"It's home, it's not there, but it's home and it felt good to be back there," says Tom Neuer. He and his wife Ana were among the first to be burned out by devastating Four Mile Canyon Wildfire.

Shortly after fleeing the flames to the safety of a State Patrol roadblock, the couple was interviewed by CBS4. Their picture and story appeared on the front page of a Denver newspaper later in the week.

First firefighter on scene talks about losing own home

When Rod Maraga first spotted the fire, he had no idea it would get as bad as it did causing many to lose everything, including him.
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"It was erratic and so it spotted left, right, and behind us and all of those embers then began to burn," said Maraga, firefighter with the Fourmile Fire Department who was first to arrive at the initial fire call.

The first moments when the fire broke out Monday posed increasing dangers to Maraga and other firefighters trying to keep the flames from spreading.

Gold Hill Fire Chief Chris Finn says he had to call an evacuation of his own crew several times.

"Started out in he subdivision, we were being overrun," said Finn. "We went up west of town to the ranch and all of a sudden we had fire coming from two directions."

Fire victim offering help to others

When the fire swept through Four Mile Canyon, Stephen Schein's home was in its path.
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Schein was at work at the time. He is co-owner of Half Fast Subs on University Hill in Boulder. Because of the mandatory evacuation orders, he wasn't able to get up to his home.

"I think what was worse for a whole lot of families was literally not knowing," says Schein of not being able to find out if his home was destroyed. "I had a pretty good sense that there wasn't going to be anything left, but there was always hope."

First responder to Fourmile Fire: 'It wasn't a big deal'
Firefighter recalls the moment he knew the blaze was 'bigger than we thought'
By Vanessa Miller Camera Staff Writer
Posted: 09/11/2010 09:55:37 PM MDT

Firefighter Rod Moraga was at his home in Fourmile Canyon on Monday morning when he got a page about a wildfire.

When he arrived on the scene, he said, he was the first one there.

"It wasn't a big deal," he said. It was a small fire outside one house, and someone was trying to put it out with a garden hose.

"We had a moment where we thought we would contain it to that property," he said.

But while his crew was focusing on dousing the small blaze, embers flew and started a fire nearby. That blaze started "running," Moraga said, and for a moment, everything became "dead calm."

"That's when I said, oh ... ," said Moraga, a fire behavior analyst who knew that everything was about to get a lot more dangerous. "I thought, 'That's not good.'"