Posted on 01/01/2022 11:29:05 AM PST by DUMBGRUNT
After a fire ripped through Boulder County Thursday, displacing thousands of residents and burning more than 500 homes, Gov. Jared Polis, Brig. Gen. Laura Clellan, Adjutant General of Colorado, and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle boarded a National Guard helicopter to survey the damage. CPR photojournalist Hart Van Denburg accompanied them.
(Excerpt) Read more at cpr.org ...
Thank you! I have been on that road a few times, but it has been awhile.
Insurance is on it fast. Not sure thier carrier. Paying for hotel and already found a short term furnished apartment they can move to Monday. Still they have no clothes or household items at all. Need computers so they can work. Family and friends have rallied, raised almost $20k so far.
ping to george76. See #19 for possible start of the fire. Not a downed power line. Accident in a shed?
A guy on a Mustang (car) FB group jumped in his 69 Mustang Mach 1 428 r code and drove out but lost 3 other collector cars (not insured because he never drove them or they were apart) and his 40 year NOS Mustang parts stash worth 75k not insured.
You’re welcome! I don’t have a Twitter account but I use it when big news happens for information.
I concede it’s run by truly wretched people- but it’s useful to me sometimes.
I’m not laughing.
But it looks like this...
https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/Wildfire/Preparing-homes-for-wildfire
...wasn’t a priority.
There is an obvious problem with the building codes and not much more.
—”There is an obvious problem with the building codes and not much more.”
Without the heavy hand of government intervention... The insurance rates will force the use of fire-resistant materials.
this area got 10” of snow last night and temps dipped into the low teens and winds have stopped for now ... just so sad that all of that didn’t happened 48 hours earlier ...
I've lived here since 82 and have never seen a grassland fire get into subdivisions. It took a very unusual set of conditions to trigger this horrible tragedy.
My cousin and his wife's home in Louisville was in the mandatory evacuation zone, so they've been living in their little cabin in the mountains since Thursday.
The updated map put out yesterday morning indicating the boundaries of the burnt areas showed that the furthest northeast extent of the fire reached within 5-10 blocks, or 3000 ft of their home.
Their youngest son, who lives in Boulder, was finally allowed in today by the authorities to check on the status of the gas & electricity in their house, to ensure the pipes wouldn't freeze.
There were a couple of "sole survivor" houses in burnt-out neighborhoods. I noticed that the owners left their lawn sprinklers running or set out garden hoses with sprinklers running before they left.
At one of the houses in Rock Creek, the grass fire reached the perimeter fence and stalled when the wind blew the panel down. It could have been stopped right there with a garden hose. Twenty minutes later, sparks from the burning cedar fence set shrubs and trees on fire in that yard, and it was all over. The house was fully engulfed in five minutes. That set off the two neighbors houses, and that whole block was lost.
I guess I will be tearing out all the bushes within 15 feet of the exterior walls.
Boulder is a very Progressive city.
That's awesome news. Learned a little while ago that friends who moved out there about 5 years ago sold their home in Lousiville (?) and moved to Boulder last year. Their old home burned. I saw pictures of the devastation, looks like everything that burned went all the way to the ground and there's nothing left. Never seen anything like that.
Wow, amazing photo POF. That Laguna beach neighborhood looks like it embodied swank with a capital “S” before the inferno.
Lasered by the gov.
They Built Home to Defeat Fire : Survival: The uninsured home of the To Bui-Doris Bender family was still standing amid chaos and destruction of its Laguna neighborhood.
BY WILLSON CUMMER
OCT. 30, 1993 12 AM PT
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
LAGUNA BEACH —
Doris Bender cleaned ants out of the refrigerator of her unscathed four-bedroom home Friday while, all around her, dazed neighbors searched through the ashes of what once had been similar luxury residences on the scorched Mystic Hills ridge.
Tough construction and tenacious firefighting had saved Bender’s uninsured $350,000 home from a firestorm that Wednesday night destroyed dozens of houses on all sides of the Tahiti Avenue home.
Bender, her husband To Bui, and their children, Angie, 17, and Meka, 12, wandered in shock Friday through their pristine house.
“Everything is still unclear to me,” said Angie, standing in her house for the first time since she ran from it Wednesday.
“Should I be feeling guilty or happy? I feel both, because other people lost their homes and ours is here. Nobody deserved for their house to be burned,” Angie said.
Bender’s nearly untouched home seems to have been surrounded by an invisible protective curtain. Three window panes cracked from the heat of the fire, but plants in the front-yard were green and alive.
The light pink stucco walls, washed clean by hours of spray from fire hoses, glistened against the black char of the hillside.
Perhaps the most damage done to the home was by the dozen news teams tracking in dirt and soot as they interviewed the family.
Bui, who built the house with a friend, said he made it tough to withstand fire, earthquake or mudslide. Thirty-foot-deep reinforced concrete pilings hold the house to the steep slope. The concrete walls are a foot thick.
Bender had planned Friday to quickly clean her house and then volunteer with Angie to help victims of the fire. Instead, she spent hours talking to reporters and amazed visitors.
“Hi. I’m your neighbor, Tom Scott,” said one visitor, walking up to Bui and Bender. “You guys were very lucky,” he told them.
Scott was not so lucky. Nothing was left of his home only six doors down from Bender’s.
Sunset Beach fire Capt. Terry Junkins, who fought Wednesday to protect the couple’s home, came to check the structure after seeing photos of it in a newspaper.
“It’s the little victories we’ve had in the last few days that have kept us going,” Junkins told Bender, his voice gravelly from two days of breathing smoke.
“We were feeling pretty down this morning until we saw the picture,” he said. “Then, we were jumping up and down on the beach.”
Junkins said his engine and an Orange County Fire Department engine spent most of the night protecting the house, which had a hydrant in front of it.
The rest of the block was already in flames when Junkins arrived about 5 p.m., but the Bender-Bui house looked salvageable, he said.
Bender twice hugged Junkins and laughed with relief as the tall fireman showed the family where he stood on their balcony for two hours, spraying water to keep away the flames from a nearby house.
“Sorry about your drain spout. I hit it off with my water stream,” he said in mock apology to the family.
Junkins said he would return later in the day to snap a picture to hang in his fire station.
“Come any time,” said Bender, inviting him over for dinner.
Two local architects also came Friday to study the design and materials used in the house. The thick concrete walls, tile roof, double-paned glass windows and absence of flammable shrubs helped save the house, said Eric Zuziak, 31.
Zuziak said he and architect Chris Abel had police permission to study homes that survived the fire. They will share their findings with other architects and builders in the Southland, he said.
Bender’s neighbors, many of whom returned for the first time Friday, combed their homes for tools, rock collections, chinaware and anything else that might have survived the 2,000-degree heat.
None begrudged the couple their miracle.
“They kept telling us when they built it, it was fireproof. I was glad,” said Evelyn Atwood, whose home two houses away was ruined.
“He did the smart thing, with stucco siding and boxed eaves,” said next-door neighbor Frank Wright as he stared at the burnt husks of a 1959 Jaguar roadster and 1962 MG Midget—the only things showing that his blackened lot had once held a home.
All visitors were shocked that the luxurious Bender-Bui home was uninsured.
Bender said she had tried to buy insurance in 1989, when building began. She said many companies refused to insure because the house is in a steep, dry canyon.
Others charged rates that seemed outrageously expensive when compared to rates in Germany, the country she came from in 1989.
Fire-Resistant Details
Studying the houses that survived the 1993 Laguna Beach fire storm yields lessons in building to withstand the heat
By John Underwood
Fine Homebuilding, Issue 96, June 1995.
One of the big keys was making sure burning embers could not enter the interior of the home or attic:
Colorado Ping ( Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from the list.)
See #19 for possible start of the fire. Not a downed power line. Accident in a shed?
Boulder County building codes now require fire sprinkler systems in all residential construction. It is quite expensive.
The newest subdivisions in Superior all had such installations. They were clearly ineffective as these areas were 95% destroyed in the wildfire.
Roof-mounted exterior sprinklers would have been less expensive and might have been more effective.
A consistent theme in the videos is decorative shrubbery or trees catching fire, and then setting the house siding on fire. Closely packed houses once fully engulfed, set their downwind neighbors on fire through a constant stream of embers to the roof and siding. They appear to set their adjacent neighbors on fire through direct radiant heating of the siding.
Building codes do not address any of this.
It does not matter how fast you are running if it is in the wrong direction.
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