So I’m in Colorado Springs for work right now (collecting dataaa!), and it seems like a, uh, great time to be here. In case you don’t know, there are severe wildfires rampaging across the area, and multiple locations have been evacuated (5000+ people). Apparently there is also a serial arsonist lurking about who may be partially responsible, so fuck that guy. The conditions here are extremely dry, which makes the firefighters’ jobs much more difficult because there’s so much fuel available. It’s 100 degrees F right now with dry winds that make the fire almost impossible to predict.
I was bumming around downtown Colorado Springs yesterday and trying to see the Garden of the Gods, a cool nature-y park thing with big rocks, but it was shut down because of the fire. Got some pictures of smoking mountains and a smidgen of visible fire.
Reminds me of when I studied in Moscow in Summer ’10 — wildfires literally filled the city with smoke. The metro was a deathtrap, the insides of buildings looked and smelled like the inside of a fireplace, and walking outside for an hour was the equivalent of smoking three packs of cigarettes. But people still…smoked…cigarettes? They couldn’t even see the smoke they exhaled because the air was so blackened and tainted.
Back to Colorado — I’m hoping I can still do my job tomorrow, but we’ll see. I hope nobody else’s homes get destroyed (about 200 total so far), and that everybody stays safe. Major props to the fire dept for working round the clock on this. Planes were dropping slurry (red wet stuff) along the border between the southern end of the fire and the nearby houses today, which makes fuel like brush and vegetation less flammable. The governor also released 6.2 mil to combat the fire, so this is some serious shit.
Craziness! Careful out there if you’re in Colorado.