BEULAH — The moment volunteer firefighter Tom Laca knew Beulah was in trouble came just after sunrise.
The wind shifted. Flames began pushing downhill. And as the fire started to spread across 12 Mile Road, the Beulah Fire Protection and Ambulance District captain turned back to try to save his community.
It was a scenario he had trained for in tabletop exercises with his team, but no training could prepare him for watching it unfold in real life.
“Here we go. We’re in for it — this is the one,” Laca remembers saying to himself that June 29 morning.
“This was real.”
Erratic winds fanned the Aspen Acre fire, as it raced across dry fuels and exploded to 25,000 acres in the first 24 hours. Laca is one of Beulah’s 27 volunteer firefighters who were spread thin for the first 48 hours, fighting alongside county teams, before federal firefighters arrived.
The fire, now estimated at roughly 97,000 acres, has destroyed 850 structures in Pueblo and Custer counties, a fire official said.
“We couldn’t save them all, but we tried,” the captain said of Beulah’s homes, as he spoke to a guided caravan of reporters who were among the first members of the public to view the fire’s destruction.
Feet away, twisted metal hung off the historic 1930s-built Horseshoe Lodge, once a central hub for the Beulah community, where local schools visited each month and where 4-H camps wrapped up just days before the fire started.
The lodge was hollowed by the fire. Its roof is gone, leaving the building exposed to the sky. Mangled mattress frames sit amid the debris inside. The scaly, cinnamon-brown bark of the ponderosa pines surrounding the lodge, now blackened by the flames.
For Laca, the emotional toll went beyond the destruction left by the flames. The volunteer fire department protects about 900 homes in a tight-knit community, and as flame threatened Beulah, firefighters found themselves defending the homes of neighbors, friends and familiar faces.
“It’s hard in your own backyard because it wasn’t about protecting such-and-such address,” Laca said. “It wasn’t a number, it wasn’t a road name, it was a person whose house we were looking to protect.”
“It became very personal, very quick.”
About one-third of the Beulah’s volunteer firefighters lost their home in the flames — many of whom knew by watching the flames or listening to radio traffic as they fought the flames, said Jill Laca, a spokesperson for the department.
“We cried, we hugged, we said, ‘What do you need?’” Jill Laca, who is married to Tom, said. “And they said, ‘I need to get back to work.’ And they just kept going, and they’re still going.”
Along South Pine Drive, the fire’s path seemed arbitrary. One home was reduced to ash while another stood untouched just feet away. The metal skeletons of washers and dryers lay among the debris and a swing set remained standing on a hillside next to the bare concrete foundation of a home that no longer existed.
A home’s fate often came down to a combination of preparation and “pure luck,” Tom Laca said. Mitigation work helped improve the odds, Laca said, but it was no guarantee against a fire driven by gusts reaching 100 mph.
“I’m sure there are houses that we lost that had been mitigated around. But if you hadn’t mitigated, your chance of surviving this fire was a lot less,” he said.
The sudden shift of the wind had crews hopping from one place to another, trying to get out of the fire’s path, while still doing the best they could to save homes, Jill Laca said.
“It was a monster and the monster ate anything in its path. You can’t stand in front of it,” she said. “We knew where the safe areas were so that we could try to put up a good front.”
She remembered lying down in bed, unable to sleep, listening to the constant, “almost deafening” whoosh of the fire as flames took in more fuel.
“It’s just gut-wrenching to see the core of our community completely changed,” Jill Laca said, standing near the hollowed lodge at the Pueblo Mountain Park, where her kids spent summers as campers and counselors.
Community gatherings will look different, but the Lacas believe Beulah’s sense of community will endure.
The community’s downtown area — “another heart of Beulah” as Jill Laca called it — is still standing, including the historic Beulah Inn, coffee shop, general store and post office.
“It’s going to look a lot different around here and life is going to be different,” Tom Laca said. “But as many are saying, we are Beulah strong, and we will all get through this together.”
“The fire is going to do what it wants to do”
When the call came to help fight the Aspen Acres fire, Trevor Johnson climbed into his car in Southern California and began an 18-hour drive to Beulah. Friday marked his 12th day on one of the nation’s highest priority fires, working as part of the Alaska Interagency Incident Management Team.
“In no way, shape, or form are we out of the weeds,” Johnson said, as helicopters flew overhead at Red Creek Ranch off North Creek Road, where crews had established a base for firefighting aircraft to refill with water.
“There’s still a ton of potential with this incident to affect other communities that are important to us here in Colorado,” he said.
Water tenders rolled in the dusty lot, hauling thousands of gallons of water from distant sources so aircraft could battle flames across the fire’s rugged northern perimeter.
Helicopters shuttled between the tanks of water and the fire line, plunging collapsible buckets into the water tanks and lifting away with 300 to 500 gallons at a time. A Skycrane hovered briefly before lowering its hose and gulped up more than 2,000 gallons in less than a minute.
As an operations branch director on the Aspen Acres fire, Johnson’s days start at 5:30 a.m. with a pre-operations meeting, before long hours coordinating the response to a fire that has challenged crews with its terrain and weather.
He’s in bed at 11 p.m., then back at it the next morning.
“Everything is lining up to make this incident challenging and complex,” said Johnson, a battalion chief for Ventura County Fire Department.
While Beulah’s 27 volunteer firefighters were among the first to respond, they stayed alongside the Alaska team, fighting to protect the community they call home.
But from the beginning, he said, firefighters were facing a force that could not always be controlled.
“Right out the gate, it’s almost man versus nature,” Johnson said. “You can provide a ton of coordination, a ton of the right technology to the fire, but sometimes the fire is going to do what it wants to do.”
As of Friday, 1,900 personnel were assigned to the fire. A new incident management team is expected to arrive in the coming days, but Beulah’s firefighters will remain.
“They’re still here every day, not only supporting their community of Beulah,” Johnson said, “but also aiding in our efforts right there, helping us get a lay of the land.”