Louisville recovers
Started: 2023-08-02 20:18:21
Submitted: 2023-08-02 21:59:27
Visibility: World-readable
Visiting Louisville eighteen months after the Marshall Fire
I spent a couple of days in Boulder County in July, visiting my employer's tiny Boulder County office (which happens to be across the parking lot from the apartment I lived in twenty years ago). This was the first time I've been in Louisville since the Marshall Fire at the end of 2021.
(Along the way I took the opportunity to drill my new-grad colleagues on the correct pronunciation of "Louisville". The locals pronounce it "lewis-ville", but at least once we explained this to someone and then got mail addressed to the city of "Lewisville". Which is still probably less confusing than the name of the main road on the north side of town, East South Boulder Road.)
The Marshall Fire started as a grass fire on a dry windy day at the end of December 2021. Nestled on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder gets strong winds from the west in the winter when the prevailing winds swoop down from the mountains across the plains. The fire started south of Boulder and was whipped into a firestorm by the winds, speeding across the tall dry grass on the plains into the town of Superior and the city of Louisville, burning through entire suburban neighborhoods destroying hundreds of homes. It was like the Omicron Wave of COVID-19: fast and hot, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
These were homes in neighborhoods I visited growing up in Boulder.
Eighteen months later there were signs of recovery. Entire streets had been scraped clean, the debris removed and the concrete foundations pulled from the ground, waiting to be rebuilt. Some new construction was underway, looking more like a greenfield subdivision surrounded by empty never-built lots than the brownfield site of a natural disaster.
Across the street from the hotel I stayed at in Louisville (and where we fled, into the hotel's conference room, when the office's air conditioning froze in the 95° F summer heat) was a fence around the edge of a parking lot that used to be a strip mall full of shops and restaurants.
Twenty years ago, while living and working in Louisville, there was a fast-casual Japanese restaurant named Tokyo Joe's that I frequented, often for lunches out with my colleagues. (My standard order was a Boulder veggie bowl with teriyaki sauce, often with a side maki roll.) The last time I visited this restaurant may have been a week after Julian was born in 2015, on the way back from a baby-related shopping trip, pictured here in this vintage photo of newborn Julian that I dug out of my archive just for this blog post. I posted it to Julian's Twitter account with the caption "That's weird; Daddy is eating with some sort of sticks in his hand. I shall watch this new development with interest."
In the background of the picture of Julian we can see the polished concrete floor with two seams crossing right behind the stroller. I believe we can see the same pattern in the concrete slab, scraped clean of all of the building around it, in the new picture below. This was a specific place that was meaningful to me, and now it's gone.
(After taking the newer picture, but before writing this blog post, I stumbled upon the picture of newborn Julian above, but by the time I sat down to actually write this I had forgotten where I saw it. I looked through every picture I posted from after Julian was born in 2015 without seeing it before I remembered that I had downloaded Julian's Twitter archive a couple of weeks ago (around the time the current owner of the site that used to be my social media platform of choice made one or more dumb decisions to drive users away, apparently ignorant of the actual value proposition posed by the site's power users; back in the halcyon days of a few weeks ago before the site was inexplicably renamed "X") and the picture existed in the Twitter archive but nowhere else. I dug it out of my backlog of unposted photos to post it here now.)
Visiting Louisville a year-and-a-half into their wildfire recovery gave me a stark reminder of the dangers of wildfire in the American West — especially me, right now, living at the edge of Santa Cruz in the middle of the wildland-urban interface.
