
With little time to get out, hundreds of Colorado residents lose their homes in a ferocious wildfire
CNN
A vicious wildfire that began Thursday morning in Boulder County, Colorado, swallowed about 1,600 acres in a matter of hours, burning hundreds of homes and prompting orders for some 30,000 people in two communities to evacuate.
Amid historically powerful winds, some 370 homes were destroyed in a single subdivision just west of the town of Superior, while another 210 homes may have been lost in Old Town Superior, the sheriff said Thursday. No deaths or missing people were reported immediately.
As quickly as the winds began, they were due to subside overnight, with heavy snowfall in the Friday forecast and the area under a winter weather warning, CNN meteorologist Robert Shackelford said.

More than two decades ago, on January 24, 2004, I landed in Baghdad as a legal adviser, assigned an office in what was then known as the Green Zone. It was raining and cold, and my duffle bag was thrown into a puddle off the C-130 aircraft that had just done a corkscrew dive to reach the runway without risk of ground fire. Young American soldiers greeted me as we piled into a vehicle, sped out of the airport complex and then along a road called the “Highway of Death” due to car bombs and snipers.












