Bobra Goldsmith was preparing for a dental appointment when her assistant told her that flames threatened her house after a fierce wind kicked over a power pole nearby.
Goldsmith, owner of Rocky Mountain Llamas, sprayed the roof of her burning one-story home with water from a garden hose. But even the firefighters who quickly arrived couldn’t save the structure from the raging fire that reduced it to rubble within an hour.
“It was just too fast,” Goldsmith, 78, said.
Two hours later she talked to a reporter by cellphone and tried to make sense of her loss. “My whole house is gone; it’s not there,” she said. “There are three tall chimneys sticking up.”
Gone are the artworks bequeathed to her from her artist mother along with the possessions gathered over years of marriage and mementos of life with her deceased husband.
The ground and trees surrounding the home at 7202 N. 45th St. in Longmont were tinder dry — a recent, 2-inch dusting of recent snow melted quickly and left little moisture, she said.
The wind had been raking her land throughout the day, and an instrument on her property measured gusts of up to 80 miles per hour.
It was a freakish wind, stronger than any she remembers in the 20 years she has lived on the land north of Boulder.
“How that pole blew over — that shouldn’t have happened,” she added.
Goldsmith trains and boards llamas and alpacas. A herd of female llamas had taken shelter from the wind near her barn.
But after the fire erupted, she and friends moved the animals to a pasture about 150 feet away to keep them safe.
A barn, shed, tractor and vans she uses to transport the animals were untouched by the fire.
But smoke blowing from the west, where grassland was burning, hung in the air, making her worry that more damage might be on the way.
“The wind is really horrendous, and there is more smoke coming from the west. It could spark up again.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
Post research librarian Barry Osborne contributed to this report.
