Three members of the Pitkin County incident management team recently deployed to Pueblo County to support response and recovery personnel during the Aspen Acres Fire, which reached 101,545 acres as of Tuesday.
Pitkin County Emergency Manager Chris Breitbach, Deputy Emergency Manager Krystal Stubbs and Communications Coordinator and Public Information Officer Abbie Cheney spent more than a week assisting local, state and federal officials to help coordinate response efforts and provide timely information to residents impacted by the fire.
Breitbach, who is also a coordinator for one of Colorado’s statewide incident management teams, said local jurisdictions during emergencies often request additional support through the state. Incident managers from across the state and country deploy for short periods of time to help emergency responses. In addition to the Pitkin County officials, emergency managers from Alaska, Virginia and Pennsylvania were also deployed to help with the response.
Breitbach worked with Pueblo County leadership, including the county’s emergency manager, to help connect affected residents with recovery resources and reentry processes.
“[Pueblo County’s emergency manager] was getting inundated with decisions that he had to make and essentially building some plans on the fly,” Breitbach said. “When we initially got there, I was tasked with helping look at what reentry would look like from a coordination perspective, working with the communications people, the PIOs, to be able to message that, balancing that with the complex incident management team that was there from Alaska on the hazards of what areas could we repopulate and when and what that looked like.”
The job morphed into what debris management would look like as people started returning to their homes, he added, and what the county could do to help support their needs.
“Anything from just smoke damage into a house that was fully standing and not impacted at all, all the way to a house that was a pile of ash,” Breitbach said.
Cheney worked within the joint information center to help communicate evacuation plans and other information to community members. The joint information center comprised about 15 officials taking phone calls, updating websites and social media to share necessary information about the fire.
“It was just [seeing] the things that you don’t necessarily think about in emergencies like this,” Cheney said. “Just people who were basically creating something out of nothing and just figuring it out because it kind of had to be done.”
Breitbach said Pitkin County’s use of an evacuation tool called Genesis, which establishes evacuation zones throughout the county, helped the emergency response crews in Pueblo County, who have used the software during the Aspen Acres Fire.
“I felt that we were ahead of the curve by having some of these predetermined zones that we could evacuate,” he said. “However, I learned a lot as well, and we are going to, after wildfire season this year, as we did last year continually reevaluate what our zones look like, the size of them, the naming conventions of them, to just make it even … simpler should we have to use them during a real-life incident.”
The Aspen Acres Fire was 61% contained as of Tuesday afternoon. It was first reported on June 29 and is currently the largest active wildfire in Colorado.