee, including many who had entered shopping malls from sunny skies just a few minutes before. An aerial view of one of the Boulder County neighborhoods that burned to the ground on Thursday.
0 kommentar(er)
