{"id":16920,"date":"2025-08-15T12:12:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T18:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/crews-gain-containment-on-lee-fire-as-colorado-governor-issues-disaster-declaration\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T19:38:36","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:38:36","slug":"crews-gain-containment-on-lee-fire-as-colorado-governor-issues-disaster-declaration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/crews-gain-containment-on-lee-fire-as-colorado-governor-issues-disaster-declaration\/","title":{"rendered":"Crews gain containment on Lee fire as Colorado governor issues disaster declaration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fire
Fire crews work to contain the Lee fire at night on Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025, in northwestern Colorado. (Courtesy Inciweb)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

GRAND JUNCTION \u2013 Good news arrived to the Western Slope. While the Lee Fire continues to grow in acreage, containment has gone up and the fire lines have held.<\/p>\n

A new executive order issued Thursday by Gov. Jared Polis also expanded current disaster declarations to the entire state, which has lost 185,000 acres to wildfire so far this year, much of it in Western Colorado.<\/p>\n

The Lee fire, burning in Rio Blanco County, reached 133,841 acres Friday morning while containment increased to 12%, up 9 percentage points from Thursday. Importantly, the acreage growth remained inside existing borders. So far, the Lee fire and Elk fire, which is burning east of Meeker, have destroyed five houses and 14 other structures, with the Rio Blanco Sheriff\u2019s Office beginning an expanded damage assessment Friday.<\/p>\n

After a week that saw weather conditions impede firefighting efforts, fire danger on Friday dropped from critical to high, with a 60% chance of precipitation. The weekend is expected to bring more relief, with moderate conditions expected through Monday.<\/p>\n

At a community meeting Thursday night in Rifle, officials said that despite fire activity on the fire\u2019s south side, the perimeter is holding.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo nights ago. I believe when we were having this meeting in here, there was quite a bit of uncertainty with us. \u2026 Right now, we feel really good,\u201d Rocky Mountain Incident Command Team Incident Commander Casey Cheesbrough said.<\/p>\n

Lisa Dawson, a Bureau of Land Management field manager, noted that the size of the crowd at the briefing had also decreased, calling it another good sign.<\/p>\n

The Lee fire ranks as the fifth-largest wildfire in state history behind the Cameron Peak (208,913 acres), East Troublesome (193,812) and Pine Gulch (139,007) fires all in 2020 and the Hayman fire (137,760) in 2002.<\/p>\n

The Elk Fire, also in Rio Blanco County near Meeker, sits at 14,518 acres and firefighters have reached 93% containment.<\/p>\n

Resources increased for all fires<\/div>\n

Polis\u2019 executive order comes as 11 significant wildfires are burning across the state, with 2,395 personnel from across the country and 41 aircraft deployed.<\/p>\n

A significant amount of those resources are on the Lee and Elk fires, along with Turner Creek fire in Mesa County, Crosho fire in Routt and Rio Blanco counties, and Oak fire in Archuleta County, because of disaster declarations from the governor authorizing the use of state resources<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colorado roughly 185,000 acres have burned this summer, compared with 80,000 during same period in 2024 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-16920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16920"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20465,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16920\/revisions\/20465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16920"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=16920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}