Chapter One The city of Grand Junction, located at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers, is the crossroads of western Colorado for trade, agriculture and government. The fertile river valley is ringed by flat-topped mesas, lonely, bleak and arid in the best of times. In the summer of 1994 the city's 38,000 residents and all of western Colorado, from the mountain resorts to the peach orchards around Grand Junction, faced a severe drought. There had been little snowfall over the winter, and unusually hot, dry weather had followed in May and June. Only once every thirty or forty years did such events occur in combination -- drier conditions in 1990 had not lasted as long.In anticipation of an outbreak of forest fires Christopher J. Cuoco, a National Weather Service forecaster from Denver, had been stationed in Grand Junction at the Western Slope Coordination Center, a federal fire office located at the city's Walker Field airport. At 3:00 P.

M. on Friday, July 1, 1994, Cuoco issued a Red Flag Watch to firefighters in western Colorado. Expect high winds, lightning and no rain, Cuoco told them, and added, "A high potential for large fire growth."By six-thirty the next morning, Saturday, July 2, Cuoco had upgraded the watch to a Red Flag Warming, meaning that the chance of a major storm had become, for him, a certainty. In his new forecast, Cuoco told firefighters, "Stronger winds will come later this afternoon. Widely scattered thunderstorms with little or no rain. Wind gusts to forty miles an hour possible."Cuoco's prediction joined a stream of drought-related warnings issued by the array of government agencies charged with forestfire suppression, from the U.

S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to state, county and volunteer fire offices. The cautions ran a broad gamut: One federal safety officer reminded fire crews to drink plenty of water "and not so much sugar drinks"; another warned that a wind of only ten miles an hour could play havoc with fire in the thickets of scrub oak, pinyon pine and juniper in the high desert country around Grand Junction.All these levels of government -- federal, state and county -- had anticipated trouble early in the spring when several fires deliberately set to clear brush had burned out of control. After a series of meetings, the Bureau of Land Management, responsible for more acreage than any other agency, announced an aggressive policy of attacking all fires as soon as they were spotted. By the end of June, with precipitation at half normal levels and temperatures rising over the hundred-degree mark even in the mountains, virtually every forestry worker in Colorado knew that an electrical storm like the one Cuoco forecast could literally spark disaster.The first bolt of lightning struck on July 2 in late morning, about 11:40. Before the day ended, more than fifty-six hundred strikes would follow, making this one of the worst lightning storms in the history of the state.

Whatever rain it carried evaporated long before reaching ground. The storm arrived at Grand junction at midafternoon, rattling metal roofs, sending trash bins end over end and scooping bone-dry dirt and sand into an old fashioned, Depression-era dust storm.At Walker Field airport, the wind sent stacks of tumbleweed hurtling along runways. The sky turned an eerie gray-brown. Cuoco rushed outside and began snapping photographs.The thunderstorm swept through the Grand Valley of the Colorado River, fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. It continued east to the Book Cliffs, a line of mesas named for their resemblance to a shelf of books, and poured through a gap cut by the Colorado River, one of the nation's longest waterways and one of the most heavily used -- for everything from electrical-power generation to float trips. It followed upriver a dozen miles on a twisting course through Debeque Canyon, barely wide enough to hold the ri.