The Fire That Isn't Here Yet
On a Saturday morning in May, 1,300 people in Evergreen, Colorado packed bags, loaded cars, and drove away from homes that weren't burning. No smoke in the ponderosa. No flames on the ridge. Just a sky so dry and cloudless it looked like a postcard of the place that might not survive next summer.
They drove single-file down mountain roads that weren't built for this, past piles of cut wood stacked along their only way out. The wood was supposed to make them safer. Evergreen ranks in the 99th percentile nationally for catastrophic wildfire risk, and the community spent six months preparing to rehearse the day everyone here believes is coming. What they drove past on the way out complicated everything.
The Fire That Isn't Here Yet
On a Saturday morning in May, 1,300 people in Evergreen, Colorado packed bags, loaded cars, and drove away from homes that weren't burning. No smoke in the ponderosa. No flames on the ridge. Just a sky so dry and cloudless it looked like a postcard of the place that might not survive next summer.
They drove single-file down mountain roads that weren't built for this, past piles of cut wood stacked along their only way out. The wood was supposed to make them safer. Evergreen ranks in the 99th percentile nationally for catastrophic wildfire risk, and the community spent six months preparing to rehearse the day everyone here believes is coming. What they drove past on the way out complicated everything.
The Wrong Month
South Fremont Fire Chief Chris Hill's volunteer department in eastern Idaho fielded 29 fire calls in March. He says that month usually shouldn't produce any. By early May, the count passed 50. Hill calls it potentially the worst season on record.
His roughly 25 volunteers have day jobs. Their availability, training cycles, and mutual aid agreements all assume a June-through-September season. Nobody arranged leave for March.
Idaho addressed one piece this week, adopting "Ready, Set, Go" as a statewide standard to replace the patchwork of county-specific evacuation language that collapsed when fires crossed jurisdictions last season.
When the Season Fails
When the Calendar Broke
The grass was brown from fence line to fence line. Brown past dormancy, past any promise of return. Gone past waiting. Nebraska's December through March ran 8.9°F above the twentieth-century average, the warmest and driest such period in 131 years. When a climatologist drove into the panhandle in late April, a farmer told him he wanted his wheat to freeze. To end it.
When the Calendar Broke
The concrete held heat long after the sun shifted. Phoenix hit 105°F on March 20, the equinox, the last day the calendar still calls winter — the hottest March temperature in the city's recorded history. An 80-year-old man died outside his home that afternoon. The county's cooling centers were scheduled to open May 1. Over the previous six years, Maricopa County recorded one heat death in March. This March, possibly 28.
Further Reading
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