Support still pours in for wildfire victims across Colorado; "It's incredible to see the generosity"

Nearly two months later, support is still pouring in for victims of the wildfires that ripped through southern Colorado earlier this summer.

Whether it's helping collect donations and taking them to impacted communities or helping to coordinate agencies responding to the fires, Coloradans continue to step up to help their neighbors.

The burn scars and damage from the Aspen Acres fire, which burned more than 100,000 acres in June and July and forced mandatory evacuations, remain clearly visible. Beulah residents still have to push forward despite losing their homes.

"You see the people who are displaced from their homes still waiting to receive the food. They still had to report for work, even though they have no place to live," said Tony Brenning, an Air Force veteran otherwise known as Big T.

Big T, along with the help of other veterans and volunteers, has delivered six trucks of donations to impacted communities. Those deliveries include gift cards and gas cards, clothes, food for animals, personal hygiene items and anything fire victims needed.

"Every time I would leave, I'd drop off food, and I'd come back, and there'd be another load of food for me to take down. It's just been incredible to see the generosity from the people from Colorado," said Big T.

On Wednesday during a 'lunch and learn', Serena Alvarado with Arapahoe County Public Health shared her experience helping during the Gold Mountain fire in Ouray as a liaison officer trainee.

"We help to coordinate and make a connection between the fire incident management team and the agency administrators and the cooperators," said Alvarado.

The Gold Mountain fire burned 39,000 acres in late June and early July. Alvarado worked on the fire for 14 days, 16 hours each day. She facilitated meetings and helped responding agencies make sure they had everything they needed.

She added that there's a large response to wildfires, and her role was the middle person to support coordination and share information between agencies.

"We would share what objectives were our priority, what challenges we were facing, what timeline we were looking at, and then what we were expecting out of the next operational period," said Alvarado. "We would facilitate those meetings so that our incident management team could share those updates as the subject matter experts for operations and for communication, for fire behavior, for weather."

During the 'lunch and learn,' she felt it was important to bring back lessons learned and share her stories and experiences from being out in the field. It was her first time responding to an emergency like wildfire. Her usual job with the county's public health department is an emergency preparedness and response specialist, where she responds to incidents that impact public health.

What remains the same, she says, is that connections matter.

"Being connected is a part of preparedness. It's a part of being successful in response. If we're not connected with our community or our community partners, that would be a huge gap in our ability to successfully respond to anything that public health is responsible to respond to," said Alvarado.

Both Alvarado's and Big T's efforts are a show of Coloradans helping Coloradans.

"It really was super special to be able to support our community, our neighbors from across the state. We all have unique skill sets that can be useful, and I really got the opportunity to use some skills and just lend a helping hand," said Alvarado.

"I can guarantee that if another disaster was to break out in Colorado, the same group of people will step up to assist, and I'm just proud to be, to know these people and work with them," said Big T. "The generosity from Colorado is second to none."