(SUPERIOR, Colo.) — The mayor of a Colorado town decimated by sudden and fast-moving wildfires called the situation “very grave” in an interview with Good Morning America.
Hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands were forced to evacuate in Boulder County on Thursday when wind-fueled grass fires exploded into infernos.
“I spent a couple of hours yesterday driving around in the afternoon with the sheriff’s office and town manager just making an assessment of the situation there on the ground and it’s grave,” Clint Folsom, the mayor of Superior, told GMA. “It’s nothing like I would have ever imagined would have happened.”
Folsom said he was fearful of what emergency responders might find in the coming days after hundreds of homes burned “in a matter of minutes.”
“I hope we don’t have fatalities,” Folsom told GMA.
The mayor said that strong winds were not uncommon in the area, but “this was a wind like I’ve never seen.” Combined with an extraordinarily dry summer and fall, the conditions were ripe for a devastating blaze.
Of the two fires burning, one, the Marshall fire, had “ballooned” into a 1,600-acre behemoth as of Thursday night. Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle, said the blazes were “consuming football-field lengths of land in seconds.”
Superior, a town of 13,000 and Louisville, a town of 20,000 were both asked to evacuate as the fires tore through the area.
Pelle said he believes the fires were likely sparked by downed power lines.
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