JAMESTOWN, Colo.—Volunteer firefighter Rich Kane was having a late breakfast at the Jamestown Cafe after a long night patrolling the northern edge of the Fourmile Canyon wildfire, snuffing hotspots.
“It’s pretty boring, really,” Kane said on Wednesday, the fire’s third day. “You do a lot of digging. Digging, digging, digging.”
The fire didn’t reach Jamestown, a tiny village tucked in one of the canyons that etch the foothills northwest of Boulder. But two fire trucks were dispatched to the fire’s northern edge on Wednesday to extinguish “incursions,” where the fire threatened to expand.
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Long before the fire, a sculptor carved an appealing bear cub’s face into a tall tree stump at the foot of Bev and Bill Spotz’s driveway near Sugarloaf Mountain. When the Spotzes returned on Friday, a strip of yellow crime scene tape was knotted around the cub’s neck like a scarf, its loose tails fluttering in the breeze.
Sheriff’s deputies were using the tape to mark houses they had checked.
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Stress and uncertainty can weigh heavily on wildfire victims.
“We’ve had a lot of people just sit down there in front of us and break down,” said Bob Blume of State Farm Insurance, who was at a Red Cross shelter to offer advice and consolation. “The stress level is getting to the point that really they can’t take much more.”
Emotions boiled over at the shelter on Tuesday, said Jim Rettew, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Colorado.
“People just got passionate, got heated. That was Day 2, and a lot of people didn’t know the status of their homes,” he said. He declined to say whether the incident was a physical fight.
It’s not uncommon for things to get heated among disaster victims who don’t know if they have a home to return to, Rettew said.
“I think not knowing is the worst,” he said.
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On Sunday, two vendors were selling $20 T-shirts and $40 sweat shirts commemorating the fire outside the camp where ground crews set up their tents and commanders orchestrated the air and ground attack on the flames.
“It’s kind of a tradition,” said Mo Roskelly of Challis, Idaho, who was buying a shirt. Roskelly and her husband, Micky, own 3,200-gallon water truck under contract to the federal government to help fight fires.
The shirts are often icebreakers for conversations with other firefighters, she said.
“You’re proud to wear it because you know you helped fight that fire,” Micky Roskelly said.
One vendor, Corey Hunter of California Fire Shirts, said he usually donates about 10 percent of his proceeds to firefighting agencies or similar groups.
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Residents whose homes were spared were still confronted with the smell of food that went bad in their refrigerators after they lost electrical power.
When Susan DiPrima returned to her intact home near Sugarloaf Mountain on Friday, she opened the refrigerator door and took a cautious whiff.
“Actually, not bad,” she said.
Next she opened the freezer.
“Not good,” DiPrima said, and began dumping the contents into plastic garbage bags.
Later that day, officials were making arrangements to station big garbage bins in the evacuation area for residents to dump spoiled food.
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One of the most pressing needs people have if they’ve been evacuated from a disaster is clean clothes, said Liz Friedenson, associate director of Colorado Friendship, which provides clothing, shelter and other necessities for those in need.
“Seems like most people are looking for a change of clothes just to get them through the next couple days,” Friedenson said.
Much of Colorado Friendship’s clothes are used, but because almost nobody wants second-hand underwear or socks, the group uses cash donations to buy them new, said Emanuel Sammartino, a volunteer for the group.
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Runners seem ubiquitous in health-conscious Boulder, and the yellowish-brown cloud of wood smoke that settled over the city in the first days of the fire kept many of them indoors to protect their lungs.
“The gyms were a little fuller,” said Ryan Loewer, who worked out on an indoor treadmill for three days but completed a 19-mile run on roads north of Boulder on Sunday.
Not everyone was deterred on Monday, the day the fire broke out. “Throughout the day, you just saw tons of people running” outdoors, he said.
