I've seen man fires in the Boulder area, but it's always in the forest off in the mountains.

I never thought fir could travel across open space or reach our neighborhood.

It feels like Armageddon out here.

I've covered dozens of wildfires in this one.

It's going to be catastrophic.

911.

There's a fire in our backyard of sorts across the highway.

Now that fir on both sides of Marshall Road, that is pushing east back.

You start looking at where that fire is headed.

You're looking at 40,000 people.

I received a phone call from my husband telling me that smoke was pouring into the house.

All I could hear was my children screaming.

I stupidly thought we were going be coming back that day.

I mean, the fire trucks were there.

It was suburbia.

It was like a tornado.

From the time the house caught fire to the roof collapse was five minutes.

Oh, this entire neighborhood is just gone.

The Marshall Fir was the first time we saw a fire that behaved like a wildfire in a non rural environment.

Over a thousand homes consumed in after the new wildfire era was being.

The way we view the urban interface has changed, I think, for everybody.

Slightly.

We're always aware that ope space was a fire threat, right?

But I think now it's in the forefront of everybody's mind exactly how much of a threat it could be or is.

We all love our untouched, natural, open space, and we like the animals and all that stuff.

But with that comes a degree of of you know, of exposure to that.

Even if you live in the middle of downtown Denver, where you're paved all around you, and you know, there's a potentia that you might have to evacuate.

You should have a plan in place.

What are you going to grab?

What's important to you?

Do you have things stored in the cloud or in safe deposit boxes?

Not in your home.

And if you don't, do you grab those things are not what's important to you.

Even if people have that plan.

In my stories and talking to other people, they don't necessarily believe believe this.

We'll be back in two hours.

I'll be back in my house in an hour.

So I'll grab my passports, my cat and my jacket.

And lo and behold, four hours later, they don't have a home.

So I think recognizing the danger, having a plan for that and then taking it seriously.

And, I'm not here to debate global warming or any of those things, but I think the question that needs to be asked is, do you really believe you'l never see this in your career?

Does a homeowner believe they'll never see this when they live in that house?

Does a firefighter believe that they'll never see this again?

I would, urge people to say n or that you will see it again, to urge them to understand that you may see it again and prepare for it.

If you never have to put those plans in action, you know, great.

That's good for everybody.

But I think the question needs to be it needs to be asked, is that true?

Is or is this a once in a career type event?

I'm starting to have a hard time believing it.

It just the materials that homes are built out of.

We've seen fire change it.

It grows in intensity.

They're more toxic.

The fumes.

Right.

Like we don't have a cotton and wool couch anymore.

It's all plastics and petroleum based which is neither here nor there.

But our windows for rescue and, you know, lightweight construction as we try to keep costs dow for everything, they just the, the windows to fight fire ar smaller right now with the wind.

It was it was like a blowtorch, you know?

I mean, you'd see a corner of a hous catch on fire, and you'd try to lob some water at it, spra it out and it they'd go up and be fully involved in 4 or 5 minutes.

And that's not normal.

It's.

It was that wind pushing.

We were coming from the east.

So we're responding this way.

We came around right about just past this mountain here.

We came around the corner and we could see a little wisp of smoke at ground level.

And so usually you're looking when we're looking for smoke, we're looking for a column of smoke that's going straight up in the air under.

The winds were so strong that day that it was ground level.

So it was pushing the smoke this way.

So we didn't see anything til we were a minute away from here.

The second I stepped ou of the truck, I put my helmet on and the wind was so strong it blew it away.

So my helmet was gone.

It was that straw.

And then one of the other guys in the truck lost his helmet.

Also, our hoses weren' having that great effect on it because of the wind was so strong.

So a normal hose pressure from out of the hose verse brands about 100 psi.

I ended up spraying like 250 psi, and that the water comin out of the hose was coming out and taking a right turn.

The wind was blowing so hard, wasn't even hitting the ground.

So we had to reassess from that point and zoo and make it much good work.

So, we kind of knew what was going to happen with those wind conditions, and we took our truck and did what you don't do in a wildland fire and try to get in the attack, the head of it to try to stop it, because we could see the writing on the wall and see what was about to happen.

On a normal, normal day, you'll get embers off a fire and some of them will.

Some of them will, catch on fire or start fires.

You know that that night there was I remember looking down the street, in the dark, and there was thousands of embers coming our way.

We were dodging, dodging pieces of tin and plywood and rocks, and it was crazy.

But every one of those embers that landed caught something on fire.

So when they were if they caught and even a house, the house would go if it got in a gutter, you know, decks, lawn furniture, piles of wood.

Yeah.

It I'm sure houses started many ways that night.

I think us as a fire service are prepared to handle fires, but that day we weren't prepared to handle this.

I don't think anybody can be prepared to handle what we were facing that day.

The wind was like nothing I've ever seen before.

So we we could barely keep ahead of ahead of ourselves.

And at one poin we just ended up switching to, you know, almost self-preservation mode that run around town here without a helmet on all these there's trees coming down everywhere.

And I thought I for sure thought we were gonna lose firefighters that day, but we ended up not, which was amazing.

And, the wind was blowing s hard that that we couldn't see.

We had stuff in our eyes.

We were covered in water because of the wind or freezing cold.

Everything we were doing to try to stop the fire was wasn't working.

Yeah, it was.

It was a reality check there for a second.

At first, we were we were convinced more people were going to.

We're going to perish in this.

I count that to the th work of the sheriffs department and the park rangers and the Division of Wildlife guys that we saw going door to doo or getting ahead of the thing, knocking on doors getting people out of the way.

It was it was a very fast moving event, something, something that none of us have ever seen here before.

I think what went right as we didn't have more loss of life like we were talking about the you know, we were obviousl concerned about houses burning.

We don't want people to lose their properties, more concerned about life and the fact that we only los two people was it was amazing.

I think what went right with that was the teamwork that went went into getting people out and the relationships we've built with the sheriff's department and they kind of already have it pre-planned and know that they need to get out and start evacuating ahead of fires and that that part went went well.

Yeah.

We're definitely going to come up with more plans to to be able to handle these events.

And there's a lot of lessons learned from this about, you know, tactics and going from the wildland interface to the urban interface and how we make adjustments and how we end up fighting fire when the fire ends up going to town.

The Marshall fire, whic I could see from my living room window, was a real wake up cal to people and fire suppression.

First of all, it made us realize our vulnerability that even under optima conditions, in terms of access, right no one had to climb a mountain to get to the Marshall fire.

It would have to, you know, forged stream or anything like this was right.

This is a downtown suburban neighborhood where the fire raged like a wildfire.

This is not somethin that had never been seen before.

We saw over a thousand homes consumed in the course of an afternoon.

And this really let the fire community know we don't have what we need.

We are grossly underequipped, underprepared, understaffed and under technology to deal with these types of fires.

And I think everyone knew when we saw the Marshall Fire that a new wildfire era was beginning, that that fire raging right over there wasn't a one off.

But this was the beginning of what the future is going to look like on this planet.