Residents Want Answers for Last-Minute Evacuations in Waldo Canyon Fire

Thirty minutes after she got a pre-evacuation notice for her northwest Colorado Springs neighborhood, Danielle Civale was told to flee for her life from the Waldo Canyon fire.

"There was no way that they planned it like this," she told relatives after she and her husband made their escape.

Nearly a month later, Civale wants answers from those city officials who were responsible for the last-minute evacuations of much of Mountain Shadows and Oak Valley, Civale's neighborhood just to the north. As Civale desperately tried to get back into Oak Valley on June 26, she was traumatized by the chaos around her -- cars running stop signs, police officers yelling at her to get out -- leading her to conclude that whatever evacuation plan in place had failed, she said on Saturday.

"What was the plan? Whatever you had in the plan, it didn't work," she said Saturday.

Homes in Mountain Shadows and Oak Valley suffered major damage after a largely unpredicted firestorm blew through on the afternoon of June 26 after a long day of high temperatures and gusting winds.

On Friday, Mayor Steve Bach announced in a news release his intention to prepare an after-action review of the management of the Waldo Canyon fire, which burned 18,247 acres, incinerated 346 homes and killed two Mountain Shadows residents.

In his news release, Bach did not directly address the evacuation plans for the city, about which questions have been raised. Four main city officials are in charge of evacuations, said Bret Waters, manager of the city's Office of Emergency Management, on Friday: the officials include Bach, Fire Chief Rich Brown, Police Chief Pete Carey and Waters himself. Bach could not be reached for comment on Friday.

Civale and other residents remain baffled and traumatized by the Tuesday firestorm and the evacuations that were issued as flames ripped into their neighborhoods. In some cases, it was Colorado Springs police and firefighters who blocked roads and chased citizens out of the danger zone, not the anticipated Reverse 911 calls and city announcements, residents say.

Wildfires are dynamic disasters but years of research show that they have at least one static quality: They are forever posing challenges when it comes to evacuations.

Among natural disasters -- hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes -- wildfires present the greatest challenges when it comes to effective evacuations, according to studies done by hazard research centers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Sociological studies of evacuations show that people benefit from and abundance of information -- they want to know what's going on before, during and after a fire.

But the unpredictability of fire makes it difficult for officials to provide everything at exactly the right moment, said Kathleen Tierney, of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"Think about a hurricane, which typically gives days of warning that it is out there," she said Friday. "Tornadoes only give a few minutes warning, same with fires. By the nature of fire dynamics, the warning challenges are very great."

TIMELESS CHALLENGES

After more than 40 years of research by the center into fire evacuations, the inherent problems have not changed, Tierney said. The evacuation obstacles encountered by residents of Mountain Shadows have plagued other wildfire victims time and again. The problems include lack of timely warnings, people not receiving information that they are at risk and failure to inform people when areas are safe to return, Tierney said.

With the Waldo Canyon fire, officials tried to send out more than 32,000 emergency notifications as the fire burned into neighborhoods. About 11,000 residents didn't get the official notifications that studies show they were waiting for. Instead, many fled their homes as the air was choked with smoke, and flames began to crawl across their backyards.

Although part of the evacuation plan created by the city's Office of Emergency Management included discussions of traffic control, the last-minute emptying of Mountain Shadows caused mass confusion for many drivers. People who had been at work or running errands found themselves shut out. As the danger of encroaching flames became apparent, firefighters drove through streets with loudspeakers.

Desperate to get her husband out of their Oak Valley home on June 26, Civale was shocked that roads nearest to the flames were not blocked off. Just before 4:30 p.m., when fire crews were retreating from a monstrous flame front, Civale was able to get into Mountain Shadows.

"They had blocked off Peregrine, but it was just really weird that they hadn't blocked off Mountain Shadows and Oak Valley," she said on Saturday.

URBAN TERRAIN AT RISK

The explosive firestorm placed upper Mountain Shadows in extreme danger. The neighborhood is bordered to the west by a ridgeline that is also the eastern border of Queens Canyon. Earlier that Tuesday, the fire expanded to the western side of Queens Canyon, which runs south into Glen Eyrie. By Tuesday afternoon, 65 mph winds pushed the fire over the canyon to the eastern ridge. The fire then hopped the ridge and rushed down into streets below.

In minutes, the Waldo Canyon fire became an urban catastrophe, a common transition in some of the country's most devastating wildfires. The Waldo Canyon fire could be a case study for those who have looked at evacuations and problems with fire in urban areas.

Some of the worst wildfires in U.S. began in the wilderness but blew epic firestorms through urban areas, consuming homes and claiming lives. The Oakland firestorm in 1991 only burned 1,520 acres, but it killed 25 people and incinerated 4,000 homes. The northern Oakland community also fell prey to an overwhelming and inescapable firestorm. People were trapped, partially by timing, partially by neighborhoods not constructed to withstand an almost immediate conflagration.

"We forget that wildfires can come into the urban setting. It is (residents') duty to mitigate and be prepared, and it's the government's duty to help them," Tierney said.

Mountain Shadows resident Hank Scarangella was seeking evacuation answers from local government officials even before the firestorm.

The weekend the fire broke out, Scarangella was evacuated from his home in Huffman Court, behind the initial Chuckwagon Road boundary between voluntary and mandatory evacuations. For all neighborhoods south of Chuckwagon, mandatory evacuations were ordered on June 23. For all neighborhoods north of the road, all evacuations were voluntary until June 26.

At a community meeting on June 25, the night before the firestorm, he approached Fire Chief Rich Brown.

"'Why did you use Chuckwagon as the boundary between mandatory and voluntary evacuations?'" he recalled asking Brown. "'There are homes further up on the hillside (from mine). I just don't understand how we can be in danger and they are not.'"

In response, Brown said he would talk to the Type 1 command team in charge of the fire.

The next night, about 4:10 p.m., Scarangella and his wife sat in their seventh-floor Marriot Hotel room, watching the fire burn from a west-facing window.

"I saw the eastern ridge (of Queens Canyon) light up and watched the fire come down into Mountain Shadows. I was watching the four o'clock press conference, and my wife said, 'Why haven't they evacuated the rest of Mountain Shadows?'"

The Scarangellas' home was the only one in their neighborhood to be destroyed.

PREPARATION CRITICAL

While Scarangella watched the smoke billow, Marty France, who lives on Wilson Road, was in the thick of it. France was ready to leave his Wilson Road home long before a pre-evacuation notice was aired on television; even so, with the red-hot flames visibly blowing into his neighborhood, he still had only minutes to escape.

Despite the lack of an evacuation mandate, France did exactly what fire behavior experts recommend in wildfire situations: He made time for some last minute mitigation, watering his roof and lawn, and he got out.

"If smoke is coming, don't wait for a call," said Michele Steinberg, Firewise Communities program manager for the National Fire Protection Association. "If you assume that someone is going to come knock on your door with lots of time, that's not happening. It's not a good idea to wait and see."

The "wait and see" mentality tends to predominate in evacuation situations, Steinberg said.

"People are reluctant to leave their homes for days. What do people actually do? What they actually do is wait and see," she said. "When conditions change rapidly, that doesn't work. Fleeing at the last moment is really not what you want to be doing."

But waiting and fleeing at the last moment might have been the only options for residents who had received no Reverse 911 calls from the city about evacuations. At 4:06 p.m on June 26, France was chatting with firefighters staged on the top of Wilson Road. At 4:10 p.m. he saw flames on the ridge and decided it was time to get out.

The days' worth of warnings and information that often accompany an imminent hurricane are usually absent in a fast-moving, unpredictable wildfire, Tierney said.

"In order for people to evacuate to safety, they need to receive the warning, understand the warning, and know that it applies to them," she said. "This is immensely challenging to get all parts of that warning process right."

As to whether enough pre-emptive action was taken for Waldo Canyon fire evacuations, Tierney could not say.

But it's a question that Civale wants answered by those responsible.

"The four people that had the decision to evacuate and didn't, they need to answer to that," she said. "It's not a political thing to me, it's life."

McClatchy-Tribune News Service