Fourmile Canyon Fire Findings

Publisher Marketing: The Fourmile Canyon Fire burned in the fall of 2010 in the Rocky Mountain Front Range adjacent to Boulder, Colorado. The fire occurred in steep, rugged terrain, primarily on privately owned mixed ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests. The fire started on September 6 when the humidity of the air was very dry and the winds were steadily blowing in the range of 15 miles per hour and gusting to over 40 miles per hour. These conditions prevailed for most of the first day when the fire burned approximately 5,700 acres and destroyed 162 homes. Because of the windy conditions, aircraft could not be used until late that first day. The first responders concentrated on evacuating the occupants of the 474 homes in the fire vicinity. No public or firefighters were injured during the course of the fire. This outcome was directly related to the excellent preparedness of Boulder County and, in particular, the Sheriff's Department and the local fire districts. Fuel treatments had previously been applied to several areas within the fire perimeter to modify fire behavior and/or burn severity if a wildfire was to occur. However, the fuel treatments had minimal impact in affecting how the fire burned or the damage it caused. After the initial day of intense burning and 4 additional days of relatively benign fire behavior, the Fourmile Canyon Fire had burned 6,181 acres and become one of the most damaging fires in Colorado's history. Contributor Bio:  Graham About the authors RONALD L. GRAHAM is Adjunct Director for Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and University Professor of the Mathematical Sciences at Rutgers University. He is coauthor of Concrete Mathematics and of Old and New Problems in Combinatorial Number Theory, and serves on the editorial boards of more than 25 technical journals. He received his PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. BRUCE L. ROTHSCHILD is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory. He received his PhD in mathematics from Yale University. JOEL H. SPENCER is a professor of mathematics and computer science at the Courant Institute. He is the author of Ten Lectures on the Probabilistic Method and the editor of Random Structures and Algorithms. He received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard University.