Fire hazardColorado tries to increase safety of urban development in wildfire-prone areas

Colorado continues to deal with the challenge of building new urban developments while reducing wildfire risks. There are currently 556,000 houses built in burn zones around the state, and the demand for water to sustain residents and industries continue to rise. A Colorado State University study predicts that development will occupy 2.1 million acres in wildfire-prone forests by 2030, an increase from one million acres today — just as wildfires continue to burn roughly 900,000 acres a year since 2000, compared with just 200,000 acres a year in the 1990s.

Governor John Hickenlooper recently signed three bills into law to improve the state’s ability to respond to fires and limit the dangers to residents and watersheds.

The Denver Post reports that one of the bills allocates $20 million toward two firefighting airplanes and four helicopters. The planes will be positioned near high risk areas in order to identify wildfires as they first break, while the helicopters will drop water on the flames before the fire spreads.

“Getting to these fires early makes all the difference in the world,” Hickenlooper said.

The other bills give a state board power to loan funds for community forest-thinning projects and clarify permitting for prescribed fires, which are used to restore balance in rough, fire-prone forests. “We’re spending a lot of money. We are going to get results,” Hickenlooper said.

State officials have been working with the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and military officials to refine protocols for deploying federal tankers within hours of detecting a harmful wildfire. The tankers can drop water and fire-retardant slurry on and around wildfires. Hickenlooper believes that if the state had the equipment and measures addressed in his three bills at the time of the Waldo Canyon, Black Forest, and High Park wildfires which destroyed hundreds of homes, “those three would not have been big fires,” he said.

Colorado officials are also trying to build more effective protocols that limit where and how new developments are built. In 2013, a task force proposed setting state standards for using non-flammable building materials and assigning wildfire risk ratings to homes, but state lawmakers faced pushback from developers. “Local governments are taking a more active role. You don’t see them considering new developments anymore without considering the wildland-urban interface issue,” said Paul Cooke, director of Colorado’s Division of Fire Prevention and Control. “The big things are that we need to make sure we continue to build with buffer zones around communities, with at least two ways in and out of an area, and a water supply.”

State Senator Gail Schwartz (D-Snowmass Village) agrees that state legislators have been slow to address long term solutions to managing development around wildfire-prone areas. “Until we get some kind of managed development in the wildland-urban interface, we’re only going to continue to put firefighters at risk” defending homes, she said. Lawmakers “didn’t do anything” on key challenges this year, Schwartz added. “How many years have we been talking about it? The water for the entire Front Range is dependent on forest management in those watersheds.”

State Senator Morgan Carroll (D-Aurora) agrees with Schwartz, noting that the governor’s push for early detection “is an important piece. I don’t think it is the total piece.”