(Dobbs) When There's A Tragic Fire, There's A Tragic Backstory

There's just no time to think.

Sometimes a catastrophe is so big, we don’t get a sense of every small measure of misery.

Like Thursday’s monstrous fire that exploded almost out of nowhere, sent thousands of Denver suburbanites running for their lives, and destroyed hundreds of homes. As in any fire that mushrooms that fast, many people lost everything.

For those who did, there’s often a backstory. That’s why I want to tell you about something I saw after another inferno almost 45 years ago in Santa Barbara, California. Because you can bet that in Colorado, it happened again. Time and time again.

It was summertime, 1977. This time, it wasn’t hurricane-force winds toppling power poles. It was a young man flying a box kite that got caught in power lines and sent sparks flying.

But whether Colorado or California, the result was the same. The sparks ignited brush and the brush set fire to trees and 90-mile gusts blew the flames into neighborhoods. In suburban Denver, more than 500 homes burned down. In Santa Barbara, around 250.

The urgency was the same too. In both blazes, law enforcement and firefighters raced through the neighborhoods, telling people they had no time to put their things in order. The fire was moving too fast. They had to get out, now.

This was the first major fire I covered for ABC News and it was shocking to see its toll. We had chartered a jet to get there from Chicago and the all-night firestorm was still fierce when we landed. Almost every home was reduced to ash, sometimes a chimney left as the only thing standing. 

After reporting on the fire itself the first day and on the aftermath the second, we wanted our third day of coverage to focus on the refugees. We found and did interviews with some who were staying in hotels or with friends. But someone told us there also were victims camping in a public park near the beach.

That’s when we came to the Ford station wagon.

It was sitting by a small campfire with its tailgate open. But as we walked up, I didn’t look inside, because what caught my attention was a mother alongside the car with her three young kids and a dog. The family was sitting on stones around the campfire, eating soup, straight from the can.

I told the woman who we were, asked if she’d been burned out by the fire, and when she said yes, I asked if we could turn on the camera and if she would recount what happened. She said yes again. She began by telling me she’d been in her kitchen cleaning up from dinner when a patrol car moved down her street, a sheriff shouting through a bullhorn that a fire was racing toward them, out of control, and everyone should get kids and pets in their cars and get out.

Which is what she did. But not before stuffing everything that mattered into the cargo space behind the rear seat.

When you hear that— when I heard that— you make an assumption that she ran around the house grabbing what mattered most: important documents (this was before personal computers), photos, jewelry, artwork, maybe family mementos that could never be replaced.

But my assumption was wrong. Because when she got to that part of the story and I asked what she had thrown in the car, she broke into tears, and with a hand she couldn’t stop from shaking, pointed toward the tailgate. I got up, took a few steps to the back of the Ford, and saw why she was crying.

She hadn’t saved documents or photos or any of that. She had saved her toaster. She had saved her coffeemaker. She had saved her vacuum cleaner, a few pots, some children’s toys, and a handful of other possessions that were part of her everyday life.

She told me, still weeping, that she had panicked. She didn’t have a sheer second to stop and rationally think things through. In an instant of hysteria she had thought about what she used most in the house and stuffed it in the car. There wasn’t a thing in the back of that Ford that couldn’t be replaced tomorrow with a trip to a store. Everything she couldn’t replace, everything that was truly important, was lost.

At the speed with which people had to flee Thursday’s fire in Denver’s suburbs, those kinds of dreadfully but understandably illogical choices must have been repeated many times over. When we hear that homes have burned to the ground, we don’t always think about what was inside. What was left inside when the owners had to run. In effect, what was now irretrievably gone.

Fires like these, even when miraculously nobody dies, are disasters. But the view from ten-thousand feet doesn’t tell the whole story. When you get down on the ground, for every home lost, there is a mammoth measure of misery.

For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.