As fires rage in California, emergency officials from metro Denver warily eye the mountains.

Especially during windy days.

With the right equipment, smart placement and plenty of water, Colorado’s seasoned firefighters are prepared to confront wildfires. 

But if winds are kicking at 100 miles per hour, coupled with dry conditions and plenty of fuel, well, that’s a different beast.

And not too long ago, emergency respondents confronted such a beast in the Marshall fire, which tore through communities in Boulder, burning down more than a thousand homes and killing two.

The fires raging in Los Angeles are making emergency officials here in Colorado vertiginous.

What if the Big One hits metro Denver?   

Earth

Colorado is no stranger to wildfires as they typically occur in the western mountains.

The main fires hitting Los Angeles also started as wildland fires, and they quickly evolved, fueled by strong Santa Ana Winds and drought conditions, into something more terrifying and hellish: An urban conflagration.

As the fires spread, L.A. firefighters found their hoses, hooked up to street-side fire hydrants, failing to spout out the copious amount of water needed to fight the fires.

The same thing happened in 2021 in Colorado, with the Marshall fire, the most destructive fire in state history, and in Hawaii in 2023, when the Lahaina fire killed more than 100 people.

Strong winds and abnormally dry winters fueled both fires.

And emergency officials in Boulder County — which has sent Marshall fire veterans to help fight the Los Angeles fires — know that should a conflagration occur, the local water system is not enough to fight it.

Water

Despite their best efforts, firefighters in Los Angeles, Lahaina and Louisville failed to contain the fast-moving fires and save homes and other structures. A big part of that was because the water systems they tapped couldn’t handle so many hoses being turned on all at once.

And as the fires burned and structures collapsed, they exposed another weakness in municipal water departments’ ability to effectively provide water.

“We’ve all seen the pictures: Things are completely burned to the ground and piping is completely exposed, so (they’re) just hemorrhaging water,” said Chris Douville, the Boulder Utilities deputy director of operations. “(They’re) bleeding out water.”

He added: “There’s a complete burnout conflagration and extreme situation where we lose water even quicker.”

“It’s not only how much water you have and which hydrants you’re tapping, it’s this burnout reality that we did see in Marshall.”

In addition to the Marshall fire and Los Angeles fires, rescue crews working the Lahaina fire — which destroyed much of the historic town —  experienced a severe drop in pressure.

Exposed pipes melted away amid intense heat and firefighters could only watch as a trickle of water turned to mist in hurricane-force winds.

But more importantly, a municipal water system is designed to handle peak demand of people taking showers, running appliances and flushing the toilet.

It is not designed to handle a massive urban conflagration, Douville said.

A typical showerhead pumps out 2.5 gallons per minute. A washing machine can use anywhere between seven and 25 gallons of water.

A fire hose used to attack a fire can spew roughly 180 gallons per minute.

Wind

Firefighters rely on much more than just water to fight fires.

Wind conditions need to be calm enough to prevent a fire’s swift spread, aircraft filled with fire retardant or water from other sources can be called in, and trenches can be dug in time to augment natural fire breaks.

Today, firefighters worry about fires crossing the wildland urban interface, where open spaces morph into urban development, and becoming a conflagration.

Denver Water, which didn’t provide specifics, said fire hydrants in the city are designed to fight small scale urban fires, not the emergencies like the Marshall, Lahaina or L.A. fires.

The department is equipped to adjust water flows quickly so “firefighters have the water pressure they need to fight the blaze,” the agency said in a statement.

In this case, a “blaze” is a small urban fire.

There is redundancy built in the system, and the department is planning to invest $1.8 billion to make it more resilient.

“As we see the urban/wildland interface continue to merge, however, we need even more investment and collaboration to inform how we plan and evolve to be as ready as possible for the future,” the agency said.

Fire

By definition, a conflagration is a large disastrous fire, according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. But in the context of firefighting, it is an uncontrollable fire spreading from structure to structure.

A conflagration is the worst case scenario for local departments, many of which saw first hand the Marshall fire’s devastating results.

Should an urban fire break out, the Boulder Fire Department estimates it could fight six structure fires at once, said Chief Brian Oliver, the department’s wildland division chief.

But there’s an important caveat.

“We have several mutual and auto-aid agreements with all our surrounding fire departments, so when those things start to happen, we instantly grab all of our neighboring departments for help,” he said.

During the Marshall Fire, the fire departments of Colorado Springs, Fort Carson, Castle Rock, Denver and Loveland all deployed to assist, among many other agencies that parachuted in to help.

Such as a system of cooperation also exists among states, which regularly send in their emergency crews to help each other. Colorado, for example, sent some 50 engines to L.A. 

The challenge is that if a fire crosses into the urban area and uncontrollably spreads through Boulder, Louisville or other towns, water pressure will drop rapidly.

At that point, firefighters pivot to saving lives, rather than structures.

“As long as everybody gets out, that’s the important thing, we can build back anything we want,” said Lt. Michael Anderson, the North Metro Fire Rescue District’s wildland team leader. “It stinks, but at least you’re alive to build another house.”

Anderson added: “As far as the structures, you just really have to pick somewhere that you can make a stand, where the winds aren’t blowing in your face and maybe you can save a structure or two.”

Price tags can be put on homes and items — but not lives, he said.

The areas served by North Metro Fire Rescue, Castle Rock Fire and Boulder Fire are, in some ways, lucky. They are dense, urban, paved cities and suburbs that fire trucks can easily access.

But it cuts both ways.

The density may become their enemy in the face of a conflagration.

In L.A., firefighters were pre-deployed to some areas of high risk ahead of the fires breaking out. Despite that, fires sparked all across L.A. County and firefighters were quickly overwhelmed.

Pre-deployment strategies are not used by Castle Rock Fire, but the department is re-evaluating this in light of the fires in Los Angeles.

“We do have models where we can up staff our rigs or add additional units to our daily staffing if we were to run into a particularly dangerous situation,” said Oren Bersagel-Briese, the operations division deputy chief of Castle Rock Fire. “On a red flag day, for example, our initial response to a brush fire is an increased response, where we send more units quickly.”

Time is always of the essence when responding, he added.

And if conditions are bad enough and time is not on a first responders side, the window to respond is very narrow.

Castle Rock firefighters try to hit fires hard and fast, Bersagel-Briese said. If they’re not fast enough, they’ll be “in a different ball game.”

And this “different ball game’ is what they worry about.

”The worst case scenario is a fire that turns into a conflagration similar to what the Marshall fire was. It’s something that concerns us so we put a lot of resources into trying to plan and prepare for that,” Bersagel-Briese said. “It’s something we worry about, but we don’t stay up worrying about it at night.”

“We try to do our best to see what we can do in our community to prevent something like that from happening.”

Much was learned from the Marshall fire and Bersagel-Briese’s department in Castle Rock is spending hours training senior command staff, incident commanders and firefighters on how to best respond.

People

It’s easy to feel powerless amid the fury of a fire. But there are strategies residents can use to make their homes as resilient as possible ahead of fire season, officials said. 

Some materials, like dried leaves and stacks of wood in the backyard, are “ember collectors” and will quickly flare up if touched by the smoldering remains of a fire, officials said. 

“It’s amazing how an ember shower created by that sort of event will light the smallest three dry leaves in the corner of your house,” Anderson said. “We started a campaign (to teach residents about) defensible spaces around the house.”

“How that applies to North Metro’s area is basic yard work ahead of time,” Anderson said. 

The Colorado state forest service defines defensible spaces as those where wildfire hazards are mitigated.

The organization has a guide on how to ensure a home is as fire-prepared as possible. But this alone may not save a home if conditions are bad enough, officials said.

When some homes in L.A. appeared untouched, surrounded by the charred remains of others, many variables were at play in these cases.

“It’s all kinds of factors,
there’s so many variables involved that it’s really hard to pinpoint,” Oliver said, explaining that certain building materials, like concrete, may have been used — or that the wind was just blowing in the right way to spare that one building.

Some areas, Boulder included, are looking to adopt building codes that increase fire resiliency. That process is still in its very early stages.