Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're only five days into 2022 and it's already apropos to break out The Rolling Stones. The winter is feeling cold and hard.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: On Monday, a winter storm swiftly dropped a foot of snow and created dangerously icy conditions in Virginia. The weather trapped hundreds of drivers on i95 as overturned tractor-trailers and multi-car accidents blocked the busy interstate on the first workday of the New Year. For some, the ordeal went on for more than 24 hours. Yesterday, Mary Louis Kelly of NPR talked with Senator Tim Kane whose typical two-hour commute from Richmond stretched on for an agonizing 27 hours.
Tim Kane: I left at one o'clock Monday to come up for a voting rights meeting that was last night at eight o'clock and I felt like there was snow but that would give me enough time to get here, but I got bogged down a number of times where the ice and the snow was so bad and the cars were just stopped for five or six hours at a time. I just arrived at the office at about 3:45, so [chuckles] it was a miserable experience.
Melissa Harris-Perry: The storm left hundreds stranded on the highway and snatched electricity from another half million from North Carolina through New Jersey, leaving hundreds of thousands of households without heat or light during these long, cold January nights.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: While the storm battered the Mid-Atlantic, the Omicron variant has shattered national complacency about COVID-19. On Monday, the US set a new record reporting more than a million new infections. Infections, illness, hospitalizations, and deaths are affecting communities across the nation and disrupting families, schools, and businesses.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: At the end of last week, residents of Boulder, Colorado, experienced a devastating end to 2021 in the form of destructive, fast-burning wildfires.
Female Speaker 1: Within five minutes, our neighbors called and said the fire department was coming down telling everybody to get out. It wasn't much longer than that that our son called and saw news coverage up the hill and he could see that there were flames on our roof.
Male Speaker: It's unbelievable. It's really just down to rubble in so many, so many places.
Female Speaker 2: Well, we thought 2022 might be better, and then we had Omicron, and now we have this, and it's not starting out very well.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Those are the voices of residents from Superior and Louisville, Colorado, speaking with the associated press about the recent fires. Almost 1,000 homes in Boulder County were destroyed. One GoFundMe page tells the story of Corey, John, and Patrick, whose home in the Sagamore neighborhood of Superior, Colorado, was consumed. The young men described by their lifelong friends as quote "The most down to earth, kindhearted individuals you could meet" were given only seven minutes notice to evacuate. All three did get out safely along with their beloved pets but they lost all of their worldly possessions. They're not alone.
We heard from Annette in Denver who told us this heartbreaking story of her friends.
Annette: Their entire home and their second car was burned to the ground. The father in this family had taken the mother to the hospital for a procedure and was going to wait until it was done and take her home, but the mother suggested he go home, pick up their daughter and their dog just to be sure. He went back, picked them up, and returned to pick up his wife, and they were never able to go back to their home. When they went back, it was a pile of ash.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, wildfires have grown increasingly common in Colorado due to climate change, but according to Colorado Public Radio, last week's fires were among the most serious that have ever taken place away from the state's more heavily forested areas. That's a potentially troubling sign of things to come.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: For more, I'm joined now by Mayor Clint Folsom of Superior, Colorado. Mayor, thanks for being here.
Mayor Clint Folsom: Melissa, thanks for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I know it's been a very stressful week for your community, how are you and your family doing?
Mayor Clint Folsom: We're holding up okay. It has been a very tough time for the entire community. Part of my extended family lost some homes in Superior and it is just heartbreaking when I go around town and I can easily identify homes and who used to live there and who's lost their homes. It is a heartbreaking situation.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Mayor, this sounds so deeply personal, and I guess I'm interested as you've been talking with residents of Superior, what they've been telling you. I know for many of us here we were just so stunned at how swiftly it had to happen. That life was normal and then 10 minutes later it wasn't.
Mayor Clint Folsom: That's right. These high wind events are not unusual in Colorado winters but we've had an extremely dry summer and fall. Then, when fire is introduced on a day when you have extremely high winds and it's introduced to the west of a large amount of urban homes, it's just a recipe for complete disaster. I guess we've always thought about the possibility of this but this was just everything coming together in a perfect, awful way where the fire was just bearing down and 100-mile-an-hour winds, and they were sustained all day. That explains why people had minutes to get out.
It is utterly amazing that it looks like we have two fatalities and we have some injuries but how this was not a mass casualty event is truly a miracle.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Having spent a decade in post-Katrina New Orleans, both your language here about, "Yes, I know we thought about it but it took all of these factors coming together to make this horrible thing happen," I absolutely have empathy for that but I also know that one of the first questions that often then emerges is, so should people have been living there? That was a question in the Lower Ninth Ward, it was a question in the East, and it's been a question in the context of post-Katrina recovery for two decades now. Let me ask that question. Given particularly the changing realities of global climate change, are these communities safe communities to live in?
Mayor Clint Folsom: Well, I think you've got many, many communities that are next to open spaces. I don't think this was really a factor of living in too close proximity to danger. In our neighboring city of Louisville, there are homes in the middle of suburban subdivisions that are burned to the ground. There's homes that are next to a golf course that are burned to a ground across a highway. This was a firestorm that originated in open space that causes still being investigated but it was a fire introduced and it literally became a storm. I don't really think this was a factor of homes being in too close proximity to an area that's prone to burn.
Any of our mountain communities in Colorado or throughout the world are perhaps more susceptible. I don't think this was necessarily the case.
Melissa Harris-Perry: In many ways, Mayor, that answer makes perhaps post-fire policy-making even harder, right? If it was just so you could say, "Oh, we can't live in these three districts as painful as that might be, it's a choice that could be made," but when you make this very clear point about how vulnerable really everyone is, so many communities are, how are you looking at the next moments and thinking about mitigation in a broader sense?
Mayor Clint Folsom: I'm already getting calls from people wanting to rebuild and wanting the town to move swiftly with cleanup and approvals of rebuilding. What I saw firsthand was there were homes that survived this and they were in the absolute line of fire. These were some newer homes and some older homes, so it was kind of random how it took out certain homes, but I think there are some building techniques, some building materials that can be employed to help homes survive better. There will be a future grass fire in these open spaces, and the question is, can we make decisions now that will construct better homes so that they are a little bit more fire-resistant?
I don't think anything other than a concrete bunker is fireproof, but there are definitely things that can be done on homes to make them more fire-resistant. I don't want to drag our feet and not let people rebuild their homes, but I want to be smart about this because that Sagamore subdivision you mentioned is 170 plus homes. Every single one of them burned to the ground, you can have a do over on that subdivision and several other parts of town, but we want to do it right, but we also want to make sure people can get back to their lives.
Melissa Harris-Perry: This could be framed as just an issue for you, for your community, maybe for that Sagamore subdivision, but I want to suggest part of the reason we put it in context with all these other things happening is that this could be any of us in any of our homes, depending on the kind of disaster, what kind of state and federal aid are you going to need?
Mayor Clint Folsom: We're going to need extensive aid, initially housing for people that have been displaced. We have a real housing crunch in Colorado now and in many parts of the country, and so it's going to be a challenge to get people housing. Then, we're going to need help with the rebuilding effort in people that maybe have been uninsured or underinsured, and so it's going to take a great effort and just appreciate you taking the time to reach out to me, and cover this important story. I know we've got a lot of Colorado connections in your area and around the world, so I appreciate the time to cover us.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Absolutely, Colorado is in the heart of The Takeaway and of the nation right now. Mayor Clint Folsom is the mayor of Superior, Colorado. Thanks so much for joining us.
Mayor Clint Folsom: Thank you.
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