Any of you folks being threatened by these fires? I certainly hope not but if you are good luck!
I’m not. Though our power is out. I halfway expect to get called out at some point
Just under 600 homes lost so far…in just a matter of hours. Flames consuming football fields in mere seconds.
Winds peaked at 115 mph…
Unreal that this should be snow season not fire season for Colorado.
Be safe
Hope they get it contained. I spent a few years in California in the Marines and those winds are no joke. People who have never experienced them have no idea how fast those fires move.
Be safe and good luck
The little blue dot is at the corner of McCaslin & Dillon, an intersection in Colorado suburbia.
The aerial photo shows the terrain - Not Much to Burn.
Seems like the serious wind fires happen in areas where there are no trees.
One would hope that Colorado could learn from California’s example, but that doesn’t seem to happen much in the US. So many of California’s fires starting from downed power lines.
It’s not that hard to make a power line wind-resistant - but it does cost money.
Check out Wildfire Today for good wildfire reporting.
I will address this two fold
First, PG&E is a utility that seems to put profits above all else. They’ve blown up neighborhoods with decrepit high pressure gas lines, and poisoned drinking water supplies for entire towns. They really are a crappy company nor are they a steward of the environment.
That said, since at least 2010 and if not earlier, PG&E has been sued by several environmental and local citizen groups whenever they try to cut back or fell trees to prevent contact with transmission and/or distribution lines. PG&E has been subject to injunctions and cease and desist orders preventing them from performing the necessary fire mitigation. Then people get upset when fires are caused by their equipment…
Every public utility in the country has taken notice of PG&E’s struggles and implemented plans not to be the next PG&E. Nobody wants that black eye nor being responsible for the destruction of land, property, or causing death.
Speaking to our own fire mitigation efforts, we have at the very least doubled or tripled our fire mitigation efforts, and I have personally worked on and put in very long hours on these projects. It goes FAR beyond just trimming trees.
We had winds in excess of 115 miles per hour yesterday. A roof of a Discount Tire store collapsed yesterday. That is Cat II hurricane strength winds in the middle of the country. While these winds are actually common in the Rocky Mountain region and as well in hurricane country, no public utility has come up with a cost effective means of electrical distribution that can withstand these extreme weather conditions.
We can certainly run everything undergound and quadruple your current electric bill, then replace everything again in 20 years and quadruple your bill again…
The truth is air is the best insulator, underground transmission and distribution is prohibitively expensive, and just not feasible.
The real issue here is the extreme drought conditions, and hurricane force winds. Not the utilities.
Since you say it’s not that hard to create “wind resistant” power lines, I’d love to hear how you’d implement such ideas, what those ideas are, and how you’d do so without major supply disruptions or cost increases to the consumer.
Looks like it was a Coal Mine fire.
That is a very real possibility, though they haven’t said definitively one way or the other
That mine in question g he as started at least one other fire
So this is outside where I live about 20 min ago. It’s a whole different fire. Started in Glade Park last night. The video is from Fruita Co.