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TRANSCRIPT: Walker Ranch
By Beth and Marissa
0:13 GINGER GRAHAM: All of us were talking about it because it was really dry. It was
the years of the droughts so we’re over 90 degrees for a month and a half, there’s
no rain at all, the winds are high, the trees are screaming for moisture; it’s just terrible.
There were signs up on the road about how dry and how dangerous it was, you know, people
were doing all kinds of things. Even neighbors were walking the trails trying to make sure
that nobody was out here smoking and all of us were talking about it. And sure enough,
you know I don’t think they ever found the person, but they believe that someone did,
with a cigarette, set this fire.
[Caption]
0:53 RANDY COOMBS: We’ve had quite a few fires that have occurred here and usually
happen in August, September, October, and November. We usually have high temperatures,
dry grasses, low humidity, lots of wind. Once you have some kind of cause for that fire,
it takes off and really blows up the wind. This particular fire happened in the year
2000, started September the fifth, lasted about seven days. Because of the topography,
the high temperatures and the dry grasses, it became extreme.
1:30 GINGER: It was in September on a Friday afternoon and my husband Jack and I saw the
smoke from Walker Ranch, so we went to check on it and knew there was a fire, called 911
and came home and immediately started watching the whole firescape along the ridge of the
mountain not too far from us began to explode. We evacuated our animals for fear that the
fire might overtake us in the night. Saturday the winds took it towards Denver
and blocked our view of Denver, created enormous smoke, lots of planes flying and people trying
to get out, a full evacuation all the homes beyond us. We’re in a position at the top
of a ridge of a mountain and our home was the first home in danger as the fire came
from Myer’s Gulch. The fire department was convinced that if they lost us, they would
lose all the houses below us. The fire department camped in our front pasture, the fire trucks
lined the road right in front of us to be available to try to stop the fire, but then
Saturday night it blew back again towards the mountains and as we woke up Sunday morning
it was coming straight at us. By Sunday afternoon, it was pretty apparent
to us that there was no stopping it. The air was full of smoke and the sun was totally
blacked out. Fire was by then in Myer’s Gulch, which is right across the street, and
as it came this way, it blocks the road and so everyone including the fire crews had to
evacuate because once the fire crosses the road, it’s not safe for anyone to leave.
We pulled out and we went up the road up about a mile and there’s a giant boulder just
off the roads and so we’re sitting up there watching the house disappear from view and
eventually it got dark enough that the planes had to leave so we assumed, that night, that
the house was lost. The fire department actually called us about
midnight at a friend’s house and said that the winds had turned back and the house was
saved.
3:28 RANDY: There were no homes lost, that’s what made this fire kind of outstanding given
the fact that it grew so fast and so intense.
3:35 GINGER: I think fire mitigation was actually very huge and maybe the only reason that our
house and scores of other homes were saved. The fire department had done a controlled
burn across the road from us in Myer’s Gulch and that of course meant that there was a
lot less fuel.
3:49 RANDY: Before we did the prescribed burn we did some forest mitigation. We went in
and thinned the trees, burned the slash piles, and got rid of the fire wood and the materials
from the trees and so when this fire took off and burnt this area over here, it jumped
the road, and because of this area being thinned and forest mitigation happening here earlier,
they knew that they could send crews in here and do it in a safe manner, and they were
able to hit it with slurry bombers and with fire crews and knock the fire down and do
it safely and between the weather and good fire fighting techniques and the mitigation
that took place here, they were able to control the fire.
4:33 GINGER: We moved to Colorado from California. When we were looking around we fell in love
with the mountains, the view, the beauty and so we just felt that it was the right place
for us.
4:42 RANDY: It continues to be a very popular place for people to want to live in Colorado,
this is the kind of place that they want to live. You have to realize that you need to
do your work around your home and work with your community to do everything that you can
to make it fire defensible.
4:57 GINGER: Community up on a mountain is co-dependent in many ways. We have giant snow
up here, we’ve had a 7 foot snow in one day, we are always at forest fire risk and
so we talk a lot about safety and fire mitigation protection.
5:11 RANDY: A lot of the homeowners get with their fire protection district and they hire
mitigation crews to come in and work on their property. Some homeowners will do it on their
own, and others will do it through contractors.
5:24 DWAYNE HARRISON: Part of the history of fire up here is that we’ve prevented
forest fire for so long that there are more trees per acre than there originally is when
we weren’t controlling the fires. What we have to do is protect from all the surrounding
forest so that if there ever was to be a fire, prevent the fire from getting from where the
fire is to the big trees around the house we want to protect.
5:50 RANDY: So this is kind of a spot where we want to be able to do some thinning, both
on this side of the road and the other side of flagstaff road. You can see that the ponderosa
pine and doug-fir are growing very close together. I think that in the this case right here most
of the homeowners know that they are living in a wildfire situation, but they choose the
privacy over the endangerment of their homes, but the downside of that is that it creates
a problem for the rest of the people who live in the area.
6:22 DWAYNE: You know, unfortunately to make things better you have to remove a lot of
the trees. Nobody wants that because everybody moves up into the mountains for the trees
6:32 RANDY: Well if you have wildland fire equipment or personnel or people trying to
get out of the area this becomes a bottleneck.
6:38 DWAYNE: From a fire mitigation standpoint you can only do so much. Of course if I could
work with that neighbor and achieve the results that we want, things would be better.
6:46 GINGER: We all want to be good neighbors and help each other, check on each other when
the weather is bad, and also hopefully create a neighborhood where we’re able to manage
if at all possible fire risk by helping each other out and doing the smart things to protect
our home. Fire never leaves us in terms of a memory.
You can still see, in our lifetime the mountains will not have trees again where the fire occurred,
and so it makes you really appreciate how fragile the environment is and our responsibility
to try and do our part to take care of it.