Conditions west of I-25 keep Springs firefighters on constant alert

Three helmeted firefighters race from their truck, working in synch to douse the tall, dry, yellow grass with water pouring out of a thin hose, pausing briefly to connect new hoses and extend their line.

Suddenly, a gust of wind sends the crew running, shedding gear and sliding into individual fire shelters. They lay there, looking like mummies in wait.

It’s a drill — annual wildfire training required for every member of the Colorado Springs Fire Department. No one’s going through the motions, though; every firefighter knows the risks the changing season brings.

The west side of Colorado Springs is the largest Wildland-Urban Interface in the state. And where dry, unruly and dying vegetation meets mass development, there exists an ever-present danger of a large, catastrophic fire. While saving lives is the first priority, these exercises may some day make the difference between saving and losing someone’s home.

Make no mistake, if a fire like the blazes that ravage California breaks out west of Interstate 25, houses will be lost.

Twenty-four percent of Colorado Springs’ population resides in the WUI. Sixteen miles of the city’s border is shared with the Pike National Forest, which is no stranger to wildfire.

“It is not inconceivable that a couple hundred houses would burn up,” said interim Fire Chief Dan Raider.

If you set the imprint of the 2002 Hayman fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado history, on a map of the west side, thousands of homes would disappear.

“Where you see rooftops on the hillside, it is an area of concern for us,” said CSFD spokesman Lt. Mike Smaldino.

The haphazard way the west side has been developed presents interesting challenges, not the least of which will be getting fire trucks past panicked residents on winding two-lane roads.

If fire trucks can get to the fire, the challenge then will be akin to triage in a hospital: which house to save and which, because of limited resources, to let burn.

“We’re not built to build up quickly,” Smaldino said. “If we could put a fire engine in everyone’s driveway, that would be ideal. But we can’t do that.”

Which homes are lost is more dependent on what’s done before the fire starts than on what firefighters can do after it’s already burning, experts say.

“Mitigation is the best chance,” said Christina Randall, who heads the city’s Wildfire Mitigation initiative.

A former U.S. Forest Department firefighter, Randall was a battalion chief on the Hayman fire. Among the lessons learned in that fire, which burned 137,000 acres in the Pike National Forest and destroyed 133 homes, was the importance of protecting structures before a fire breaks out.

Randall spent most of April overseeing a $2.4 million mitigation project of 118 acres in and around Bear Creek Regional Park, 80 percent of which is dead brush. The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid for the weeks that crews spent chopping down dead trees and mowing grasses up to the property lines of some of the most expensive houses in the city. A few residents complained their privacy was jeopardized with the tree removal, Randall said.

“I’m personally thrilled that this work has been done,” said Charles Lavender, whose property on Orion Drive overlooks Bear Creek. “When this greens out, this will look like a park. We gave up some privacy, but we got safety in return.”

Since 2000, CSFD has kept a color-coded public map of each lot from Stratmoor Hills to the Air Force Academy, arching across Interstate 25 to the areas surrounding the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and Palmer Park, all known as the Wildland-Urban Interface. The wildfire risk levels of more than 35,000 lots have been identified, based on proximity to large pockets of brush and forestry as well as property owners’ compliance with mitigation recommendations.

The first of those recommendations came in 2003 in the form of the city rooftop ordinance. Roofs are the most vulnerable part of houses in the path of a wildfire, especially those made of wood shingles. New homes are required to have Class A roofing, such as asphalt shingles, metal, clay tile or hybrid composites. If 25 percent or more of an existing roof has to be replaced or repaired, the city requires that the entire roof be replaced with Class A roofing.

That’s not to say there aren’t a plethora of wood roofs on the west side. Charles Schwartz, who has lived in the Broadmoor Heights neighborhood for 30 years, is waiting for significant hail damage before he replaces his wood shake roof.

Schwartz’s lot is coded red, the highest risk rating on the CSFD map, despite his dedication to clearing trees and brush around his house.

The area is filled with million-dollar homes on sprawling, wooded lots, most of which, Randall concedes, were built in the brush and trees to enhance the value. She is part firefighter, part landscape architect in the way she tries to balance mitigation recommendations with aesthetics.

“We can’t make them change it. But you can make it look really nice,” Randall said.

Maintaining vegetation around a house is one of the main measures of its defensibility in a wildfire, firefighters say. Keeping grasses mowed to a minimum of 4 inches, pruning low-hanging tree branches and creating a 30-foot buffer between the house and trees and brush are some of the ways homeowners can help their homes survive a wildfire.

Though the Fire Department works with several of the 50 homeowners associations on the west side, not all are active in encouraging or enforcing that residents reduce the fire danger on their properties and any open space surrounding them.

That plays into why in a sea of “yellow” and “green” lots, there might be a “red” lot sticking out like a sore thumb.

Frontline firefighters have moments to decide which structures to defend, based on what homeowners have done.

“We’re going to spend the time on the houses that will take the least amount of time to set up a hose line around and defend,” Smaldino said. “The time to do mitigation is not when there’s a fire.”

On a day in early April, fire officials were touring the area surrounding Bear Creek park. Heading west on narrow Ridgeway Avenue, Battalion Chief Steve Dubay could barely get his fire department suburban past a large truck parked in front of a home.

“One of our engines would not be able to get through here,” Dubay said.

That means finding another route, eating up more time, Smaldino said.

Last November, a 10,000-square-foot, nearly completed mansion at 2855 Stratton Forest Heights above Cheyenne Mountain High School, was engulfed in flames.

Fire trucks had to navigate steep, narrow roads and a line of cars on 21st Street, some of which had stopped out of curiosity and apparently didn’t realize they were delaying firefighters. In a large foothills fire, that scenario would be repeated on dozens of access roads — all the while police try to evacuate residents.

Then there are the “perfect storms” to worry about.

Five to seven days a year, heat, Chinook winds and low humidity combine for prime wildfire conditions, or “perfect storm,” fire officials say. The Fire Department stops all non-essential activities so it can station trucks from the east side closer to the WUI.

The city owns 20 standard fire trucks, three wildland specific engines, and 14 smaller pickups equipped with smaller amounts of water that can access hard-to-reach terrain. That’s all that would be available until help arrived from surrounding areas, said interim Fire Chief Dan Raider.

It would take an hour or more for reinforcements to arrive from Pueblo or Denver. Even the smaller county fire departments would have a trek to the west side.

Residents may think that as a military town, Colorado Springs is better protected, with helicopters from Fort Carson available for bucket drops and C-130 tankers from Peterson Air Force Base prepared to drop fire retardant.

Air support from the military and Forest Service is dispatched through the National Interagency Fire Center, which stations aerial resources closest to the highest fire risks in the country. The 302nd Airlift Wing, which is frequently called on to fight large fires in California, is stationed at Peterson Air Force Base. It can be dispatched immediately under extreme circumstances, but more often getting assistance is not as simple as a phone call.

“During fire season, it will take at least 45 minutes to a few hours to get air resources,” Dubay said. “If we’re going to do it, we have to order it early.”

With 8 percent of west-side land left to be developed, the stakes continue to grow. Meanwhile, fire officials are bracing for steep cuts when the 2011 budget talks kick into full swing in coming months.

Raider said that he can’t “prove the negative” — that there would be more destruction if the department has to cut firefighters.

But the potential for more houses to defend with fewer firefighters is not an equation the department looks forward to balancing.