Fire crews plan to strengthen the containment lines on Sunday and are optimistic that more of Saturday’s evacuations will be lifted if weather and fire conditions remain favorable, incident commander Mike Smith told a morning news conference. “We are in a good position right now,” Smith said. “Wind speeds are not at all what they were with Marshall Fire. “If the weather does what it’s supposed to do today, then tomorrow we will be in good shape.” The blaze started at around 2pm on Saturday near the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and forced evacuations to the southern Boulder and the Eldorado Springs area. No one was injured and no construction was burnt. Late Saturday, the evacuation area shrank to include only about 700 homes and 1,600 people, out of about 19,400 people evacuated at the height of the fire, according to the Boulder Office of Emergency Management. The Devil’s Thumb neighborhood south of Boulder – just east of the fire – and Eldorado Springs were evacuated. You can see the full evacuation map here. A lot of good work was done at #NCARFire today and many homes were saved. My crew withdrew around 11:30 p.m. Tomorrow at 8 in the morning we will be on fire again. pic.twitter.com/FuGuAWAkyD – Edward O’Malley (@EdwardOMalley) March 27, 2022 About 200 firefighters from 30 services attacked the fire Saturday and about 110 are expected to continue fighting the blaze on Sunday, Smith said. Winds in the area were initially expected to be southwesterly, but are now expected to be westerly and northwesterly, he said, which could create the need for additional evacuations. “We have a plan to create more evacuations. “Our hope is that we do not have to do any of these,” Smith said. He said the authorities hoped to “bring people back to their homes as soon as possible”. Officials had estimated the fire at about 200 acres in size on Sunday morning, but later said an aerial survey showed it had risen overnight to 189 acres. The causes of the fire remain under investigation. Officials know the fire started in the northwest corner of the burn area, Smith said. The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office is investigating. Smith said firefighters were assisted by previous firefighting work in the burn area and said crews were aiming to “block the fire on the rocks and snow” on Sunday to ensure it did not move further into the city. The NCAR fire started just three months after the Marshall fire, which started in Boulder County in late December and was driven east by hurricane-force winds, destroying more than 1,000 homes. Smith, who was also responsible for extinguishing the Marshall Fire, said the two fires were “different animals”. “One of the things we learned from the Marshall Fire was how to quickly scale and integrate multiple actors and get them to work together,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. “We saw an improvement from Marshall, but there are a few apples and oranges.”
Evacuation confusion
On Saturday, Boulder officials used two different emergency alarm systems – which created two different evacuation maps – to warn residents during the NCAR fire, said city spokeswoman Sarah Hadley. Officials sent alerts through both the Everbridge system – which sends alerts to landlines and cell phone users who have previously signed up for alerts – and for the first time used the city’s new wireless mobile alert system, which targets mobile phones. whether or not the user was previously registered for notifications. The use of this new wireless system meant that some people received evacuation alerts that were not actually in danger, Hadley said. Saturday’s evacuation alert via wireless stood on cell phones in Louisville, Superior and parts of Boulder where evacuation was unnecessary, he said. Boulder officials expected the wireless alert to go off very widely – a well-known trap of wireless alerts – but decided to use it anyway to make sure the evacuation alert reached as many people in the evacuation zones as possible, he said. Huntley. The Everbridge system, which was used during the Marshall fire, is more expensive, but can lose people in the evacuation zone if they do not have a landline and have not previously registered for alerts, he said. Officials decided on Saturday that “excess is better than incomplete approach,” Hadley said. “The weather and wind conditions were such that we had concerns when we first arrived that the behavior of the fire could be unpredictable and could blow towards the city,” Hadley said. “We know it is a densely populated area and we thought it was important to get the message out to as many people as possible.” He acknowledged that wider alerts could make it harder for people to evacuate due to unnecessary congestion on the streets and main evacuation routes. “It is always an act of balancing in such emergencies,” he said. The first pre-evacuation alarm was set at 14:48 on Saturday at the Everbridge system and followed at 3 p.m. evacuation order. At 3:14 p.m., the wireless alert system was used to alert cell phones in the Table Mesa area. Another wireless alert sounded at 5 p.m. for Boulder County south of the city limits, Huntley said in an email. The use of the two alarm systems on Saturday also created two different maps for the evacuation zone, Huntley said. The Everbridge alert system creates a more accurate evacuation map than the wireless alert system, he said. The wireless alert system can be customized for more accurate mapping, but this step has not yet been taken because the wireless system is so new. “This is an improvement on the process that will require manual design at the rear,” Huntley said. “What we had to do at the front (Saturday) was do our best to copy the Everbridge area into (the wireless alert system) as fast as we could. “We think we did a very good job, but we know there were some addresses on one map and not on the other.” We’re working on multiple community alerts right now, but if you’re in any of these shady areas, GET NOW. We will continue to share information as #NCARfire evolves. He is also working on finding a safe media viewing area. Will tweet when pic.twitter.com/xtvFgLgylm is found – Boulder Police Dept. (@boulderpolice) March 26, 2022 Encourage anyone receiving an emergency alert who thinks they have received it by mistake to check the Boulder County Emergency Bureau website before evacuation, where the most accurate maps and information will be posted. He said authorities would work to improve the alert process and that the city would continue to use both systems as required in various emergencies. “This is a challenge we are discussing,” he said. “These are questions we ask ourselves. “Again, the technology is not perfect and these first signs of an emergency are quite chaotic.”
