The result: parched soil and vegetation — ideal conditions for wildfires. Twenty-seven minutes after Graves’s visit, an ambulance arrived to pick up Jordan Wyatt and Jennifer Shook, who were portraying injured victims. A short distance away, firefighters hosed water onto an imaginary blaze. Shook, who uses a wheelchair and works for an organisation supporting people with disabilities, volunteered for the mock rescue after her mother last summer was unable to access updates from authorities as a wind-whipped wildfire quickly cut off roads near her home.
“Watching her stress level and knowing that we have other people with disabilities that would need to be evacuated, I wanted to participate,” she said. – ‘Never seen anything like it’ – This type of drill, increasingly common in Colorado, is essential for identifying coordination gaps among emergency responders. They also help residents prepare for the nerve-wracking scenario of an evacuation. “I’ve worked here my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like” this year, said Aaron Jonke, fire chief in the small town of
Salida. “The moisture is way down, so it’s a much more dangerous situation,” he said, adding that he’d been warning residents about fire risk since January. “With climate change, the fire season changed from a summer event to a year-long event.”
Colorado wildfire, low snow, emergency drills, evacuation, Salida fire chief Aaron Jonke, Jennifer Shook, Jordan Wyatt, people with disabilities