Recent wildfires that scorched about 40,000 acres and decimated more than 12,000 homes and businesses in Southern California could be previews of Colorado’s fate this summer. In military terms, Colorado is a target-rich environment—an arsonist’s dream-come-true, and the U.S. Forest Service’s worst nightmare. The state has almost four million acres of dead trees, routinely suffers chronic drought and below-normal snowpack, and may be facing a summer of record high temperatures with little rainfall.
Consider this scenario: The third week of record-breaking heat and single-digit relative humidity began with a forecast for yet another wave of afternoon dry-lightning storms. Dozens of lightning-started fires were already burning across Colorado and had stretched local and state firefighting assets to the limit.
As the outflow from a collapsed-column dry thunderstorm drove 50-mile-per-hour winds up a narrow mountain valley, officials of a small city debated the pros and cons of issuing a mandatory evacuation order to residents and several hundred tourists enjoying vacations at the nearby lake. They ultimately decided to take a “wait-and-see” approach, because local business owners resisted alarming visitors unnecessarily. If weather conditions worsened, or a fire was spotted anywhere in the valley, an immediate evacuation would be ordered. The city constable was confident his handful of law enforcement personnel could get all inhabitants out by turning the valley’s single road into a double-lane escape route.
Ahmed, a sleeper-cell al Qaeda jihadist who had slipped across the U.S. southern border in 2024, also was monitoring the area’s weather conditions. As up-valley windspeed increased, he launched and flew a four-seat Cessna aircraft toward his predetermined target. Ahmed slowed, opened the pilot-side window, and started throwing road flares overboard.
One pass across the valley’s mouth ignited a half-dozen fires in the thick forest of beetle-kill lodgepole pines. He reversed course and was rewarded with a view that surely pleased Allah: Each small fire was rapidly expanding, fanned by high winds that drove flames into ultra-dry trees. Within minutes, the fires had grown together, creating a wall of flame that roared up-valley, devouring acres of dead timber.
Directly in the path of that inferno, a cluster of homes, retail shops and rustic cabins was perched on the edge of a crystal clear lake ringed by steep slopes and cliffs. The infidels only had one escape route: Through the barrier of towering flames.
City leaders, alarmed to learn the entire mouth of their valley was ablaze, immediately issued evacuation orders. Soon, the single two-lane road was choked with vehicles. Several of the pack-leaders braved the conflagration and blew through, before the road’s pavement melted and buckled. Trailing vehicles slowed to a crawl, and their drivers frantically tried to turn around. Hundreds of trapped cars, vans and SUVs were overtaken and burned.
As her long-held nightmare manifested, the U.S. Forest Service district ranger issued a top-priority call for fire-fighting aircraft and a Type 1 incident team, declaring that personnel were in a time-critical, life-and-death situation.
The harried dispatcher delivered a chilling truth: “We’re out of resources. A surge of new starts across the nation has consumed all federal assets. I don’t have a single tanker or helicopter to send. You folks are on your own.”
Within hours, the tiny Colorado town burned to the ground and hundreds of people died horrific deaths. The only survivors had grabbed the few boats available and huddled in the center of the lake.
After-action studies concluded that the deadly fire was ignited by an illegal alien (who was never captured), and the fatalities were attributable to “insufficient firefighting resources.” If large air tankers had been deployed immediately, they could have created a protective corridor through the conflagration by dropping retardant on both sides of the single-road escape route. Instead, hundreds of people lost their lives, homes and businesses.
Colorado’s governor said the fire was the largest loss-of-life incident in the state’s history, comparing it to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.
Some will scoff and dismiss that scenario as mere fiction, noting that Colorado has never suffered such a disastrous fire. True, but neither had California—until January 7, 2025.
Colorado is in a new era, facing a perfect storm of unprecedented fire-prone elements: Drought; tinder-dry beetle-kill trees blanketing millions of acres; a real-and-present terrorist threat, and a cash-strapped, dysfunctional federal land-management agency that has a mere handful of large air tankers to serve the entire nation.
The toughest element for skeptics to accept is the terrorism-by-wildfire threat. It is real. Guaranteed. When Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden, they captured a treasure trove of material that provided detailed insight into al Qaeda’s long-range plans. One was a detailed campaign for starting fires throughout the West. Firefighting officials told this writer that some California wildfires in 2011 were ignited by al Qaeda operatives.
On May 2, 2012, ABC News ran a story entitled, “Al Qaeda Magazine Calls for Firebomb Campaign in U.S.” Issues of Inspire magazine surfaced on al Qaeda websites, calling for jihadists to start huge fires with timed explosives planted in U.S. forests. The articles included detailed instructions for assembling remote-controlled “ember bombs.” It would be naïve to think those jihadists will NOT target Colorado’s super-dry forests.
As a former aerospace reporter, who has flown on 10 different types of aerial firefighting aircraft and served on a Blue Ribbon Panel that assessed the nation’s ability to fight fire from the air, I assure that the federal government’s tiny, oversubscribed aerial tanker fleet is not capable of protecting Colorado’s citizens and forests. Whether we admit it or not, we really are on our own.
Finally, of equal concern: Are Colorado’s elected officials diligently preparing for the types of unprecedented dry conditions and hurricane-level winds that obliterated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other Southern California areas in early January? Or are they, like California’s, focused on protecting illegals and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense in state and local fire protection agencies?
- First published in Col. Free Press on January 14, 2025.