5 videos show devastating 'super fire' sweeping Colo.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and thousands evacuated as the Waldo Canyon Fire continues to rage through Colorado Springs. More than 900 firefighters are working to contain the 15,324-acre blaze. They include city, county state and federal-level crews.

Peter Fulé, professor in the school of forestry at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, told the Los Angeles Times it's deemed as a "super fire" or "crown fire."

He said such fires spread — often at great speed — through treetops.

In this type of fire, "the fire is burning through the entire tree. The tree is 80 or 90 feet tall, and flames are even higher than that. Firefighters can't even get close to them," he said. "It's a very severe type of fire, an intense type of burning."

These videos, as highlighted in a TIME article, chart the incredible progress of this unchecked fire.


A Colorado Springs resident focuses on the flames peeking out from over the foothills, with the smoke enveloping the entire sky.

This time-lapse video, captured by Nicholas B. Lee of Colorado Springs, shows the immense growth of the fire over a 12-hour span.



This video was filmed 10 miles outside of Colorado Springs; Michelle Jones, who made it, noted "the smoke is becoming thick in the city and we have ash falling outside. As these wings pick up, it makes the air dense with the smell of smoke."



A vast cloud of billowing smoke took to the sky on Tuesday between 4 and 6 pm, when the fire jumped the forest line and began to swallow homes and other structures in nearby neighborhoods.
 

And this last video, an AP aerial tour of one neighborhood, shows hundreds of heavily damaged or destroyed homes as well as charred forests.

While the damage from the Waldo Canyon blaze and other fires across the state will be devastating, the good news is that evacuations have gone smoothly, and no injuries or deaths have been reported.