I lived in Colorado Springs in the early 1980s and remember the chinook winds that would sweep through in the winter… is it likely that’s what happened in this case?
I’m in West Texas and this time of year is always bad anyway for fire due to all the dry grass but it’s even worse since we’ve been so dry and all the cedars are drying out. Once those cedars get this dry they go up fast. We cut fire lines every year and especially clear out around the ranch house and other structures, some folks don’t understand how important that is. You can’t stop the fire but in most cases you can divert it or take away it’s fuel in small area’s like structures and in our case oil wells and tank battery’s. As I mentioned up thread we lost 14 square miles of pasture but didn’t lose any structures or equipment to the fires in 2011. We did lose several miles of fence. The plus side of this is a good fire rejuvenates over grown pasture and clears out a lot of the undesirable brush and weeds.
Fire is part of natures way of cleaning things up and staying healthy and an important part of ranch management or forest management for that matter. Hell some tree’s can’t reproduce without it. Pre 1900’s we use to have a lot more fires than we do now and they would just burn until they finally went out. The only defense was clear enough area around the house to keep it from getting to it, a practice many seem to have forgotten. Now they build right in the forest and brush area’s and then plant even more combustibles around it.