In a flash, Ordway's way of life goes up in smoke

By Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, April 18, 2008

Preston Gannaway / The Rocky

Ordway resident Helen Smotherman looks for salvageable items Wednesday at her home on Lane 17.5 on the northern fringe of Ordway. Smotherman's three dogs survived the inferno.

Preston Gannaway / The Rocky

Utility workers repair lines next to a fence Friday on Lane 17.5 in Ordway. The fence melted from the intense heat of the Ordway blaze.

Preston Gannaway / The Rocky

Oscar Martinez recounts how he narrowly escaped the deadly fire on Arkansas Avenue that destroyed his house and killed most of his pets.

It was a specter difficult to imagine - a half-mile-wide wildfire ripping through a quiet corner of the Arkansas River Valley, consuming homes and racing across farm stubble, threatening to wipe a small town off the map.

After all, this was flat farm and ranch country - no forests, just wide-open fields stretching to the horizon, grazing cattle, and cottonwoods here and there along ditches and around homesteads.

But in a span of a few hours, decades of changes in the land and a relentless wind took something that was incomprehensible and made it real. And the 1,217 people of Ordway bore witness to an afternoon like none of them had ever experienced - hours of wind and fire and smoke, of utter disbelief at the fickle and destructive work of the flames.

The first flare-ups

The first call for help came at 2:09 Tuesday afternoon. A fire was burning about two miles southwest of Ordway.

Authorities now say the fire was sparked by at least one controlled burn in a pile of trash and hay that may have been set Monday but flared up again Tuesday. The controlled burn on private property at 14700 County Road F in Ordway was not undertaken by a government agency, officials said. The name of the person who started the burn was not released, but the Colorado Bureau of Investigation said Friday there was no evidence of criminal intent.

A second controlled burn on another piece of private property at County Road F and Lane 9 may also have been set Monday but flared again Tuesday and caused a wildland fire, according to officials. It was unclear Friday whether both fires merged - they started six miles apart - but the total land burned by the two blazes was put at 8,900 acres.

Whipped by high winds, the main fire grew quickly, pushing into once lush irrigated fields left brittle and brown after farmers sold off their water to the thirsty Front Range.

When the flames reached Lane 15 - two miles from Ordway - the blaze was a quarter-mile-wide and growing.

Fire raced across fields and through ditches that once carried irrigation water, now choked with weeds, brush and sapling trees. The wall of fire quickly grew to a half-mile-wide as it continued marching east and northeast, toward Lane 16, where it gobbled up a home.

Not far away, the flames cut along a ravine that cuts under Colorado 96, the main east-west highway through the area. The bridge over the ravine was supported by timbers soaked in creosote - an oily substance that helps wood resist rot but that can also feed a fire.

The flames devoured the timbers.

By then, the call for help had gone out - a huge blaze was bearing down on Ordway, and firefighters up and down the valley raced toward the choking smoke.

In tiny Olney Springs, 10 miles to the west, volunteer firefighters Terry DeVore and Jim Schwartz jumped into a truck and headed toward Ordway.

'Get out - and get out now'

Authorities scrambled to evacuate Ordway - the entire town. They herded all the children in the city's school onto buses and drove them east five miles to Sugar City, and they used reverse 911 calls to alert residents. Law officers and members of the town council drove through the streets, stopping to bang on doors in some cases, telling people to get out.

At Bob and Helen Smotherman's home along Lane 17.5 on the city's northern fringe, the phone rang.

"Get out - and get out now," said an officer on the other end of the line. "Don't dilly-dally - get out now."

Bob and Helen dilly-dallied. The call was precautionary, they figured, and they could grab a few things, drive to the cafe for a cup of coffee, and return in an hour when things settled down.

On the southwest side of town, Rick Martinez called his mother, Mary Pinar, and said he needed help. Fire was burning near his house. Mary and her husband, Robert, grabbed shovels and garden hoses and drove from their home along Arkansas Avenue to help.

Another of Mary's sons, Oscar Martinez, stayed behind. Oscar and his family lived in a home behind his mother's on the same piece of property.

The smoke was far off, Oscar thought, but he gathered a few papers, and some photographs, just in case.

As the blaze reached the edge of Ordway, it split into three distinct fingers.

One thundered due east, along the south side of Colorado 96, taking several homes, an outbuilding and a warehouse. Two other forks of fire jumped the highway - one heading for Arkansas Avenue, just four blocks from Main Street, the other curling north and then east, right toward Lane 17.5.

Tragic drive into the rubble

Firefighters DeVore and Schwartz raced down the two-lane blacktop. About five minutes after pulling out of Olney Springs, they passed the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility - with its squat, earth-colored buildings and fences topped by coils of sharp, silvery wire - where both men worked.

DeVore's father, Bruce, followed behind them in another truck.

As they neared Ordway, the smoke was so thick in places that visibility was little more than a few feet. DeVore and Schwartz, who each had four children at home, probably never saw that the bridge over a ravine had collapsed after flames ate away the timbers, and the truck sailed into the rubble, killing both men in an instant.

Bruce DeVore and other firefighters with him stopped just short of the crash and fought desperately to douse the flames, but it was too late.

'It's in our backyard'

Oscar Martinez looked out the window. The back of the property was all smoke. He grabbed a box of papers and pictures and looked out again. Ten-foot flames crawled toward the home. He called his mother.

"Mom," he screamed, "it's here - it's in our backyard."

Oscar ran for the back door, hoping to get to get to Oso, the family's Pyrenees-Shepherd mix, but he tripped and fell, and he knew he'd never make it, so he turned and sprinted out the front door.

Flames crackled through the dead cottonwoods towering over the property. He jumped into the van and turned the key. Nothing. He tried again - and again - and he was about to bail out when the engine caught. He threw the van in reverse and mashed the gas pedal, but in the smoke and confusion he drove into a ditch.

He could not move forward - the fire was coming fast - so he gunned it and bounced through the ditch and into the street, speeding off with his life.

In the meantime, his mother and brother and other family members raced back to the home only to see it swallowed by fire.

For a moment, Mary Pinar feared the worst, that her son was still inside.

"No, no," her son, Robert, shouted. "The van's gone. He has to be gone."

They fled.

'Never seen a fire like that'

Firefighters from all over the valley streamed into town, making stands where they could, saving many homes.

But they also watched helplessly as homes and garages disappeared in great swirls of fire and smoke.

The flames hopscotched around, taking buildings but sparing others.

At the home where Jorene Markus lives along the east side of Arkansas Avenue, the main blaze skipped on by. But a flaming ember landed in a cedar bush next to the house, leaped up the wall to the eve, and burned into the attic, collapsing the roof.

In the meantime, up on Lane 17.5, Bob and Helen Smotherman and their grown son, Kevin, grabbed a few things - papers, photographs - and headed outside and into a scene none of them could have imagined.

Sheets of flame burned a tenth of a mile away, dancing through the tops of cottonwoods.

"I've never seen a fire like that, except on TV," Bob said.

They drove off, right through the fire, toward the safety of Kevin's home in Las Animas, 40 miles away.

Miracles in the debris

As Tuesday evening fell, the worst of the damage was done - two dozen structures, many of them homes, left as nothing more than piles of rubble.

All kinds of people headed to Ordway to help.

Katherine Sanguinetti sped south along Colorado 71 in the night. It was about 10 p.m. Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, she had been dispatched to Ordway once the deaths of the two firefighters had been confirmed. Both men had been state corrections officers, and she would be needed to help piece together and disseminate the story to the reporters and photographers who would invariably flock to Ordway.

As she drove through the darkness, a surreal visage emerged. Farm fields glowing orange on one side of the highway, their grasses still smoldering. Flames jumping from a cottonwood a half-mile in another direction. Great wisps of smoke hanging in in the air.

"When you see it, it's a whole different feeling," she said later, in awe of her memory.

The night passed, and Wednesday morning arrived. The fire was all but out. It was the first time some of Ordway's residents would see the devastation. Oscar Martinez and other family members returned to Arkansas Avenue to realize their worst fears. Where their houses had stood only blackened ruins remained. Several of their dogs and cats were gone, taken by the fire.

And then, a miracle. Oso, alive and well, a tail-wagging salve in the midst of the pain.

And up on Lane 17.5, another miracle. Or rather, three of them.

Bob and Helen Smotherman drove up the dusty road, knowing what they would find when they got there. Only the chimney stood where their house had been. Bob's projects - a '55 Buick and an '81 El Camino SS - and everything else lay in ruins. Many of the cats that roamed their farm lay dead.

But out back, behind the house, their three big dogs rose from the remains of their burned-out pen - Ike, a border collie, and two mutts, Tippy and Clancy, bounding across the blackened earth to greet them.

Fire season's deadly debut

Ordway

* Started: Tuesday

* Contained: Wednesday night

* Size: 14-square miles

* Buildings damaged/ destroyed: 10 outbuildings and 20 homes destroyed; two homes damaged.

* Cause: Controlled burns that flared up

Fort Carson

* Started: Tuesday

* Contained: 75 percent as of Friday

* Size: 13.5-square miles

* Buildings damaged: 0

* Cause: Under investigation

Carbondale

* Started: Tuesday

* Contained: Wednesday

* Size: 1.5-square miles

* Buildings damaged: 2

* Cause: Started after high winds exposed an ember from a property owner's controlled burn