Thanks to my many readers who have e-mailed me with concerns about my family’s proximity to the massive wildfire in Boulder County.

The huge fire in the foothills north of Boulder, being called the “Four Mile Canyon Fire” for the location where it started, has burned over 7,000 acres as of Tuesday afternoon.

The current rumor is that a car was driven into a propane tank which exploded and started the fire.

The southern-most edge of the fire is, or was, a couple of miles north of (Boulder) Canyon Rd., near Sugarloaf Mountain – where I used to live.  We’ve since moved to a neighborhood on the southern side of Canyon Road, so we’re several miles south of the southern edge of the fire.

As of late Tuesday, it seems that the southern edge of the fire is contained, with the winds blowing mostly north and causing evacuations and tremendous damage in a wide swath across the Left Hand Canyon area of Boulder County.

As I looked north across the (Boulder) canyon from my side toward Sugarloaf on Monday evening, I could see at least a half dozen (former) houses in the Mountain Meadows neighborhood of lower Sugarloaf which were just giant glowing red shapes.  It was extremely sad to see, and would have been more so had I not been simultaneously so worried about the risk to my home and family from the somewhat unlikely event of a sudden southerly wind big enough to push the fire into our area.

Our home is bordered by national forest, so a serious tree fire would put us at real risk even though we’ve cut down almost all the trees which are very close to the house.

Needless to say, my wife was quite nervous – and justifiably so – even packing a few things in a suitcase in case we had to leave quickly.

On Tuesday afternoon, as I was driving back to Boulder from a lunch meeting in Denver, the foothills to the north of Boulder were covered by an enormous white cloud of smoke that looked more than anything else like a mushroom cloud you’d see in an old black-and-white clip of a nuclear bomb test.

As of late Tuesday, the fire was absolutely uncontained on the north despite the best efforts of “slurry bomber” airplanes and many brave firefighters. I can only hope that it’s essentially contained on the south, in terms of my family’s safety.

On my way home on Tuesday, around 6 PM, I stopped at the overlook.  There were several evacuees from Sugarloaf looking across the canyon with binoculars trying to see if their homes survived.  One woman saw that her home had indeed survived; a young man couldn’t tell through the smoke if his house was still there.

I look forward to contributing to some a charity, which I presume someone will start soon or which will be taken on by a large existing non-profit, to help those who lost their homes in this disaster.

Again, I thank all of you who have e-mailed or called to make sure my family and I are safe, and to offer help if we needed it.

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Note: The largest wildfire in Boulder County history prior to this fire was the “Black Tiger” fire, also in the Sugarloaf Mountain area, which burned approximately 44 homes and 2,000 acres in July, 1989.  This fire is already nearly quadruple the acreage and probably double the homes burned.

A case study on the Black Tiger fire noted that “The Black Tiger Fire was the worst wildland fire loss in Colorado history, but the conditions that led to it are still prevalent in many parts of Colorado as well as in other states. The trend of building combustible homes in the flammable wildlands continues. In many of these areas the potential for similar or worse disaster currently exists, needing only an ignition source and the unfortunate development of hot, dry, windy weather conditions that come with dangerous regularity every year.”