Colorado
How to prepare for a wildfire evacuation in Colorado
Preparing to evacuate because of a wildfire is now a year-round reality in Colorado, with destructive, deadly wildfires possible every month of the year, according to state officials.
Colorado’s “core wildfire season” is now 78 days longer than it was 50 years ago, according to the state Division of Fire Prevention & Control, and state forest service experts estimate nearly half of all Coloradans are at risk from wildfires.
Residents can prepare for a possible wildfire evacuation or a pre-evacuation warning by gathering important supplies and documents and making their home as fire-resistant as possible through these guidelines from the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Colorado State Forest Service and Colorado Springs Fire Department.
Supplies for wildfire emergency kit or go-bag
- Three-day supply of water (1 gallon per person per day) and non-perishable food
- First aid kit and sanitation supplies, including toilet paper and baby wipes
- Flashlight, battery-powered radio such as a NOAA Weather Radio and extra batteries
- Extra set of car keys, credit cards and cash
- Extra eyeglasses, contacts, prescriptions and a week’s supply of necessary medications
- Important documents and phone numbers, including insurance information
- Printed map with evacuation routes marked in case your phone dies
- Valuables or irreplaceable items you can easily carry
- Personal electronic devices and chargers
- A pair of old shoes and flashlight in case of a sudden evacuation at night
- Other items needed by your family, such as baby supplies, games and activities for children, pet supplies, two-way radios and a manual can opener
What to do during a wildfire pre-evacuation warning
- Be ready to leave at a moment’s notice and monitor local news for updates.
- Listen to your instincts. If you think you should evacuate even if you haven’t received an official notice, evacuate now.
- Back your car into the garage or park it facing the direction of escape.
- Put your emergency kit, important items and valuable papers inside your car.
- Wear protective clothing outside, such as sturdy shoes, cotton or wool clothing, long pants and a shirt, gloves and a handkerchief over your face.
- Put your pets in one room so you can find them easily if you need to evacuate.
- Set up temporary housing at a friend or family member’s home outside of the evacuation area.
- Close outside doors, windows and vents but leave them unlocked.
- Close inside doors to prevent drafts.
- Shut off natural gas or propane at the source.
- Connect garden hoses to outside faucets and fill any pools, hot tubs, tubs, garbage cans or large containers with water.
- Remove flammable drapes and curtains and close all shutters and blinds.
- Move flammable furniture to the center of your home, away from windows and sliding glass doors.
- Move flammable items outside your home, like patio furniture, children’s toys or firewood, as far from the house as possible.
- Leave interior and exterior lights on so firefighters can see in smoky conditions.
- Shut off the air conditioning and sprinkler system.
- Disconnect automatic garage door openers so they can still be opened if the power goes out, but leave them closed.
- Check on your neighbors to make sure they’re preparing to leave.
Colorado
‘We couldn’t do this in another place’: Horror film looks to make Southern Colorado the next Hollywood
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – It’s commonly understood that many of the best blockbusters are made in Southern California but a group of local filmmakers wants to prove Southern Colorado can be a destination for both aspiring and established auteurs.
Shooting began in Fountain this spring on ‘Devil In The Trunk’, a new horror film set in Colorado’s eastern plains.
“Devil In The Trunk is about a small-town woman who encounters a mysterious traveler driving this car right here who claims to have the actual devil trapped in the trunk of her car,” executive producer Leon Kelly said. “As you can imagine, when the devil comes to your small town, terrible and dangerous things can happen.”
Director, writer, and producer Evan Alderson said they wanted to make the film as Colorado as possible.
“We ended up finding a local Colorado writer, and we ended up collaborating to come up with this idea that could act as a love letter to Colorado,” he said.
While Colorado may be most famous for its soaring mountain peaks, Kelly said the plains were a much more fitting setting.
“It’s both beautiful and dangerous at the same time,” he said. “One of the underlying themes is the desolation and the loneliness and how vulnerable some folks can be in small towns and out in rural areas.”
Kelly said not only is the film meant to showcase Colorado’s natural beauty, but also to showcase the talent of the people who live there.
“It’s a proof of concept, to show that we have not only the talented people but the infrastructure that can support really high-quality, independent films,” he said. “We know we’ve got great filmmakers here, we know we have really talented craftspeople here, but they don’t necessarily have the opportunities to work on something like this on this scale that’s a narrative film.”
With the Sundance Film Festival set to make its debut in Boulder in 2027, Kelly said people are asking new questions about what Colorado can do for those looking to tell stories on the big screen.
“Can Colorado become a hub? Can that be a place, a destination where others come? Can that be a place where our own filmmakers can come into their own?” he said.
Alderson said once the film is finished they will put it out on the film festival circuit, and even look for distribution.
“That will look like a theatrical release, potentially, in an ideal world, or it will be straight to streaming services like Amazon, Hulu, that type of stuff,” he said.
Copyright 2026 KKTV. All rights reserved.
The now 19-year-old victim, who Brent Metz is accused of shooting in the face, took the stand in Metz’s trial Thursday. Metz, a former town of Mountain View councilman, was in the second day of his trial hearings.
The teenager, who has recovered well physically from the shooting back in September of 2024, told the story of what led up to the shooting, then said he blacked out for a period after he was shot.
The young man, Jack (CBS Colorado is not sharing the victim’s last name) said he and his younger friend went to ask for permission to take pictures at a scenic home near Conifer. At first, they parked outside the gated driveway and tried to figure out how to contact someone there. They then hopped a low fence and went up to the house.
Jack said he had difficulty locating a front door on the home, but the large property also had a garage and barn. They heard music coming from the barn, which is a common practice for people with animals to leave music playing to calm animals while away.
“We decided to knock on the barn door and then after a couple a minutes we decided to go back down the driveway,” Jack said in court.
The two friends went back over the fence and moved the car to a spot not blocking the driveway along the right-of-way at the road. Minutes later, Brent Metz drove up in his black GMC pickup truck, blocking their car in. Metz got out. Jack testified that he raised his hands at some point, a claim the defense questioned in cross examination. He related that he was getting out to try to greet the person getting out of the truck.
“I just (got) the door open I kind of turned to open my door and then turned to get out, and I saw someone get out, and then it was black,” Jack said.
The victim soon awoke bleeding and injured. “I looked down and I thought I was going to die. So I said that a couple times,” Jack testified.
“My mouth was on fire and it felt like my upper lip was gone, and I could taste little fragments,” Jack told the court. Jack’s friend and Metz tried to help him out of the car.
“The one who shot me was trying to help me get out of the car.”
Soon after, Metz left his side.
“He helped me sit down, and then he walked away,” Jack said.
“I started to realize I needed to stay as calm as I could, and when I got out of the car, I sat down, but I was very anxious,” Jack recalled.
Later, the victim had to have surgery in order to have the bullet fragments removed from his face. One of the fragments was more than an inch in size. He had trouble breathing through his right nostril due to the injuries to his nose. His eye was blackened for a long time, and a tooth was shattered.
Jack did not remember Metz saying much.
The testimony followed hours of testimony from a gun testing expert who looked at the weapon at the request of the prosecution. Derek Watkins is an engineer who said he has seen many claims of weapons not working properly.
“My experience is that, if you manufacture a firearm, at some point in time, it’s going, you’re going to run across the claim that it behaves in a defective manner,” Watkins said.
Metz’s defense is centered on a claim that the Sig Sauer P320 he had fired on its own without Metz pulling the trigger.
“There was nothing about the gun through the testing or through the examination of the components indicating it would function any other way than it was designed and left the factory,” Watkins said.
The defense had little luck getting Watkins to agree the gun could fire on its own, but did try to point out to the jury in questions that Watkins has previously testified in civil litigation about the gun’s integrity on behalf of the manufacturer.
The case continues Friday when it could wrap up. Metz faces four charges, the most serious of which is second-degree assault, but also two menacing charges and one of illegal discharge of a firearm.
On the cusp of the United States’ 250th anniversary and Colorado’s 150th, the Centennial State and its Catholic witnesses show modern Catholics a path forward.
Colorado celebrates its own 150th anniversary this year, as the rest of the country marks 250 years since the founding of the United States. The two milestones bear an interesting connection. In the very year of independence, one of the most important explorations of Colorado was undertaken by two Franciscan friars: Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante.
Faith Crosses the Rockies
While the importance of the Domínguez-Escalante Expedition should not be overestimated — it didn’t lead to any settlements and mostly focused on Utah — it nonetheless symbolizes the coming of the Christian faith into Colorado. Their expedition traces the path the Church followed into the Rockies, initially coming up from the south, to be met later from the East by miners. Leaving Santa Fe in the very month independence was declared, the two friars and their companions crossed into the modern-day boundaries of Colorado at the beginning of August 1776. They were not the first Spaniards to enter the territory of the Ute and Arapahoe tribes north of Nueva Mexico — Juan de Oñate was in 1598, and they also relied on the previous expeditions of Rivera — but the friars opened up more regular access to it as they laid the foundation for the Santa Fe Trail that would lead from New Mexico to Southern California.
The friars found in Colorado beautiful mountain vistas, remarking that it was cold even in the summer, as well as dangerous canyons and abandoned settlements in the Mesa Verde area. Their journal remarks: “We traveled a league and turned west through very pleasant narrow valleys with woods, very abundant with pastures, with different blooms and flowers.” (The Domínguez-Escalante Journal, translated by Fray Angelico Chavez, University of Utah Press, 15). Focusing on possible mission sites more than a continental passage, they insisted to all their companions that they should not “have any purpose other than the one we had, which was God’s glory and the good of souls” (40). Their desires would take 110 years to come to fruition with the founding of the first Catholic mission to Native Americans in Colorado, St. Ignatius, on the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, in 1886.
From Frontier Territory to Catholic Settlement
Catholic life was slow to arrive in Colorado compared to other parts of the nation, especially given the early settlement of New Mexico not far to the south. The Spanish were never able to create permanent settlements in Colorado, with one failed attempt near Pueblo in 1787. This is where 1776 regains its significance, even for the Church’s development in the region. It was only after the United States annexed the Southwest following the Mexican-American War in 1848 that Catholic settlement began. From the south, settlers arrived from Taos to establish San Luis on April 9, 1851. Not long after, in 1858, the Pikes Peak Goldrush brought a flood of miners from the East. From this mix of New Mexican settlers, Native missions and Catholic miners, the Catholic Church of Colorado finally emerged.
In 1860, Father Joseph Projectus Machebeuf arrived from Santa Fe and, in the eight years before he became Denver’s first bishop, the energetic priest established eighteen churches. I first encountered him through Willa Cather’s fictional portrayal of him as the character Vaillant in her novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (and she relied heavily on Machebeuf’s letters for the book). Though primarily set in New Mexico, Cather brings the history of the Church in the Southwest to life through the vibrant, often tense meetings of Natives, Mexicans, newly arrived Americans and the French clergy seeking to unite them into a cohesive whole. It was Bishop Machebeuf who presided over the Church when Colorado became a state in 1876.
A Little-Known Bishop With An Important Lesson
His successor, Bishop Nicholas Matz, likewise came to Colorado as a missionary from France and experienced firsthand the difficulties miners faced in mountain towns, especially as a pastor in Georgetown. Seth Fabian brings this lesser-known figure to life in his new book, The Pilgrim Bishop: The Spiritual Biography of Nichols C. Matz (TAN Books, 2026).
Even after living in Colorado for nearly twelve years and working for the Archdiocese of Denver for six, I didn’t know much about this misunderstood and even controversial bishop, who often lacked support from his clergy. Even in a newly established state, still riding high from its mining operations, Bishop Matz interpreted the events around him with a lens formed by the violent revolutions of the Old World, fearing and overestimating the “potential reach of radical socialists or anarchists” (11).
Bishop Matz’s difficulty in addressing the social question in his diocese points to an ongoing difficulty for both Colorado and the entire nation in this celebratory year marking their founding. Dr. Fabian raises a fundamental question we must consider: “the question of how individual Catholics live their daily lives in a pluralist society” (386).
We have a strong legacy of Catholic settlement across the continent, of our ancestors seeking to consecrate this land to God. In fact, in just a few weeks, on June 11, the U.S. bishops will do so again when they consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Yet we face pressing challenges that call us to wade into difficult social questions, especially those related to technology and artificial intelligence, as Pope Leo XIV is expected to do in his first encyclical, to be released on May 25.
Despite the real challenges, if we advance, as Domínguez and Escalante did, seeking “God’s glory and the good of souls” above all else, we can continue our great Catholic legacy and open a path for future generations to follow.
-
News18 minutes agoWhich first lady feared her husband might be having a stroke? The quiz knows
-
Los Angeles, Ca2 hours agoRescued sea lion pups released in Manhattan Beach
-
Detroit, MI2 hours agoSunda New Asian brings bold flavors to Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA2 hours agoDriver Arrested After Pedestrian Killed, Three Injured In Mission District Crash
-
Dallas, TX3 hours agoMcAllen Welcomes Texas Hockey | Dallas Stars
-
Miami, FL3 hours agoPair arrested in connection with armed home invasion robbery in Miami, cops say
-
Boston, MA3 hours agoSaturday storm will bring bursts of rain, strong winds, and… snow?
-
Denver, CO3 hours agoVon Miller lobbying Broncos to bring him back (here’s the latest update)
