Reporting by Justin Reutter, Pueblo Chieftain
In portions of Beulah, some houses have been reduced to piles of ash and rubble. Others stand perfectly intact, seemingly untouched by the Aspen Acres Fire.
“Why a home lasted, why a home didn’t, a lot of it is pure luck,” said Capt. Tom Laca of the Beulah Fire Protection and Ambulance District.
“We have done a lot of work in this community with mitigation. Houses that were mitigated very much stood a better chance of surviving.”
For a very close-knit community, the fight was often very personal. Crews fought not to protect an address, but the homes of friends and neighbors whom firefighters often knew personally.
The small volunteer fire department has been fighting the inferno for 12 days straight. A third of the crew have lost their own homes in the wildfire, which is now past 97,000 acres as of July 10.
“We’ve been able to get rest where we can, when we can,” Tom Laca said. “We didn’t get much rest in the beginning. As we added more crews in, the teams have come in and were able to put more assets in place to help with this. We have been able to get away, go home if you have a home, or find a place to stay. Sometimes that rest might just be staying at the station and being with each other.”
While the fire has largely moved away from Beulah in recent days, the fire department continues to fight hotspots.
“For the most part, those assets are taking care of things, but we are still watching over the Beulah community, and protecting what’s still been protected,” Tom Laca said.
‘We’re in for it, this is the one’
The fire captain said that as he watched the fire crest over a nearby mountain and start to come down the hill, he knew the Aspen Acres Fire might be the “big one.”
“I remember looking at the hill above us, and you could see it start to work its way up the hill, and then the wind shifted,” he recalled. “It started blowing down that hill, and that was the moment it was like, here we go, we’re in for it, this is the one.”
Jill Laca, the volunteer department’s public information officer, said the damage was heart-wrenching to see.
“The first couple days, I stayed on the side of town that didn’t have loss, because I couldn’t bring myself to see the loss,” she said. “I really had to make myself go the other way to get to the fire station, to go down Pine Drive to see the loss.”
Jill Laca said that it was only on July 9 that she saw the “moonscape” on South Pine Drive.
“This building is gut-wrenching to see. This is a central location for our community, whether it be a preschool that does outdoor preschool up here, the local school that comes out here almost monthly, every single grade. 4-H camps are held up here,” she said. “My kids have gone to camp up here for the last 12 years. They were campers to begin with and counselors in the end. It’s just gut-wrenching to see the core of our community completely changed.”
While the fire was devastating, Jill Laca said that joint tabletop exercises with other partners helped protect the parts of the community they could.
“The fire was like a monster that ate everything in its path. But we knew where we could try to make a stand. We knew where the safe areas were that we could put up a good front, and we had contingency plans for, if it got past here, the next stand would be here,” she said.
Because of extensive training with mutual aid partners, that intelligence was easily shared with other Pueblo County agencies responding.
“And we all know how to work with each other, so there was never a question of who was in command,” Jill Laca said.
“It was a seamless effort to come together and do what we could to move the monster around town the first couple of days and save what we could.”
Fire branch director gives insight into ongoing fire operations
North of Beulah, Trevor Johnson, a battalion chief for the Ventura County, California, fire department and Branch 10 director for the Aspen Acres Fire, spoke to gathered press Friday in front of a “dip site” for helicopters dumping water on the wildfire.
The dip site is fed by water tender trucks, which bring water from far away, as there is no applicable water site near the north side of the fire. Helicopters draw from the site and go to work across the fire to support fire suppression, he said.
Johnson said that the terrain, fuel conditions, weather, and wind combined to create the conditions under which the fire spread so easily.
“The Beulah Fire Department, all of our local cooperators, have done a great job assisting the Alaska team, and our suppression operations,” he said.
Around Beulah, firefighters continue to not only suppress active fires, but also continuously check around houses to make sure that smoldering embers around houses do not result in new houses being destroyed.
“Our focus is to make sure that everything is mitigated around Beulah,” Johnson said. “We’re also felling any hazard trees around the area. We’re working with the gas company and the power company. We’re making sure the roads are tenable for the residents to return.
“We’re in focus with our law enforcement partners, our stakeholders, to return Beulah to a sense of normalcy. Our focus is to get them back, recover, move on, and deal with the next step in their process.”
Firefighters have saved “countless” houses, he said.
Bulldozers are being used to dig fire lines, and hand crews are digging additional protection where heavy equipment can’t reach.
In rugged terrain, elite “hot shot” crews and other resources are engaged in perimeter control. In the skies above, helicopters dump water and fire retardant on the blaze, and specialized fixed-wing planes known as air attack platforms “supervise” operations, providing air traffic control and supporting operations on the ground.
“We can’t solve every problem at once, so we prioritize,” he said.
“It’s a big elephant — you gotta take one bite at a time.”
Justin Reutter covers public safety, county government, and business news for the Pueblo Chieftain. Contact Justin at jreutterma@gannett.com or follow him on X @jayreutter1. Support local news; subscribe to the Pueblo Chieftain at subscribe.chieftain.com.
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain.
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