High Park Fire

This week there have been tornado warnings on the TV on many days and some areas have been in flash flood alert due to thunderstorms dumping great amounts of water in a short time. At first when arriving to Colorado I didn't really understand the phenomenon and seeing warning signs next to the canyon roads seemed very strange but flash floods can be extremely dangerous as e.g. this example from 1976 proves.

The big news, however, has been the High Park Fire which has been blazing for about a week now west of Fort Collins about an hour's drive to the north-northwest. It has continued to be incredibly dry and like with the last big fire in March, it got out of hand because of very high winds that spread it over too big an area to control. On Tuesday the wind blew the smoke right towards Denver and the visibility and the air quality was very poor. You could clearly smell it even inside the heavily air-conditioned office and all week firefighting airplanes and helicopters have been flying over the office to and from the nearby Broomfield airfield.

Some pics from the Huffington Post

The worst is now over but over 55,000 acres were scorched. That translates to 222 square kilometres and just to put that in perspective, that's more than the entire land area of the city of Helsinki. The fire killed one person and destroyed 181 homes (the most in Colorado's history) which might sound little compared to the massive area but it is sparsely populated due to its ruggedness and as much as 1500 firefighters have been battling day and night in order to protect more homes from going up in flames. One unlucky man who had lost his home commented on TV that all the people living in these remote locations have to accept the risk and that it's the price to pay for choosing to live in such a gorgeous setting.











Looking at next week's weather forecast, it doesn't look any better and reports of other smaller fires are to be expected but fingers crossed that none of them get out of hand. Everyone in Colorado is hoping for some big showers and preferably ones that last for days rather than hours. We have had some local thunderstorms and although those might sound good at first, it's worth keeping in mind that this fire was actually started by a lightning strike so it's a bit of a catch-22. Just a side note: Vaisala's equipment was used for detecting the lightning strikes and you can get a quick glimpse of it in this news story around the 7:15 mark.

No help in sight next week