When Hailey Unruh got the evacuation order on her cellphone Tuesday night, she had already left her house in western Colorado Springs, Colo.

“It’s kind of a rapid analysis of what’s important to you,” said Unruh, who gathered up a few clothes and necessities and headed with her husband, Chase, and their two dogs to a friend’s house to escape the wildfire encroaching on their neighborhood.

The Unruhs, who are Carthage natives, are among more than 32,000 residents who have been forced to evacuate their homes after a large wildfire near Colorado Springs doubled in size overnight Tuesday to about 24 square miles, threatening the city of about 419,000 people.

Flames also crested a ridge above the U.S. Air Force Academy campus this week, and the school told more than 2,100 residents to evacuate. No injuries or damage to academy structures had been reported by Wednesday evening.

Unruh on Tuesday had watched the wildfire barrel toward Colorado Springs from her office at the Citizens Service Center, which faces the mountains.

“We could actually see it crest over the ridge,” she said in a phone interview. “You could see it over the course of yesterday afternoon just racing down toward neighborhoods. It was just kind of a very surreal feeling.”

Unruh and her husband are staying with friends just a few miles from their home. Because residents are dissuaded from entering the evacuated areas, she did not know the status of her house on Wednesday evening. She said that when the all-clear is given, she hopes her house is still there and the couple can move back.

“But if we don’t, we really do have the most important things with us,” she said.

Steve Cox, an aide to Colorado Springs Mayor Steve Bach, said Wednesday morning that the blaze had consumed dozens of houses, but a precise figure wasn’t available because of the intensity of the fire.



‘Right out my window’

Ben Lowe, a Joplin native who has lived in Colorado Springs for about 12 years, on Wednesday was watching billowing plumes of black smoke from the window of his seventh-floor office downtown.

“It’s absolutely on everyone’s mind,” he said by telephone. “People are at work today, but I don’t think a whole lot of work’s getting done. Right now, I just see a smoldering mountainside behind Garden of the Gods (a public park in Colorado Springs). It’s the kind of thing that I’m supposed to see on TV happening somewhere else, not right out my window.”

Lowe’s house, he estimates, is about three miles from the evacuation zone. He said he doesn’t think he will be forced to evacuate. That would mean the wildfire would have churned its way through most of Colorado Springs, and he thinks fire crews will try to prevent that from happening.

But he acknowledged that the wildfire’s sudden turn on Tuesday toward the city was unnerving.

“Two days ago, I wasn’t worried at all,” he said. “Now, anything’s possible.”

Lowe’s sister, Alyson Lowe, was in Joplin over the weekend for a 20-year high school class reunion. She returned to her home in Fort Collins, Colo., on Monday. By Tuesday, she had opened up her home to family and friends who had been evacuated.

Alyson Lowe said the primary threat to her neighborhood was the 136-square-mile High Park fire, which was triggered by lightning on June 9 and has destroyed more than 250 homes. She said residents have been warned not to do strenuous exercise or outdoor work during mornings or evenings, when the winds are calm and leave deposits of ash over their cars and yards. Twenty minutes outside is enough to leave her hair smelling “like a campfire,” she said.

Lowe said that during the seven years she has lived in Colorado, she has not seen an emergency as serious as this one.

“There are fires almost every season, but none of them are affecting residential areas like this, and none of them are at the level of threat to the populated areas like this,” she said. “It’s just so dry and hot out here that they can pop up anywhere.”



THE ASSOCIATED PRESS contributed to this report.



‘Epic’ wildfire

RICHARD BROWN, fire chief in Colorado Springs, has called the blaze in his area “a firestorm of epic proportions.”