By Bill Scanlon
The Rocky Mountain News

ORDWAY, Colo. — Roaring at 30 mph, turning on a dime, leaving deadly embers in their wake, wind-blown prairie fires fuel the nightmares of firefighters.

"In the right weather conditions, prairie fires can move almost as fast as a person can drive," said Ed Wright, board member of the National Wildfire Suppression Association. "They require a whole different set of tactics than forest fires."

Two such fires in Colorado this week left dozens homeless, burned 18,900 acres and were indirectly responsible for three deaths.

Wright, who teaches fire-suppression techniques at colleges in Washington and Idaho, tells his students to never challenge a prairie fire from the front. It can move so fast, changing directions with a sudden shift in wind, that it can turn deadly in seconds.

Instead, "work from the black," he says, referring to putting firefighters and equipment on the charred portion of grass, which can act as a natural firebreak.

That's important advice, said Chad Ray, regional field manager for the Colorado Division of Emergency Management, who worked the Ordway fire. But if a prairie fire keeps being blown in the same direction, he said, eventually a fire line must be established.

"This fire was running up to 30 mph on the ground — you can't catch it," he said.

At the Ordway fire, firefighters looked for canals, rivers and ravines that could act as natural barriers, then bolstered those with fire lines dug by bulldozers. Then firefighters dropped tons of water on the denuded area.

Unlike the carefully planned meetings on a forest fire, decisions are made on the fly on prairie fires — where to make a stand, which structures to give up on, which to try to save by steering the blaze around them.

"You just don't have that luxury of time" with a prairie fire, Ray said.

Firefighters unfamiliar with prairie fires can "lose their perspective of how fabulously dangerous the situation really is, how quickly the fire can turn if the wind shifts, how a bank of the fire can become the head of the fire," Wright said.

Forest fires can be just as deadly, but at least firefighters can generally plan their moves, Wright said.

"You have the ability to decide what you're going to do tomorrow" on a forest fire, he said. "You can decide how you're going to stop the fire from coming down the canyon, and you can make a prediction that it will be coming down the canyon tomorrow afternoon."

Copyright 2008 Denver Publishing Company