The Boulder County Office of Emergency Management announced evacuation orders for Superior and Louisville, urging residents to leave quickly, as the sky turned orange, ash swirled in the wind, and buildings were engulfed in flames. Residents in parts of Broomfield, Colo., were also ordered to evacuate.
He said wind gusts of up to 110 miles per hour had pushed the fires with astonishing speed across suburban neighborhoods. More than 1,600 acres had burned since the fires started on Thursday morning, officials said.
Sheriff Joe Pelle of Boulder County described the fires as a “horrific event.” He said he believed that both fires were caused by downed power lines, and said he would not be surprised if there were deaths or injuries, although only one minor injury had been reported so far: a police officer who got debris in his eye.
Avista Adventist Hospital, a 114-bed hospital in Louisville, said it had evacuated its neonatal intensive care and intensive care units as well as its emergency department, moving patients to two other hospitals. The hospital’s staff members were sheltering in place and nearby roads were closed, the hospital said.
While the threat of wildfires looms as a constant threat over Western mountain towns and homes tucked into the woods, people who fled the smoke and flying embers on Thursday were astonished at how the fast-moving blazes had raged through their suburban neighborhoods.
“When does this happen in such a suburban area?” asked Alli Bowdey, a nurse who left her home in the Boulder suburb of Louisville and packed into a friend’s house with other evacuated family members. “We grew up with friends losing their homes in the mountains. What happens here? Nothing.”
But wildfires in the American West have been worsening — growing larger, spreading faster and reaching into mountainous elevations that were once too wet and cool to have supported fierce fires. What was once a seasonal phenomenon has become a year-round menace, with fires burning later into the fall and into the winter.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires, as rainfall patterns have been disrupted, snow melts earlier and meadows and forests are scorched into kindling.
Colorado had the three largest wildfires in its history in the summer of 2020, each one burning more than 200,000 acres, Gov. Jared Polis said. But those fires burned federally owned forests and land, he said, while the fires on Thursday destroyed suburban subdevelopments and shopping plazas.
“As a millennial, I’m just looking outside and I’m seeing climate change,” said Angelica Kalika, 36, of Broomfield. “I’m seeing my future. I grew up in Colorado, and this is a place where I’ve had snowy Christmases and a nice 60-degree summer. But, for me, this is a moment of deep reckoning of climate change when there is a wildfire outside my door.”
Across the Boulder area, displaced neighbors pored over the news for updates on whether their homes had survived and compared notes on businesses where they had seen fires scorching parking lots and approaching buildings. A city recreation center. A Chuck E. Cheese. A grocery store.
Normally, businesses like these, surrounded by asphalt and concrete, are protected from wildfires. But weeks of warm, dry weather that stretched from the autumn through December turned communities across the plains of Colorado into a wintertime tinderbox, and the frenzied winds on Thursday created a firestorm that left few places safe.
“It’s popping up all over the place,” Ms. Bowdey said. “These embers are flying all over the place. It’s a shock to everybody. Nobody wakes up planning for this.”
At about 5:30 p.m., she said she got an update from a neighbor. The fire was now two blocks away from their home.
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