…in Colorado Springs. Good luck to all my friends in the area. I’ve heard they’ve evacuated the Air Force Academy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s not a forest fire any more. (Note that these pictures are from last night, not sure what status is this morning, except I saw on Facebook that Stephen Green was getting ready to potentially evacuate).
[Update a few minutes later]
Here are more pics from the Denver Post. This could be one of the worst fires in the nation’s history, in terms of residential damage (and perhaps loss of life, too, if people don’t evacuate in time).
[Update in the afternoon]
As Stephen Green says, it looks like Hiroshima.
Sarah Hoyt has commented a few times, here and here.
Re the Academy, there anticipating over 1000 doolies coming in tomorrow. At this point they’re still planning on bringing them in.
My home for fifteen years. 100 homes lost in Mountain Shadows alone, which is the development just below the Flying W Ranch, which burned to the ground yesterday. I worked in the MCI complex at the bottom of Mountain Shadows.
The fire came over the ridge at 65 MPH. I have friends on the east side of I-25 and even they are afraid of what might happen next.
I live on the south side of the city, but my work place (as of yesterday) is in one of the evacuation areas near Garden of the Gods. It didn’t look that bad when I left work on Saturday, but the wind shifted yesterday and turned everything very bad. I’m hoping this thing will end soon and without any loss of life.
I live just across Centennial Blvd from the Mountain Shadows area. We were evacuated last night. From the maps, it looks like our neighborhood still exists, but at least one friend/coworker has lost his house.
They haven’t evacuated the entire AFA (I don’t think). I’m looking at it now from my office across I25. Mt. Blodgett is on fire on three sides, but the helis and spotter planes are using the AFA runways near its base. And the MAFFS C-130s from Peterson are hard at work.
Based on info I’ve gotten from the Association of Graduates, they have evacuated the housing areas in Pine Valley and Douglass Valley. As far as I know they are still operating and expecting to inprocess the incoming class today.
I say we send in Bruce Willis!
Looking out my window, it seems the fire is moving closer to the Academy. It’s really hard to know the fire’s boundaries with all the smoke.
It’s the smoke that does a lot of the damage along with winds generated by the fire. I hope they get everybody evacuated from the danger.
I guess this wasn’t a good idea after all:
The Obama administration is ordering a one-year moratorium on most road-building and other development on about 50 million acres of remote national forests.…
Environmental groups consider the road ban crucial since road-building is often the first step toward logging, drilling, mining and other development in the forest backcountry. Critics of the ban say roads are needed to fight wildfires and log small trees that otherwise could serve as fuel for catastrophic fires.
Colorado did decided to one-up Obama.
Did they mobilize the AF cadets to help fight the fire? Put them to work and they might learn something about how close air support is for more than fighting wars.