DENVER (AP) — A late-season wildfire pushed by hurricane-force winds tore through two densely populated Denver suburbs and seemed destined to leave a trail of deaths. Yet, only two people are unaccounted for out of some 35,000 forced from their homes.
It’s a remarkably low number of possible casualties, according to disaster experts and authorities, all the more so because a public alert system did not reach everyone and the wintertime blaze caught many people off-guard.
Several factors broke in favor of the evacuees: The blaze came during daylight and over the holidays when many were at home, in mostly affluent neighborhoods where most people have easy access to vehicles.
It also might have helped that the area has seasoned emergency management personnel who have worked other recent wildfires, major floods in 2013 and a supermarket mass shooting last March.
“In terms of the big picture it’s a really miraculous evacuation,” said Thomas Cova, a University of Utah professor who researches emergency management and wildfire evacuations. “So close to a populated areas … spot fires everywhere and 100-mile-per-hour winds — I think it’s incredible that’s there’s only two people missing.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said the fire that destroyed almost 1,000 homes and damaged hundreds more stands as a warning: “When you get a pre-evac or evacuation notice, hop to it.”
Officials have not said exactly how many people were contacted through the emergency system, which sends a recorded alert or text to phones. The alert undoubtedly saved lives, but some residents affected by the fire complained in the aftermath that they never received it.
Neil Noble, who fled his Louisville home Thursday, said the first he heard of the fire was from a FedEx delivery driver who knocked on his door to drop off a package. After setting out for an errand and seeing gridlocked traffic as the smoke plume grew, he decided to leave with his three teenage children.
“I’ve talked to dozens of people, even those whose houses burned down, and nobody seems to have received any kind of notification,” he said.
Alerts went out to people with landlines because their numbers are automatically enrolled in the system and those with cellphones and VoIP phones who enrolled online, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said. He also noted that people with landlines might not have received the evacuation order because those very lines had been burned by the fire.
According to Everbridge, the company that created the notification system, more than half of households in the country rely entirely on cellphones and don’t have landlines.
Noble, who does not have a landline and didn’t know he had to sign up for the alerts on his cellphone, said it would be an uphill battle to get tens of thousands of people to manually sign up for the service, causing unnecessary risk.
“We were fortunate enough it happened in the daytime, you know. You could see the plume getting worse and worse,” he said. “At night this would have been deadly with this lack of communication.”
Past fires have shown that wildfire alert system subscription rates can be as low as 30% to 40%, Cova said. But not every household needs to receive an emergency alert for it to be effective, since people will quickly share the news with their neighbors and friends, he said.
The Boulder County fire ignited shortly after 11 a.m. on Dec. 30, when schools were closed and many people were either home from work or working from home due to the pandemic.
