On Thursday, August 13th, what would eventually become the largest fire in Colorado History started to burn about 15 miles southwest of Red Feather Lakes and 40 miles west of Fort Collins near Chambers Lake in the Roosevelt National Forest. Over the course of nearly four months, the Cameron Peak fire would burn 208,913 and destroy 461 structures, 224 of which were residential until being 100% contained on December 2nd.

The impact of this fire was monumental, and it has left a lasting mark on a landscape that many people in and around the Fort Collins area cherish. It felt as though every day, the first thing on the agenda for many, myself included, was to look for updates on the fire. Information like how far the most recent run was, changing containment date estimates, etc. were constantly the topic of most conversations. These updates became an integral part of daily life during this time and it’s thanks to public information officers like Olivia Bruce that the public can stay so up to date on the status of fires.

Olivia is a CSU graduate who became a wildlife dispatcher in Grand Junction after getting her degree in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources. She was part of a type 1 team sent to the Cameron Peak fire in mid-October. Wildland fire complexity levels range from type 5 to type 1. Type 5 usually requires a small number of firefighters and these incidents are often contained within a few hours of resources arriving to the scene. Type 1 involves multiple operational periods, over 1,000 personnel, fully staffed command and general positions, aviation operations, and regular briefings. These teams are not deployed unless the fire is threatening structures, human life, and serious widespread damage to the surrounding area.

Olivia explained that 2020 was an especially bad year for wildfires. The country was on national preparedness level 5, the highest level of wildland fire activity. This means that several geographic areas are experiencing large, complex incidents that could potentially exhaust national wildland firefighting resources. When talking about this, Olivia explained “they are doing things we have never seen before. In Cameron Peak’s situation it got a foot of snow and then still went on to burn”. These fire behaviors are part of what helped extend the burn times and gave them the strength to become as large as they did.

Before being brought onto the team as a public information officer, Olivia had been keeping tabs on the Cameron Peak fire. During her studies at CSU, she went to the mountain campus and spent a lot of her time in the area where the burn was taking place. She loves it and says Fort Collins and the wilderness to the west is a second home to her. Trying not to let what was happening get to her too much was not easy. Once she was at the fire and working with the team, she said that it was emotional yet empowering. “Not only was this my first role as a public information officer but I was also in my hometown and I was on the community branch. We were going to evacuation centers trying to tell people as much as we could” she told me.

They would meet those who were forced to leave their homes and go to evacuation centers that had been set up by the team. Leaving your home for an evacuation center due to a fire is hard enough but these residents had the added stress of doing so during a global pandemic. Olivia said that out of the interest of public safety, there were questions they simply couldn’t answer. While this was hard, she told me that some of the things she heard while visiting these centers were amazing. People who were unsure of whether their homes would still be in tact when it was safe to leave were asking her questions about the state of the Poudre River and the watershed as well as what impact this fire could have on the landscape. Olivia said that as a community, they were still just as worried about the wilderness they loved so much as their homes.

The team that Olivia was working on was integral to keeping the public informed and aware of the situation as it continued to unfold, and she told me that this was one of the most rewarding parts of her job. “It felt really empowering to do something that mattered. Without the group that I was working with, the public would be in the dark”. The daily information being put out by their team was what every news outlet would base their stories around. Without these reports, concerned residents would be unable to easily find out how the fire was behaving. This is one thing that kept her going, being able to give her past neighbors the reassurance that they would have access to information about their homes and favorite places to reconnect with nature.

Olivia remembers the moment when they could announce the fire was coming to an end vividly and described it happily. The Colorado type 1 team she was a part of had just been switched out with a type 1 team from Alaska, but she decided to stay on and continue her job as a public information officer. It was 11:00 at night in early December and she said she was in her office without her glasses on working when the Incident Commander, the person at the top of the team who was in charge of coordinating the fire response, walked in with the news. He told them that containment was at 88%, a huge jump from where it had been throughout November. She jumped up asking if this was confirmed and if they could publish it. One of her colleagues that she talked to asked who told her this and she said she didn’t know, not realizing until later that it was the incident commander, the top brass.

Her experience as a public information officer on the largest wildfire in Colorado history was a life changing experience. Olivia told me that while it was difficult seeing a place she holds so close to her heart burned, the experience was incredible and she knows that she made an impact while in her position. From talking to those affected by the fire while on these teams, she thinks that it has made a lasting impression on them. She believes that communities will be more fire aware and do more of the little things that, when combined, can help slow the spread of future fires. She also said that people in Fort Collins seemed to have a realization that they can make an impact by taking care of these wildlands as well. If all the communities can work together to mitigate fire dangers, we can prevent an event like this from being able to happen again for a long time.