Waldo Canyon fire 10 years later: Longtime photojournalist loves his neighborhood — just differently — after rebuild
Mike Petkash has put the past behind him after losing and rebuilding his home 10 years ago.
Three days after the Waldo Canyon fire sparked northwest of Colorado Springs in the summer of 2012, smoke and flames raced down a hillside toward Petkash’s Mountain Shadows neighborhood and leveled his house, one of 346 destroyed by the fire.
Petkash and his family rebuilt on the same lot they have called home since 2001. They moved back six months after the fire and have spent the past 10 years reclaiming their property from the cinders, most recently planting two pine trees in their pristine, xeriscape yard.
Petkash is the chief photographer for Gazette news partner KKTV 11 News, where he has worked for 32 years. He was on his way to work on June 26, 2012, when he saw the fire racing across the mountain. He said to himself, “I’m turning around and going back into my neighborhood.”
It’s a good thing he did.
When he arrived back at Yankton Place, Petkash said the fire was coming down the hill toward his house. Between yelling at neighbors to leave the area and evacuating his family, he did what came naturally — he grabbed a camera.
“I was just in my cul-de-sac spinning around, shooting everything I could,” he said.
His footage from that day shows smoke coming over the mountain, neighbors packing their cars and a police officer calling for an immediate evacuation over a bullhorn. The video was taken on a TVUPack that allowed Petkash to broadcast live.
– In June 2014, the fire was determined to be caused by a human, but the true nature of the cause remains unknown.
– The origin of the fire was within 3 miles of the Waldo Canyon Trailhead off U.S. 24.
– The fire killed two people, destroyed 347 houses, amassed nearly $454 million in insured losses, scorched 18,247 acres and cost $15.3 million in firefighting efforts. It took crews 17 days to contain the devastating blaze.
– Husband and wife William and Barbara Everett were the lives lost.
– More than 32,000 residents were evacuated.
– Investigators still don’t know who started the fire or if was arson or an accident.
In a final move before evacuating with his wife, 12-year-old son and new puppy, Brandy, Petkash switched on an oscillating sprinkler on his roof, which watered the area around his home. “That was the last thing I did before I got in my car and drove away,” he said.
Petkash — who some neighbors say saved their lives by yelling of the fast-moving fire — worked through that night with a KKTV news crew on Centennial Boulevard, watching the fire burn through neighborhoods and listening to propane tanks explode in the fire. He had a feeling that things were not good but didn’t know about the fate of his home until he received a photo from his nephew the next day.
“You knew it was coming; it was inevitable,” he said. “I kinda knew in my gut that my house is probably burned up.”
What Petkash saw in the photo from his nephew, a firefighter, was a smoking pit where his home once stood. “There was nothing. No oven, no refrigerator, no nothing,” he said.
Petkash has an indiscernible lump of metal on display in a corner of his yard — one of the few things he chose to keep from the ruins of his original home. Before the fire, it was a toolbox. “I still have that as a reminder,” he said.
For the damage on the property to be so severe, firefighters told Petkash that temperatures would have been at least 1,400 degrees for over three hours.
With pre-evacuation orders given days before the street burned, Petkash and his wife had preemptively emptied a fireproof safe, which later “crumbled” in the flames, and moved some important items to a family member’s house — but they didn’t save everything.
Petkash shared that his grandmother was a painter and her artwork hung on the walls of his original home. He expressed regret over leaving them behind. “I don’t know why I didn’t grab the pictures off the walls,” he said.
When Petkash went back to his neighborhood for the first time, the houses were gone, but the first thing he noticed was the absence of many “huge” trees. The diminished foliage is still noticeable today, but Petkash is hopeful that the area will grow back to how it was before in the next 20 years.
Petkash said deciding to stay in that neighborhood was an easy decision, because he likes the neighborhood, a sentiment shared by many of his neighbors. All but two of the families on Yankton Place rebuilt on the same lot and came back.
“Right after the fire, we definitely all became closer,” Petkash said of his neighbors, recalling a dinner they shared together two weeks after the fire at a Mexican restaurant.
In the aftermath, Petkash and his family stayed with extended family for six months while they found a builder and planned their new home. “In an ironic way my wife never really liked the layout of our house,” he said. All but one house on the street has a new layout.
“2012 was the end of that neighborhood and now it’s a totally new neighborhood, a lot of the same people, but just different,” Petkash said. “We’re way past this now. It’s behind us.”
KKTV photographer Mike Petkash has one thing that he salvaged from his home on Yankton Place that burned to the ground during the Waldo Canyon fire. He thinks that this blob of metal was his toolbox and maybe some items from his truck.
Every house except one was wiped out on Yankton Place. The house of Mike Petkash was on the right in the photo of the cul-de-sac. The photo was taken in 2012 a few days after the Waldo Canyon fire.
KKTV photographer Mike Petkash not only lost his home on Yankton Place, but worked through the night covering the fire. Petkash has rebuilt in the same location.
Mike Petkash and his 12-year-old son, Michael, look through the ashes of what is left of their home in Mountain Shadows after the Waldo Canyon fire in 2012.