Urban Coloradans face new vulnerability after wildfires
Jeffrey Lucas’ hands shook uncontrollably as he pointed his iPhone at the advancing Waldo Canyon fire and watched it race toward the Colorado Springs neighborhood where he grew up.
The resulting video, which spread almost as quickly via his Facebook account and later through the news media, portrayed the kind of raw panic, punctuated with expletives, that Lucas had never felt in his 23 years.
“Up until I saw flames on the hill, I was completely calm,” he said. “I actually had a load of laundry in. I was just doing normal things. It went from a completely calm scenario to absolutely chaotic really quickly.”
In his entire life, he had never seriously entertained the notion that wildfire might roll down the foothills and breach the city limits. For the most part, it scorched more remote and mountainous areas, where residents knowingly traded the risk for the rewards of natural beauty and relative solitude.
