Environment & Energy

Almost 3 years to the day a very similar fire tore through 2 towns near Boulder Colorado. Extreme winds aproching 100mph made the fire basically unfightable. In around 4 hours over 1000 homes were burned to the ground. Looking at the pics of the aftermath was shocking with mostly just basements with ash and some metal debris in them. Lucky there was only 2 deaths. 3 years later about 70% of the homes have been rebuilt.

The parallels to the comments coming out of the LA fires are amazing. Fire hydrants with no water is one of them. The system just could not keep up with all the water getting pumped out of it by all the regional fire trucks that rushed into try to help. The pipes in the residential areas are not large enough to supply the shear volume being asked of it. One of the city water systems managers even disabled the water treatment system to all their system to keep suppling as much volume of raw water as they could. It took months to resanitize the supply system. An important paper/Manuel was written an published as before there was little information available for doing this.

if you look at the videos of a house fire being fought while under these kinds of high winds one fire truck does not stand a chance of even containing the fire to just that house.

With this being in the location that it was in Colorado there is a large number of researchers in the area that had the equipment and the interest to swing into action and start measuring data. There is lots of papers that have been written about many aspects of the fire. Just search with Marshall fire Colorado in your search terms. You will find an amazing amount of information that has been compiled about this event.

here is an example of a search for some air contamination research. https://www.colorado.edu/today/2024/12/23/months-after-marshall-fire-returning-residents-reported-symptoms-poor-indoor-air-quality