The Rocky Canyon Fire has scorched over 15,000 acres in Summit and Morgan counties.
Without the help of wildland fire crews, experts say the acreage would be higher.
Unified Fire Battalion Chief Riley Pilgrim said firefighters create fire lines and use aircraft retardant drops and backburning to contain the flames.
“It’s kind of a tricky metric that we use,” Pilgrim said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” Aug. 14. “But we basically take a GPS measurement of the fire when we have an effective hand line that’s been secured, so there’s really minimal threat to that line, and that’s what we started calling contained.”
When a fire reaches 100% containment, he said that doesn’t mean the fire is out.
It means the burn is surrounded by fire lines that will keep it from spreading.
Although the Rocky Canyon Fire is almost half contained, he said it will likely continue to grow.
Pilgrim said crews create fire lines by removing fuels feeding the blaze, like using axes to cut vegetation down to the dirt with axes.
Roads and rivers also help as barriers.
“We try to connect the dots with our fire line, but we’re basically just trying to remove fuel from the fire, whether that’s by digging it, you know, removing it by hand, or using fire to get rid of it.”
To slow the fire’s progression, aircrafts drop in retardant. According to Pilgrim, these chemicals don’t extinguish the flames but delay the burning process until crews can fight the fire on ground.
He said fire crews try to limit retardant drops in sensitive watershed areas.
“We’ve definitely seen it happen where retardant is inadvertently dropped parallel to or across a creek or a body of water,” Pilgrim said. “It can be catastrophic sometimes for the wildlife, and so it’s kind of picking the evils of what the fire is going to do or what the retardant might do.”
Firefighters also use a technique called backburning, or starting controlled burns in specific areas.
“Sometimes the best way to fight fires is with fire,” he said. “What I mean by that is we’ll find a pretty robust line like roadway, or a river, or some kind of feature where we can actually put a fire on the ground in a very coordinated and orchestrated effort, and basically we remove the fuel from the fire.”
Pilgrim urged the public to obey fire restrictions and to call 911 as soon as a fire is spotted.
