BEULAH – Tom Laca doesn’t remember much about the first day and night of the Aspen Acres fire. But he remembers the explosions.
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“We had so many propane tanks exploding, so many things exploding that by the end of the night we didn’t even flinch when things went boom. Just, nothing hit me, we’re good to go, we continue on,” Laca, a captain with the Beulah Fire Department, said Friday morning.
Soon after the fire was reported in the neighboring community of Rye in the early morning hours of June 29, the department’s 27 volunteer firefighters pulled back to protect Beulah and that’s where his memories start to blur together, Laca said. A lot of the crew lost time that day, he said, only focused on saving whatever they could.
But there was a moment, driving up to the start of the Aspen Acres fire on a mutual aid call to help Rye firefighters at 5:50 a.m., when Laca said he realized this was what he and his team had trained for. They had done tabletop exercises and drills for exactly this scenario.
“When that wind shifted, and it blew down the hill, that was the moment that was like, ‘Here we go. We’re in for it. This is the one,’” Laca said, standing near the burned-out shell of the Horseshoe Lodge & Retreat Center in Pueblo Mountain Park. The center’s American flag was still flying on the flagpole, one of the only things at the center not destroyed by flames.
Beulah is a small town, with the fire department responsible for protecting about 900 homes in a 1,100-square-mile fire district. When flames spotted over 12 Mile Road, the local name for an unpaved section of Colorado 78, firefighters knew they were facing the worst-case scenario, fire department spokesperson Jill Laca said. (The Lacas are married.)
“It was a monster, and the monster ate anything in its path,” she said. “You can’t stand in front of that.”
That didn’t stop the volunteer firefighters from trying. Tom Laca acknowledged there were probably moments in those first days when crews were running into precarious situations to try to save people’s homes.
“It wasn’t a number. It wasn’t a road name. It was a person whose house we were looking to protect,” he said.
On Friday, the forest around Colorado 78, where the Aspen Acres fire raged less than two weeks ago, was almost entirely black. Firefighters call it a lunar landscape because of how alien it looks – skeletal remains of hundreds of towering pines that flames stripped bare and left as charred poles stuck in the ground. The tallest trees still had some blackened pine needles around the crowns that cast scant shadows over scorched soil.
About a third of the Beulah Fire Department’s firefighters lost their homes in the Aspen Acres fire, Jill Laca said. Department leaders had to tell members of their crew that everything they owned was lost, a process she called heart-wrenching.
“Most of them knew,” she said as she stood by the destroyed Horseshoe Lodge, where her children spent the last 12 summers, first as campers and then as camp counselors.
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“They could either see the fire in their neighborhood or they heard radio traffic. Most of them knew their homes were being devoured.”
After that first day, Beulah firefighters and staff came together, cried and hugged. And then they got back to work.
“They said, ‘All right, that was just stuff, and we have to go save somebody else’s,’” Tom Laca said. “And they continue to fight, even though they have nothing.”
A few miles north at Red Cliff Ranch, the near-constant roar of helicopters and large water trucks was the soundtrack of an open field where fire crews set up a “dip site,” where aircraft can pick up water from a 5,000-gallon portable water tank and ferry it to the fireline.
Rows of tender trucks full of water sat in the field waiting to refill the orange tank, known as a pumpkin. Helicopters flew by every few minutes, some filling up 500-gallon buckets and others using a large hose to suction up 1,000 gallons into the belly of the aircraft.
Fire officials like Trevor Johnson, the operations branch director for the northern section of the Aspen Acres fire, are cautious about speaking too positively about progress on the wildfire.
“In no way, shape or form are we out of the woods,” Johnson said, standing in front of the water tankers on Friday afternoon. “This fire has the potential to still have large impacts.”
Johnson, whose day job is battalion chief at the Ventura Fire Department in southern California, is no stranger to destructive wildfires. The Aspen Acres fire has devastated Beulah and the Beulah Valley, he said.
The devastation is apparent in what’s left of the homes destroyed by the wildfire, each pile of rubble containing bits of evidence of what was there: a burned-out washer and dryer, a child’s metal bedframe turned charcoal black, shining rivulets of melted and cooled aluminum that flowed from cars and trucks as they burned.
Recovery really hasn’t started yet, Tom Laca said. A good portion of the town is without electricity or water, because firefighters drained the water lines dry while fighting the fire. Hazard crews need to come in and remove burned trees that threaten to damage homes that are still standing.
“We’re in this for a while, and it’s gonna look different and life is gonna be different,” Tom Laca said. “But as many are saying, we are Beulah strong, and we will get through this together.”
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