“We might have our very own New Year’s miracle on our hands if it holds up that there was no loss of life,” Gov. Jared Polis said.
The outcome appears all the more astonishing considering how quickly the Marshall Fire spread. “In the blink of an eye,” the governor said Friday in a news conference, “many families having minutes, minutes to get whatever they could, their pets, their kids into the car and leave.”
Still, hundreds have lost homes and perhaps everything they own. Entire subdivisions burned, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said.
“The west side of Superior, Old Town Superior … are totally gone,” he said after he and the governor flew over the area to assess the damage. “That accounts easily for 500 homes.”
The wildfire began Thursday morning and swallowed at least 1,600 acres in a matter of hours, prompting orders for people across two communities to evacuate.
As quickly as the winds began, they subsided overnight and the weather started a quick swing 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.
“We do still have active burning within the fire perimeter both in the communities of Superior and Louisville,” she said Friday morning.
The mayor of Superior “witnessed houses just exploding right before our eyes” on Thursday evening, he told CNN.
“It was one of the most disturbing situations I have ever been in,” Clint Folsom said Friday.
‘The winds were going crazy strong’
Thursday’s event was a “truly historic windstorm,” with winds gusting over 100 mph in Jefferson and Boulder Counties and fueling the blazes, the National Weather Service said.
“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.
Wind gusts Thursday pushed the blaze “down a football field in a matter of seconds,” 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.”
“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.”
‘It was just apocalyptic-feeling’
Overall, “we had 300 people overnight in shelters,” Kelly said Friday.
On Thursday at a Costco in Superior, Hunt Frye was shopping for soup for his wife when a worker told customers to evacuate. People initially were calm as they left the store, Frye said, but then took off like “antelope, running all over the place.”
“It was pretty scary. It was kind of like a life beyond a dream,” he said. “It was just apocalyptic-feeling.”
As he drove away through the haze, Frye was “trying to get out of there in a safe manner.”
“But people were running from their houses with their pet cats and, you know, everybody was very panic-stricken,” he said. “The thing that really struck me was the fear in the police officers’ face(s) who were trying to kind of get traffic going. They were legitimately scared.”
“I called my wife, and she started collecting valuables and clothes to evacuate,” Smith said. He drove through smoke on his way there and on his way back.
Across the fire zone, roads were blocked by smoke and traffic gridlock as people tried to make their way out.
The situation on the ground was “unbelievable,” Weaver told CNN.
“When you talk about what’s going on on the ground, it was really about trying to stay away from the front of the fire that was being pushed forward and get everything out that we could,” he said. “The focus was on life safety.”
At a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Superior, families with young children could see smoke out wide windows and made their way toward an exit, video taken by Jason Fletcher shows.
“Right now,” one woman said. “It’s OK.”
“I’m scared,” said a child as another woman leaned hard into the front door to pry it open against blowing wind.
From an ICU room at Avista Adventist Hospital in Louisville, white smoke clouded a charcoal sky just across the parking lot and a street, video from Kara Plese shows. The hospital was fully evacuated and patients transferred or discharged, officials there said. Good Samaritan Medical Center in nearby Lafayette also began transferring some of its most critical and fragile patients, according to a news release.
Downed power lines may be the cause
Deputies confirmed downed power lines in the fire zone, said Pelle, who cited preliminary reports in pointing to those line as the fire’s cause, with a final determination expected in the coming days. Also sparked was the Middle Fork Fire, which was quickly “laid down,” the sheriff said in a news conference.
Strong wind would make battling the fire head on a challenge, Weaver told CNN’s “New Day” Friday.
“The high wind speeds were driving embers and other flames forward so quickly,” he said, adding, “There is no way to attack it head on, that’s absolutely true. Even from the sides, you have to be careful with the swirling winds that are nearby.”
Winds had dropped by early Friday to below 20 mph, and the area is under a winter weather warning, with heavy snowfall expected by sunrise, CNN meteorologist Shackelford said.
Friday’s anticipated snowfall “comes at a good time,” Schakelford said, “since 100% of the state is under some sort of drought, and this snowfall will also help to contain the Marshall Fire.”
But while the snow will help halt the flames’ advance, “for some people that’s going to be a problem for trying to retrieve belongings from any burned home,” Weaver said.
“If the snow falls too quickly,” he added, “it can do further damage to property.”
Recovery plans are already underway
“It’s just something you don’t plan on. It’s just devastating,” she said.
Given the fire’s size and intensity, Pelle would not be surprised if the numbers of casualties or missing people soon change, the sheriff said Thursday. Already, at least six people were treated for injuries related to one of the fires, a UCHealth spokesperson told CNN Thursday. A law enforcement officer suffered a minor eye injury from blowing debris.
“This area, for those who don’t know this area of Boulder County, is right and around suburban subdevelopments, stores. It’s like the neighborhood that you live in; it’s like the neighborhood that any of us live in,” the governor said Thursday.
CNN’s Carma Hassan, Natalie Andes, Derek Van Dam and Monica Garrett contributed to this report.
