When La Plata County resident Faye Harmer learned her home on Payne Lane, 3 miles east of Durango-La Plata County Airport, was under threat of fire earlier in August, she thought, “I can’t do this again.”
She said she already knew the stress of losing a home to a house fire. She and her husband watched their 2,400-square-foot home burn to the ground 34 years ago, three days before Christmas 1990, the day after their seventh anniversary.
When her and her husband’s phones sounded with CodeRED evacuation alerts the afternoon of Aug. 8, they instantly panicked, she said. They were on the Front Range for a work trip. Their two dogs and two cats were at home on Payne Lane off Colorado Highway 172 between Oxford and Ignacio.
The evacuation notice lasted only an hour, she said. Los Pinos Fire Protection District and three other agencies quickly responded to the growing blaze and contained it, saving Harmer’s home and the homes of eight other residents.
Residents showed their gratitude for the firefighters’ quick intervention by erecting a billboard in a charred field on Saturday that said, “THANK YOU Firefighters For saving our homes.”
The message was accompanied by residents’ signatures and hand-drawn hearts.
Los Pinos Fire was alerted of the fire at 3:17 p.m. Aug. 8, said Deputy Fire Chief Jim Owens. He was passing by the Pine River Baptist Church about 3 miles east of Payne Lane when he saw a plume of smoke rising from the hills. At 3:27 p.m., he arrived to intensely burning flames, fanned by the wind, that reached about 5 feet high.
Motor traffic was still traveling Highway 172 and fire crews would be stationed on the roadside. Almost immediately, he called for Highway 172 to be shut down from the intersections of county roads 311 to 515.
At one point, Owens had zero visibility, he said. He ran back and forth along the highway between both ends of the fire to see where it was burning and where to next station resources.
Grasses were dry and made good fuel for the fire, he said.
He recalled one firefighter said cattails inside two sets of drainage ditches leading to one home “were burning like they were dead.”
At least one of the residences had cedar siding, and that was Owen’s major concern, he said. He described other residences as a mixture of modular single-wide homes and stick builds.
The fire was contained by 4:16 p.m. with assistance of the Durango and Upper Pine River fire protection districts and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he said. La Plata County Sheriff’s Office, Southern Ute Police Department, the Tribal Rangers and Colorado State Patrol were also on scene.
The cause of the blaze was narrowed to a vehicle dragging chains or a vehicle with a hot break pad, or something else related to a vehicle, because investigators found three separate points between east Payne Lane to the 8500 block of Highway 172, where fires started.
Owens said the 172 Fire was a “good fire,” in the sense fire crews were able to contain it to the grasses and drainage ditches along the highway.
This fire season has been hot and dry, he said. No moisture and 90-degree weather has baked everything.
“I was on a grass fire Jan. 27 below the airport at 7 o'clock at night and that stuff was burning like it should be burning the end of April, beginning in May,” he said.
On Friday, Gov. Jared Polis declared a statewide disaster emergency and authorized the use of the National Guard, as reported by Colorado Public Radio.
La Plata County and the city of Durango declared stage 2 fire restrictions in early August. In July, the Rim Road and Elkhorn fires necessitated the evacuations of Wolfwood Refuge and a combined 52 homes south of the airport and near Missionary Ridge, respectively.
Harmer provided a photo of the billboard thanking firefighters in an email with the subject line “A Sign of the Times.” The photograph show the billboard, a partly blackened telephone pole and an untouched house on a hillside. A scorched field underlines in soot and charcoal how close the home came to destruction.
Harmer said the 172 Fire grew to about 3 acres and pales in comparison to the size of other Southwest Colorado fires this season that have resulted in evacuations and destroyed homes.
“But it was big to us,” she said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
