The Morning Dispatch: Colorado Wildfires Cause Record Damage

Happy Monday, and Happy 2022! We have big plans for The Dispatch and our members this year, and it starts this week with Dispatch Politics. 

With the midterms rapidly approaching, we’re expanding our coverage of campaigns and elections to provide more of what you’ve told us you like—and several new offerings, too. In addition to the sharp analysis you’ve come to expect from Sarah Isgur in The Sweep every Tuesday, we’re adding a second politics newsletter: Stirewaltisms, from contributing editor Chris Stirewalt. Brilliant name, right? To make sure you get it in your inbox every Thursday, double check The Sweep is marked on your Dispatch account page. We’ll connect the various tubes and wires on the back end.

But that’s not all: You’ll also find more political coverage on our website under the Dispatch Politics banner, with regular reports from the campaign trail and analysis from top Dispatch writers and contributors. (Don’t worry, we’ll link it all in Toeing the Company Line, too.)

And we’re just getting started. Stay tuned for news in the coming days and weeks of additional podcast and video offerings available exclusively to Dispatch members.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Biden spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin for slightly less than an hour on Thursday amid tensions over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to an anonymous senior administration official who briefed reporters, Biden “laid out two paths” for Putin: diplomacy leading to de-escalation, or deterrence with “serious costs and consequences.” Biden also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, assuring him the U.S. and its allies will “respond decisively” to a Russian invasion. The United States and Russia—along with NATO allies—are scheduled to engage in further dialogue next week.

• Weeks after he was reinstated following an October coup, Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok announced his resignation in a televised address on Sunday after failing to reach a power-sharing agreement with the military. “I tried as much as I could to avoid our country from sliding into disaster,” he said. “But despite my efforts to achieve the desired and necessary consensus to give citizens security, peace, justice and to stop bloodshed, that did not happen.”

• Iran’s Defense Ministry announced late last week it had successfully launched a satellite carrier rocket with three “research cargoes” aboard into space. U.S. intelligence officials told the Wall Street Journal that although the satellite carrier rocket isn’t military in nature, many of its components could be repurposed for long-range ballistic missiles.

• Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced last week he is appointing Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio as the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, replacing former Rep. Devin Nunes, who resigned at the end of 2021.

• Citing students’ “suffering” over the past few years, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told Fox News Sunday that despite the Omicron variant, the Biden administration’s “clear” expectation is “for schools to be open full-time for students, for in-person learning.” Several large teachers unions, however, have voiced displeasure with cities’ plans to keep schools open after winter break, and some are weighing walkouts in protest of districts’ decisions.

• A preliminary, non-peer-reviewed study out of South Africa found a booster shot of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization from the Omicron variant by about 85 percent, as opposed to a single J&J dose which reduced hospitalization risk by 63 percent.

• A preliminary, non-peer reviewed study from American and Japanese scientists released last week found that, in mice and hamsters, the Omicron variant produces milder clinical disease than previous COVID-19 strains, in large part because the virus tends to remain in hosts’ noses and upper respiratory tract rather than cause damage to hosts’ lungs. A handful of other studies have come to similar conclusions.

• The Department of Health and Human Services announced last week the Food and Drug Administration has issued emergency use authorizations for two new over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 tests from SD Biosensor and Siemens. “Combined, it is estimated the companies can produce tens of millions of tests per month for use in the U.S.,” HHS said.

• Initial jobless claims decreased by 8,000 week-over-week to 198,000 last week, according to the Labor Department, bringing the measure’s four-week moving average to its lowest point since October 1969.

• Betty White, actress known for countless sitcom roles over a career spanning seven decades, died Friday, just weeks before her 100th birthday.

Colorado Wildfires Cause Record Damage

Two people remained missing on Sunday after a fire swept through more than 6,000 acres in Colorado’s suburban Boulder County on Thursday, destroying nearly 1,000 homes and businesses in the process and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate.

What’s since been labeled the Marshall Fire was not actually the first to catch on in the area last week. First responders were able to “attack” the Middle Fork Fire “pretty quickly” before it caused any structural damage, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said in a Thursday briefing, but the second blaze proved far more difficult to contain, expanding rapidly on the back of winds that topped 100 mph throughout the suburban towns of Superior and Louisville. After raging overnight, the flames began to subside on Friday as temperatures dropped into the single digits and the area was coated with several inches of snow.

Like most Western states, Colorado has dealt with its fair share of wildfires; there were nearly 15 named blazes in 2020 alone. But they typically occur in wooded areas, away from population centers—and almost never in December. “[This] wasn’t a wildfire in the forest; it was a suburban and urban fire,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said. “The Costco we shop at. The Target we buy our kids’ clothes at—all surrounded and damaged.”

Dana Ramsey—a Boulder County resident who works at a local theater and entertainment venue—was en route to Superior when she noticed the string of cars heading the opposite direction. “I was actually supposed to be getting my nails done at 1:30 p.m. right in that Superior shopping center—where the Costco and Target were,” she told The Dispatch Sunday night. “I saw all these cars. I saw the smoke from the fire. I just didn’t realize how close it was to that shopping center.”

Initial reports indicated the blaze could be traced back to a downed power line, but Boulder’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) said Friday that was unlikely. Video footage emerged over the weekend depicting a shed ablaze near where the Marshall Fire is believed to have begun, and Pelle on Saturday confirmed that investigators had executed a search warrant on a property believed to be tied to the blaze’s origin—but he urged caution.

“I don’t have any hard, credible evidence,” he told reporters. “I don’t have probable cause to understand what caused the fire.”

But those affected are desperate for answers, and some believe they’ve found them. “I was thinking, ‘How does this happen in the suburbs?’” Tamara Anderson—a Louisville resident who evacuated her home—told the New York Times. “And then I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, 100 mile per hour winds, and it’s been bone dry.’ And that’s because of climate change.”

According to National Weather Service-Boulder, the second half of 2021 was Denver’s driest on record, and the National Integrated Drought Information System shows about two-thirds of Colorado is experiencing a “severe drought” while 22 percent of the state—including Boulder County—is living under “extreme drought.” But historical data indicates the county has faced nearly two dozen seasons with more “extreme drought,” including as far back as 1900.

Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who studies fire ecology, said the combination of this dry spell and extreme winds created a veritable tinderbox—but not necessarily an unusual one.

“This is not a novel phenomenon,” he told The Dispatch. “What is new now is, in the past, when grasslands were subjected to dry weather and extreme winds, the fires burned and nobody was affected because nobody lived there.”

Colorado’s population has increased nearly 35 percent since the turn of the century, and all those new people—as well as the people priced out of bigger cities—need somewhere to go. The population of Superior, for example, has ballooned from about 250 in 1990 to more than 13,000 in 2019.

“You can’t rule out the importance of climate, climate is certainly important,” Keeley said, noting that, even though it isn’t a “novel” phenomenon, it’s not “normal” to have a dry spell in December. “[But] without a question, one of the biggest drivers is the increased population growth. … They’re expanding out into landscapes where people didn’t live in the past.”

That may explain why, even though “only” 6,000 or so acres burned last week—compared to nearly 140,000 acres in the Hayman Fire of 2002 and more than 200,000 in 2020’s Cameron Peak Fire—the Marshall Fire has already become Colorado’s most destructive in terms of property damage. More than 550 structures were obliterated in Louisville, about 330 in Superior, and 106 in unincorporated Boulder County. Another 120 or so structures—including Superior’s Target, Whole Foods, Office Max, and town hall building—were classified as damaged, but not destroyed. 

Thursday’s blazes have yet to result in any confirmed deaths, a silver lining that Polis said would be a “New Year’s miracle” if sustained. But two people—including 91-year-old Nadine Turnbull—are still missing, and Pelle said over the weekend that first responders and cadaver dogs were shifting from missing persons operations to recovery ones. Daily Camera, an area newspaper, reported the local hospital has treated a half dozen burn victims.

Even if the casualty count remains thankfully small, the people of Boulder County have a long road ahead of them. “I know for many it seems like a surreal experience,” Polis said. “Just a few days ago you were celebrating Christmas at home and hanging your stockings and now home and hearth have been destroyed—and it’s a shock. But I want the community to know you’re not alone. … We will build back stronger from this one because we are Colorado strong.”

Polis declared a state of emergency on Thursday to access emergency funds and activate the Colorado National Guard, and President Biden approved the state’s disaster declaration a few days later, making federal aid available through “grants for temporary housing and home repairs” and “low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses.” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell traveled to the state on Saturday.

The local community—still reeling after a grocery store mass shooting last spring—has come together once again to support its neighbors. The local Red Cross has begun telling would-be donors it already has more than enough food and supplies to disburse to those in need, and Boulder OEM said it was so “overwhelmed by the community’s generosity” that it had to stop accepting physical donations at evacuation centers and the food bank. 

“If you would like to help victims impacted by the fire, please consider a financial donation through the Community Foundation serving Boulder County, Red Cross or Sister Carmen, or sign up to volunteer,” the agency said. “There will be many opportunities to volunteer in the days ahead as we continue to recover from this catastrophic event.”

Worth Your Time

• Matt Welch’s latest piece for Reason has a pretty straightforward premise: Joe Biden would be a better president if he stopped saying things that aren’t true. “Behavior that gets rewarded (or even just unpunished) tends to get repeated. And Biden at this stage in his presidency is repeatedly saying things that aren’t true,” he writes. “It’s not OK for a pandemic-era political leader to say, as Biden did just two weeks ago, that if you’re vaccinated, you ‘do not spread the disease to anybody else.’ It is not acceptable for a president to claim, as he did Tuesday in a single tweet, that Build Back Better is ‘fully paid for’ (it’s not), that it ‘will not increase the deficit’ (it would), and that it ‘won’t raise the taxes by one penny for anyone making less than $400,000 a year’ (counters the Tax Policy Center: ‘roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022’). Such hyperbolic balderdash is worthy of a 24-year-old social media intern at a hack think tank; not the Commander in Chief of allegedly the greatest nation on Earth.”

Presented Without Comment 

Toeing the Company Line

• Up on the site today, we have an early look at Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague’s new book on the effort to overturn the 2020 election—and the people who stopped it. In the spotlight this chapter: Rohn Bishop, then-GOP chairman of Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, where the Republican Party was born.

• Also on the site today, Chris Stirewalt touts the idea of ideological diversity within parties and has an important question regarding the 2022 elections: “Which Republicans will refuse to condemn their friends and defy the mob? Which Democrats will reject and stick up for principled Republicans who are defending the rule of law?

• In Friday’s G-File, Jonah—on the mend from COVID-19—remembers the year that was. “What we are witnessing in American politics is best understood as elite failure, and 2021 is when it became undeniable,” he writes. “But elite failure isn’t just about January 6, or Joe Biden’s narcissistic need to be a more historic president than the times or the electorate called for. It’s everywhere. It colors how elites have responded to the pandemic and everything else this year.”

• In Sunday’s French Press, David—also on the mend from COVID-19—grapples with a recent critique of his work. “If I’m trying to communicate things that I believe to be both true and gravely important, and a thoughtful man says I’m communicating through ‘pique and annoyance,’ then I need to think very hard about how I write,” he admits. “Am I communicating a message that I do not intend?”

Let Us Know

All the Midwesterners on staff are looking forward to the nation’s capital freaking out today over a couple inches of snow. Which comes closest to your position?

1. I wish there was snow on the ground every single day of the year.

2. I enjoy the first one or two snowfalls of the season, but it becomes a hindrance after a while.

3. Bah humbug! Nothing worse than having to shovel the driveway before work and getting rock salt on your shoes and car.

4. I live in a part of the world dominated by Heat Miser and my opinion on snow is irrelevant.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).