Sharpe Fire Update: Officials Clarify 81% Containment and Praise Exhausted Firefighters

Description: Officials explain why Sharpe Fire containment jumped from 0% to 81%, highlighting the heroic work of local Colorado fire crews who stopped fire spread and protected homes before state and federal teams arrived. Read the Full Update from Baca County Emerengecy Management...

Sharpe Fire Containment Explained: Why the Percentage Jumped Overnight

Sharpe Fire Update: 5/20/2026

Now that at least a few of us had a full night of sleep, we’re able to start answering a few questions we couldn’t get to in the chaos.

We’ve had several questions about containment percentages and wanted to provide some clarity based on our understanding.

Our local crews and mutual aid did an INCREDIBLE job stopping fire progression and keeping the acreage contained (as you can see by the fire map below—the unburned spaces between the “fingers” of fire represent our crews stopping fire progress around structures). 

Our local teams gave literally everything they had, to the point of complete exhaustion, for days in a row. During the most active parts of the fire, crews, especially in areas far from major resources such as ours, often can’t obtain official containment percentages as they are dedicated to life and property protection. 

Once the state and federal taskforce arrives, they bring with them the capability to measure exact and official containment. However, reportable containment has a very specific set of exact specifications that must be measured, and this takes some time. It requires crews to get eyes up close on virtually every square inch of the fire perimeter, making sure there are no hotspots visible to the naked eye or thermal imaging within a certain distance of the fire line. This distance changes based on fuel and weather conditions, etc. For example, if winds are 60mph for multiple days in the forecast, the distance will be much larger than if winds were 5mph.

While all this is understandably a little confusing, this is why you might have seen reports after command transfer on the 18th that fire containment was at 0% (limited measurement) jumping to 81% (measurement basically complete) in one day. 

The large jump simply represents the time it took the task force to continue mop up and measure these conditions that likely largely already existed in practicality due to the amazing hard work of our crews.

Our collaborators at the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control and U.S. Forest Service - PSICC National Forest have shared with us multiple times how impressive the work of our crews was, and we were so relieved to hand off the remaining work of making this fire “cold out” — putting out every burned railroad tie, fence post, tree, and soap weed. This process will likely take several days.

We couldn’t be prouder of our teams.

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