While state and local fire personnel quelled a 5-acre brush fire along Alamosa County’s Road 4 South and County Road 111 Thursday afternoon, firefighters in Custer County are containing the Buttermilk Fire on the Wet Mountain Valley side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Fire season has started.
Alamosa County, as of Thursday afternoon, is under a fire weather watch until Saturday. The past two weeks have warranted a number of Red Flag Warnings to be issued in the county.
Department of Fire Prevention and Control SLV Engines 3321 and 3322 responded to two fires in Monte Vista, one in Alamosa and one in Sanford on Thursday, the agency said on its Instagram page.
The “111 Fire” in Alamosa County was human caused “as a gust of wind took the fire out of control,” the San Luis Valley Fire Buff said in an Instagram post.
Much of the west is under the dome of a heat wave that will have some parts of Colorado see temperatures in the 90s in the coming days.
The Buttermilk Fire in Custer County, as of Thursday afternoon, had burned a total of 80 acres and was nearing 75 percent containment. Initial evacuations were ordered for residents living within a two-mile radius of the fire, but according to the most recent update from the Custer County Sheriff’s Office no evacuated community members needed overnight accommodations.
Buttermilk is burning at the base of the mountains in a pine forest. Wind is expected to pick up Thursday afternoon.
The fire was caused after an Aspen tree fell onto a Sangre De Cristo Power line, according to the sheriff’s office.
“It has an automatic setting to try to reconnect the power. This led to starting a fire. For the duration of the fire season the automatic re-connect feature will be disabled. This potentially would lead to more outages due to false alerts. Any time a failure is detected they will have a manual crew physically check the lines before re-energizing,” the sheriff’s office wrote in a Thursday update.
“Saturday we are expecting much worse fire weather.”
Meanwhile in Nebraska, Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management team is overseeing the Morrill and Cottonwood Fires that are burning a combined acreage of more than 800,000 acres as of Thursday.
The Morrill Fire is burning into its seventh day and has killed at least one person. It is the largest wildfire in Nebraska’s history.
Its cause remains under investigation, but high winds, low humidity and temperatures in the 80s caused the fire to bloom rapidly. It’s now burning 643,000 acres with 67 percent containment.
The Cottonwood Fire to the east of the Morrill Fire is burning 128,000 acres and is 78 percent contained. More than 400 firefighters from across Nebraska and neighboring states are working these fires.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen made an emergency declaration and activated some Nebraska National Guard members to assist.
