Mandatory Evacuation

Hey everyone! I hope that you guys are having a better week than we are here in Colorado. I wanted to fill you guys in a little on what is going on where I live right now. I live in a town called Colorado Springs, CO. It is the second largest town as far as population goes in the state of Colorado. I have lived here my entire life and I love how beautiful this place is.

This past Saturday a fire started that was just West of the town. It wasn't a huge concern for our part of town at the time, but today that changed really quickly. As I was sitting at work, I could see the smoke climbing higher and higher into the sky and it was really starting to worry me. The sky along with the smoke kept changing colors. It would be gray, then it would be orange and then it would be black. It kept doing this all afternoon. Around five o' clock when we were supposed to be leaving they started issuing mandatory evacuations for the neighborhoods West of where we work. I really started freaking out at this point, mainly because we know at least three people that we work with that have homes in those areas. My boss was one of them and he has actually been evacuated from his home since Saturday night.

This was the fire when it first started on Saturday

As I was waiting on Aran to finish up his work, the smoke started rolling in and making it difficult to see and breathe and there was ash falling from the sky. What we had been fearing all weekend and in the start of the week had happened. The fire had crossed over the one canyon that was in it's way and started spreading down the foothills of our town and into city limits. And things only got worse from there.

They started putting more neighborhoods on mandatory evacuation including the neighborhood that our place of work was in. At this point, our IT department called and told everyone to sign off of the systems because they had to do a back up of the system to take with them just in case the building went up at some point. They also told us that our COO of the company pretty much told us to get the heck out of Dodge. At this point, again, we were completely freaking out.

The smoke outside my office this afternoon

A different angle but same place

Now, Aran and I don't live far from work. We actually live on the other side of the interstate from it. So after discussing it, we decided that the mandatory evacuation line was far too close to where our apartments are for us to feel safe staying there. So we rushed home, packed up everything that we felt was necessary(legal docs, wedding photos, our kitties of course, clothes, my wedding dress, Aran's guitars, etc...)and we booked it down to my big brothers house. He lives on the south side of town and at this point, the fire is not really a threat to that area. We figured that we would rather be safe than sorry and we are going to be moving in with him in a few weeks anyways, so everything seemed to work out in that area.

This fire has become absolutely out of control and has now burned over 6200 acres since it started on Saturday. And as of this morning, they hadn't lost any structures or lives that they were aware of. However, because of the change of events this afternoon we have now lost quite a few homes and a historical landmark. I am in complete shock as to what is going on and I have been having a hard time finding the words to express the emotions that are going through me. I am watching the town that I was born and grew up in and that I love so much, just go up in smoke and to tell you the truth, I am not handling it well. I have cried a few times. So many people have already lost their homes and many more might lose theirs as well. It is the worst feeling in the world just having to sit back and not be able to do anything.

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Things like this make you realize just how unprepared your are for something like this. I can tell you that we were very unprepared. All of our legal docs were in different places. We were running around like mad trying to find them. We have renters insurance, but have never bothered to catalog or take pictures of all of our higher valued items. We have now realized that we also need a fire safe box, just in case anything were to ever happen and we weren't able to get in and get our stuff. And lastly, that we need to have some type of sign or sticker indicating that we have animals inside.

Source

This whole experience has been a huge eye opener and hopefully we can now better prepare ourselves for if this ever happens again. We are hoping that the fire steers clear of the interstate tomorrow so that we can go back and possibly get a few more things. We are actually thinking that if it is possible that we may just move completely out of our apartment this weekend. We were going to be moving in a week or two anyways, so why not try and get it done just in case this fire does jump a six lane interstate. You just never know.


Thanks for reading this incredibly long blog post. I hope that you guys are not dealing with anything ridiculous like this. I would also like to ask that you send your prayers and positive thoughts this way for all of us that are affected by this horrible fire. Especially those that are out trying to fight it. Thank you in advance everyone and hopefully I will have some better news for you tomorrow!