BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — Smoke in the sky above Boulder County on Saturday brought back painful memories of the Marshall Fire just three months earlier.
The NCAR Fire burned roughly 200 acres, according to fire officials Sunday. There were no injuries or reports of structures destroyed.
Mike Smith served as Incident Commander for the Marshall Fire and now for the NCAR Fire. He says key differences between the fires make it difficult to compare the two.
“It’s a little bit of apples and oranges just because of the wind speed and location,” said Smith.
The Marshall Fire spanned more than 6,000 acres in less than 24 hours, riding 100 mile per hour winds through a suburban setting. The NCAR fire was contained to just hundreds of acres, thanks to lower wind speeds and lessons learned from the Marshall Fire.
“One of the things that we learned from the Marshall Fire was how to rapidly escalate and integrate multiple agencies and get them to work together, and I think we had a much more seamless process on this one,” Smith said.
Boulder County now has a system in place that sends alerts directly to cell phones inside the disaster area. That system was in the works during the Marshall Fire but not fully activated. Some people had little to no warning to leave their homes.
Smith says the new alert system was effective in evacuating homes during the NCAR fire.