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American Morning

Wildfire Races Out of Control in Colorado

Aired April 25, 2002 - 09:06   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to turn to story that's getting a lot of attention here this morning, those wildfires out west. Let's check in with Anderson now.

ANDERSON COPPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right Paula. Wildfire races out of control in Colorado this morning. The fire burning just south of Denver has doubled in the last 24 hours. It now covers about 2400 acres. Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. The firefighters are desperately continuing work trying to contain the blaze. CNN's Rusty Dornin joins us now from Bailey, Colorado with the latest. Good morning, Rusty.

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Anderson. We're here at the staging here in Bailey where many of the fire trucks and these guys right here were out all night trying to fight some hot spots because during the night usually the fire - what they call lays down overnight. The flames lay down, the firefighters can get in and get some containment going in there.

Now most of the people that were evacuated, and that was a few thousand, have returned to their homes. But that's under the condition that they be ready to leave again should the winds kick up. The problem with this fire has been very erratic winds that's been - it's been very difficult to predict which way the fire has been going. And also almost most of the firefighters have had to stick to structure protection rather than trying to get on the fire because there are a shortage of firefighters. I've been covering fires for 20 years. This is the first time I have ever covered a wild land fire in the west in April, this early in the season. Now here to talk a little bit about this is Marc Mullenix. He's the safety officer actually the snaking fire. (INAUDIBLE) what has been the difficulty in this fire?

MARC MULLENIX, SAFETY OFFICER: Well our fuels are just extremely dry. We're in extended drought here. Some places were 20 to 30 percent of normal precipitation. What's happening, we call a probability of ignition. If you had 10 fire reins (ph) in your hand and you threw them out on the landscape right now, you'd start about nine fires. So about 90 percent of probability of ignition is what we have. When spot fire goes into these fuels. So this fire is surging. It's spotting and then running up to itself and spotting. It really makes difficult to catch up to.

DORNIN: Now I was here at fire two years ago. It burned 10,000 acres. Same exact area. What's the problem here?

MULLENIX: Well, you know, it's in the west. We have a lot of people who move out to what we call the inner face. And you said earlier, you know, that we're protecting homes and we leave the fire unchecked. And so you know we've got every resources that are hampered by the high winds and topography here and then we don't have enough of them. In April - I mean we're out here in April. I mean you can see our breath right now and we're fighting a major fire in a major urban airplace (ph) out in Denver.

DORNIN: Yeah. And I heard you actually had to call the crew from Illinois because ...

MULLENIX: Illinois.

DORNIN: What's the problem? Aren't there - how about the other hot shot crews and hand (ph) crews that normally fight these?

MULLENIX: Well the hotshot crews, which we would consider our backbone of the first service in the wild land arena, they're just coming on. They're just getting their training and hiring people and getting their physical fitness up and those sorts of things. So I mean I'm sure they're chomping at the bit, looking at TV right now saying, gosh, wish we were there. But we just don't have those crews available quite yet. You know our fire season usually picks up in late May and June and then, you know, ends around late September. This extremely early and we're extremely concerned about what this is going to do to fire crews and the resources throughout the west this summer.

DORNIN: What about today? What's going to be the concentration (INAUDIBLE) predicting the weather and that sort of thing?

MULLENIX: Well - well, again, we're cautiously optimistic. We're going to have winds again and they're going to pick up around 11 o'clock this morning. Yesterday, we had 4 percent humidity. So we - we have all those contingency plans in place. We have more air resources today. We have a plan to get people out if we have and we're going to hit the fire as hard as we can. You can see all the resources we have here now and they're being mobilized out to the line as we speak.

DORNIN: Great. Marc Mullenix, thank you very much, safety officer here on the snaking fire. Just one quick note. It turns out there's a suspicion that two kids may have started the fire from smoking out back behind the high school - Anderson.

COPPER: All right Rusty Dornin thanks very much. Just to repeat, this is a burning just south of Denver. It's doubled in the last 24 hours, now covering about 2400 acres.

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