Rare December wildfires fueled by strong winds triggered evacuation orders, power outages and a state of emergency Thursday in Boulder County, Colorado.
The National Weather Service for Denver and Boulder called the situation “life threatening” and urged residents of Superior and Louisville, cities about 8 miles southeast of Boulder, to “LEAVE NOW.” Officials issued evacuation orders for both communities Thursday afternoon.
Gov. Jared Polis declared a state of emergency in the county, allowing for quick access to emergency response resources.
“Prayers for thousands of families evacuating from the fires in Superior and Boulder County,” Polis tweeted Thursday afternoon. “Fast winds are spreading flames quickly and all aircraft are grounded.”
The conditions caused several road closures and hundreds of power outages, and the winds toppled multiple “high profile vehicles,” the Colorado State Patrol said in a tweet.
Video from an evacuated Home Depot showed a parking lot that appeared to be engulfed by wind-whipped smoke. A similar scene was captured at a Costco in Superior.
Because of the blazes, the Boulder Emergency Operations Center (EOC) was activated. It said it was monitoring two fires, the Middle Fork Fire and the Marshall Fire, north and south of Boulder.
In Broomfield, about 13 miles from Boulder, a smoke plume was visible and the smell of smoke wafted through the air in some areas. The police department said there were no active fires in the city.
Residents of the Broomfield County city were not under evacuation orders but were urged to stay indoors if they have respiratory or breathing issues.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist and extreme weather expert at the University of California Los Angeles, said it was “genuinely hard to believe this is happening in late December in Boulder.”
But a combination of events — a downslope windstorm with 100-mph blasts and a fall that saw record heat and just one inch of snow — prompted fires that Swain called “extremely fast moving” and “dangerous.”
The vast majority of Boulder County is experiencing extreme or severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and experts have partly attributed the West’s increasingly intense wildfires to climate change.
In Boulder, where Swain is based, he said: “It’s honestly a pretty harrowing scene near Louisville and Superior right now. I can see quite a few structures burning and, if anything, the winds have increased.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
