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Tuesday, 23 April 2002

On our 14th wedding anniversary, three students from Platte Canyon High School hiked up to the ridge behind the school on their lunch period, to smoke. Not long after, the first reports of a smoke plume were called in.

I was at work when Tracy called and asked me if I knew of the big fire in Bailey. She was at home, and Channel 9 News was reporting it was a half-acre fire. A half-acre, my foot — it was much bigger than that; the smoke plume was towering above the foothills, and was clearly visible from the window at my workplace, down in Englewood. After a bit of dithering about whether or not to go home (I had just started the job a couple of weeks before), I packed up and left.

I got home and saw the smoke plume — it was big. Not as impressive as Hi Meadow was, but a concern, nonetheless. We checked in the the resource net being run, and found out that the 285 Wildcats had scrambled, and we were invited to go over to the Platte Canyon Fire Station #2, which was where the ICP was set up.

Our shift lasted until about 0200 the next morning. I was tasked with Net Control Station duties, and Tracy got into the Status/Check-in role with one of the people from the State of Colorado. After several hours of using paper forms, Tracy had pulled out her laptop, and they were designing a spreadsheet to keep track of all the people and other resources coming in to help work on the fire.

Around 2am, when we were about to close our shift, Mark Hall (from D23, the primary ham on this incident) asked us if we could return at 0700 for another shift. We smiled, said, "sure", and headed off to go to bed.

Wednesday, 24 April 2002

Morning came slowly; sleep was hard to come by, for both Tracy and me. We showed up at the ICP at 0700, whereupon I was dispatched to perform NCS duties for the tactical net, and Tracy was immediately ushered off to continue to perform the important task of Status/Checkin.

Net Control duties were not strenuous; there were only a few divisions out on the fire (five, if I remember correctly), and most of my traffic consisted of taking weather information.

The excitement really started around 1000 hours, when a spot fire was called in, and it was in the Burland Ranchettes area, which is one of the more populated places in the Bailey area, as well as my own subdivision. The firefighters hit it hard, and got it out in about 30 minutes.

However, since it flared up in a "densely" populated area (for Bailey, at least), Sheriff Fred Wegener decided that the best course of action was to evacuate the Burland subdivision. I had some prior knowledge, since I was able to overhear some of the discussion about whether or not to evacuate. Once they came to that conclusion, I grabbed Tracy, left my ham gear there (batteries, Icom 746, miscellaneous other gear), and we headed back home to evacuate.

This time around, it was a little easier to perform the exercise &emdash; "this can burn, that can burn, that we take, this we take..." We filled up both Jeeps, grabbed the cats (three of them, that was an adventure), and we headed out.

Tracy had called her brother Matt, and made arrangements to let us stay the night with them. On the way, we stopped by our friends' house; we knew them from church. We let them know that the evac order would be coming, and they might want to get a head start on grabbing their stuff. They hadn't gone through this before, so we gave them some advice on the kinds of things to take &emdash; important papers, things of a personal nature, that cannot be replaced.

After a while, we said our goodbyes, and headed down the mountain toward Denver. We arrived at Matt's house without incident, and got settled. We went out to dinner a little later, and hit the sack early, since we didn't get much sleep the night before.

Thursday, 25 April 2002

We slept hard the night before; it felt good. We puttered around for a while, then headed back up the mountain toward home. We had tried to get a hold of Padre, our next door neighbor, to see if the evacuation order had been lifted, but had no success. So, we were going up to see if we would be allowed back in.

Around Conifer, the PCRC 146.895 machine came in, and Padre was on the air, performing NCS duties. We checked in, and he verified that the evac order had, indeed, been lifted, and we were free to go back in. He informed us that the ICP had moved to Platte Canyon Middle School, and my gear that I had left at the fire station could be found in the fire station. I retrieved my radio and the rest, and we unpacked our Jeeps at home and settled back in.

Padre had also indicated that the fire was more or less under control, so District 6 had stood down. We counted our blessings and continued to monitor the relevant frequencies.