Co-Existing with Wildfire

This is Colorado but this is also Colorado.

Tonight, surging winds stoking the flames of Colorado's historic wildfires.

And it has scorched more than 24,000 acres and also remain mostly uncontained.

Firefighters battling what has become the largest wildfire in Colorado history.

The three largest wildfires in Colorado history have all occurred since 2020, as did the most destructive fire, destroying more than a thousand structures.

And Colorado certainly isn't the only state ravaged by wildfires.

Tonight, amid record breaking heat and explosive wildfire bringing devastation to northern California.

Nearly a dozen large fires that have burned over 340 square miles in six states recently.

This is a risk very familiar to people who choose to live life in the beautiful Rockies.

But this isn't something people in the suburbs really think about.

Until 2022.

The Marshall and Middle Fork fires tore through suburban communities in Louisville and Superior, destroying and partially destroying hundreds of homes.

Is this just what we have to accept as the future of Colorado?

We're one lightning strike, one more drought season away from Colorado's next mega fire.

Can anything be done to preserve the future of Colorado's landscapes?

What is the government doing to help?

How much is the homeowner's responsibility?

How do we all play our role in coexisting with wildfire?

Colorado has a long, complicated relationship with wildfire.

But there's no doubt the connection has recently gotten much more intense.

The Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, or CDFPC The state's fire agency has seen this relationship evolve firsthand If you think of the 20 largest fires in Colorado's history that Colorado's ever experienced those have all happened since 2001, ok.

If you go from 2001 until now those same 20 largest fires, 9 of those fires, 45 percent have occurred in the last 3 years.

When I started in wildland fire, you know being a wildland firefighter was a great summer job while you were in college, and fires in Colorado kind of happened from Memorial Day to Labor Day up at the mountains As we're seeing now, it's become we refer to it as the fire year.

We know that wildfires are getting worse, but how did we get here?

A lot of places in Summit county, the forests there, they're not in really great health have been had the mountain pine beetle come through.

So that's killed.

And in Grand County, up to 90% of the forest in Summit County, 40 to 60% of the forest, the trees are standing dead.

And then the remaining forest that we do have, they're not really very healthy right now.

The population of Colorado has increased significantly, and the number of values at risk you know the infrastructure, communities, all of those things that support those people.

So we have more values at risk we have a higher likelihood of ignition sources for up from all of those humans.

You know you can call it global warming, climate change just the natural cycle whatever it is the data shows that fire seasons are becoming longer we're having more fires that are burning larger acres and they're impacting more values at risk.

These changes have caught the attention of Colorado State University researchers like this team of graduate students working with Dr. Camille Stevens-Rumann.

They are examining fire aftermath near Cameron Pass, west of Fort Collins, trying to understand fire and forest relationships.

Our forests are are definitely struggling with a couple of different factors.

Right?

We have suppressed fires really effectively for the past 100 years, 100 years plus.

And so a lot of our drier, low elevation forest types that would have burned every 2 to 20 years on average haven't seen a fire in some cases in about 140 years.

And so that's allowed this really large fuel accumulation.

With all these recent large wildfires, it seems surprising, but it is true that firefighters are really effective at putting out most fires.

On average we'll see about 5000 or more fires a year that burn about 220,000 acres per year that that's an average year, when we look at those numbers and statistics and you say you know we had 5300 fires in 2020 our aggressive attack if you will to support fires before they get big worked 5284 times-ish right.

It's the ones that get established in the in the beetle kill and those extreme drought conditions those are the ones that are going to get away.

We're never going to be able to catch all of them Cameron Peak and Calwood seem to be far and away the biggest concern.

You know, the fires that make the news are the only 2%.

We effectively put out 98% of all fires that start.

Meaning that they are burning under less extreme conditions and can be controlled.

Because when we have those extreme wind events, when it's really hot and dry, there's not much a firefighter can do to put that out in that moment.

But as Dr. Stevens-Rumann said earlier, fire is a natural and a essential part of the landscape.

Lodgepole pines, for example, depend on it.

If you look here, you can see these the cones that were on this tree.

This was a live tree as the fire came through.

It opened the cones.

And we do the same thing when when foresters recommend clear cut and the trees are cut, the cones fall off the trees, and they're scattered about the forest floor.

The heat from the sun does the same thing.

It'll open the cone slowly, release the seed resulting in a new forest.

On the good note, there's a lot of species that use these freshly burned landscapes.

You know, it increases the amount of foraging habitat for large mammals.

We definitely have been in a deficit of these early kind of several stages.

And so in some ways it's great to have that new re-initiation of a forest Problem is, as we saw last year in 2020 in Colorado, with fires that were burning for 90-100 days and unprecedented fire growth impacting our communities particularly from the state side of things, where we have those where we have those values at risk, having fire on the landscape for longer durations for management objectives is just not possible given the values at risk in those communities.

So we certainly support that at, you know, kind of a right time, right place right conditions kind of a situation in certain areas of Colorado.

But it really takes a lot of thought of when and how and where we we use that tool.

Value's at risk or anything that is a priority to protect the number one value being lives followed by homes and other structures, water sources and more.

If any of these values at risk are in danger, when a fire starts, just letting it burn becomes too risky and it's time to fight.

I saw firefighters, I talked to them where they had fought and saved a person's house as they looked down valley and saw their own house burn up.

You can't criticize our first responders, so they're the best.

Unfortunately, if the fire burns too fast and firefighters are not able to contain it, there are devastating results, changing lives in moments.

The Erber family cabin near Grand Lake was lost in the East Troublesome fire.

Three generations of Erber women all have emotional memories of the day they were allowed back after the fire.

I was the first one to see and I kind of just was just muttering to myself like, it's gone.

It's gone.

And just seeing the history and the cabin not there anymore.

It was a difficult.

It was difficult.

It's a it's a stab at a punch in the gut every single time.

And it will be for the rest of my life.

Down the road from the Erbers, the mountain home of the Reed family was miraculously saved, thanks to both the mitigation work they did around their property in the years prior and a customized sprinkler system that doused the home as the fire approached.

I think everyone should be very much aware that if you if you live in the forest, you're pretty much at risk if the right conditions come along, which is what happened here.

Forest fires, even these large mega-fires are not a complete surprise to Colorado fire officials.

But what happened on December 30th of 2021 shocked many Colorado residents, particularly urban homeowners.

I received a call from my son telling me not to go home and saying that the house had burned down and it all happened probably in a matter of 45 minutes.

That Marshall Fire in Boulder.

Those were 100 mile an hour winds on a tinder dry landscape.

Every single firefighter was risking their life to save the houses of their neighbors, I think we're to make a good stop at this house.

That house would have caught.

Yeah, Totally saved that house.

The fire on the outskirts of Boulder was the most destructive in the state's history.

More than a thousand structures were destroyed.

Patricia Familetto works at Vetka Flowers in nearby Superior.

You know, you think about going to work and then never, ever going home again, which is the way my husband put it.

It's just hard to believe that everything in your home is gone.

The fire made headlines across the country because it demonstrated how even an urban area is not immune to a wildfire tragedy.

A lot of people who aren't in the area can't understand the magnitude of it.

When they say, oh yeah, some houses burn down.

But it's not just a few houses that burned down.

It's the entire neighborhood that burned down many neighborhoods.

The response to the Marshall Fire was swift and significant.

FEMA, the Small Business Administration, state, and Boulder County officials mobilized a disaster assistance center.

Two reasons why we have this one stop shop approach.

One is that the fire survivor can go to one place to get all the services they need so they don't have to drive around and try to figure out where the different options are.

The second one is so all the different providers can coordinate better.

In less than a week, we've distributed over resources to over 70% of the people that were impacted by this.

These are your tax dollars at work.

That's one of the things that we really try to stress for folks.

This is not charity.

You have already paid for this.

And from the very beginning went to the disaster center.

The community was incredible in putting together a lot of sites where you could go and get the things that you needed.

And it's not just financial resources.

A tragedy of this magnitude requires special assistance, including mental health support.

This is such a significant event that anybody would need help maneuvering through feelings related to it.

How do I talk to my children?

How do I talk to my teens?

How do I get through each day?

How do I get through the next hour?

And how do I deal with these things that are coming at me so fast?

We've seen devastation when the small percentage of fires that firefighters can't put out immediately get out of hand when the ashes settle.

The first question on many minds is what started this.

About 15% of the fires that start in the state of Colorado are caused by lightning.

About 85% are caused by some human action or inaction.

You know, powerlines catalytic converters, unattended campfires, fireworks, throwing cigarettes out the window.

You know most things that we see fires starting from are from human action or inaction In 2020, the massive Pine Gulch fire in western Colorado was started by a lightning strike.

But it's still unclear what started the east troublesome Cameron Peake and Marshall Fires.

But it wasn't lightning.

The Marshall Fire was an outlier.

Based on what we know from history, that we never had fires of large scale in duration in the winter.

It is making us all rethink how do we fight fires and how do we be more prepared?

How can we be resilient before we have fires?

The technology that we used to detect fires within DFPC one is what we call our Multi-mission aircraft, and they have military grade sensors that we will send out either at the request of a local agency or on kind of statewide missions when we have high fire potential and we know there was lightning in the area and they can detect fires from the air, get a size up on those.

and then send the information to the jurisdictional agencies so they can take appropriate response.

And in Colorado, a lot of times it's a local fire department on non-federal lands that has that response.

And then probably well over 95% of the time, those local agencies, which are really the backbone of fire suppression in Colorado, they contain control the fire within the first day or a few hours, go back to their job.

And in general, the public doesn't know the difference there.

But as we know, we're not going to always be able to put out every fire.

So in Colorado, it then escalates.

They start asking for assistance from their neighboring fire departments and federal agencies.

If the fire continues to exceed the local fire department's capacity, it becomes the county sheriff's responsibility and then if it exceeds the county sheriff's capability that comes to us at DFPC at the state And we take, we assume, responsibility for management of the fire and the finances along with those local agencies, who stay engaged for the whole duration.

A big goal is to prevent most fires from becoming the state's responsibility.

Not only does that mean that the fire has become more dangerous, but also way more expensive to put out.

Every five years or so, we spend about $60 billion fighting fires, but it costs us $50,000 an acre to do it.

You can do the mitigation for 1500 bucks an acre and create a whole bunch of jobs in rural America.

I have been an advocate and then pushing legislation in Washington to spend up to $60 billion to do forest restoration, fire mitigation, watershed protection which is so vitally important.

Part of the difficulty, I will tell you in Washington is convincing many of my colleagues who come from the Eastern Seaboard that this is a priority area of investment for our federal government.

And I try to explain to them the real scale and scope of the problem, the gravity of the crisis we face in terms of Western wildfires in Colorado, in Oregon, in California, in Idaho, and across the western United States.

And I think we are making more progress in that regard, in part, unfortunately, due to the very visceral impacts of these wildfires that folks are experiencing.

We have a map that really helps us determine where those critical landscapes are.

That with a focus of protecting life, property and critical infrastructure.

So we're working on these these landscapes now in Colorado through that lens.

We also have a brand new program situated right here in the Department of Natural Resources called COSWAP And what that is, it's a it's a brand new program that brought $17.5 million to the table that we can look at those landscapes that are defined in this map and get to work immediately on those.

So there's no matching requirements required if you have a community that frankly doesn't have money to bring to the table.

It's all right.

The Colorado Department of Natural Resources is responsible for a variety of programs that are impacted by wildfire and fires certainly impact on natural resources.

Executive Director Dan Gibbs has seen this firsthand as a wildland firefighter himself.

A lot of people don't realize we've had a really robust Department of Correction crew called the SWIFT crews in place for years, I've worked side by side with folks on these projects.

Good teamwork, guys.

When looking at state mitigation projects, the Colorado State Forest Service is yet another key player with many boots on the ground working alongside federal partners, including the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

One of their larger mitigation projects is taking place near Grand Lake and Granby for the devastating East Troublesome fire burned in 2020.

We have a lot of trees on the ground that's a result of mountain pine beetle.

In the late nineties, it killed about 90% of the forest.

As you can see, 20 years later now, the forest is actually blowing over and it's on the ground.

That represents a concerning fuels condition that we as foresters are trying to address in our projects right now.

In drought years, this fuel, while rather large and bone dry and it can burn very readily.

In the East Troublesome fire this was one of the primary fuels that burned in the East, Troublesome and resulted in its growth.

What we have going on here is we're creating a fuel break in between some forest land and many of the communities in the Fraser Valley located just below us.

And the whole purpose of this project is to, in the event of a wildfire, slow down the speed and intensity of a fire so that firefighters can safely engage and stop the fire before it starts to impact the communities.

What's special about this particular project is it actually isn't costing the state money.

It's Colorado is a very it's a very unique place in that we actually have a forest products industry and we're able to market those forest products to that industry for not a lot of profit, but a little bit of revenue generation.

So instead of paying thousands upon thousands of dollars to do per acre to do treatments, we're actually saving the taxpayer a little bit of money.

Much of this wood came from beetle killed areas or areas affected by fire or both.

And it's been sawed into wood products.

Some two by fours over here, there's some two by sixes over here.

When we have these hundreds of acres projects, we really need a place like CTR.

We need mills and industry so that we can we can have that material go somewhere.

It's certainly my hope that as part of our comprehensive solution to the fuels problem, that that is at the basis of our wildfire problem is that we can do the things that keep these businesses alive.

South of this mill close to Colorado ski resorts along the I-70 corridor.

Some smaller mitigation projects have already proven to be successful.

So a couple of years ago, there were some some fires in Summit County that actually the fuels reduction treatments were effective in in allowing the application of fire retardant, allowing firefighters to come in and safely and effectively put those fires out before we had any structure loss, which is which is great.

That's what they're supposed to do.

You know, our treatments aren't going to prevent fire, but they're going to create conditions where the firefighters can effectively fight the fire.

And this is a key point for nearly everyone involved in wildfire management constantly emphasizes mitigation does not prevent wildfires.

Really, the whole intent of mitigation is to provide a safe working space and a safe environment for firefighters to get in to to put the fire out.

It's never going to stop fires from from starting.

And historically, we've talked about mitigation being vegetation management and suppression.

And that's how we address things.

And then it often ends up being a competition of that.

Again, that perception that if we spend more money on mitigation, then we won't have to pay for suppression and that won't be the case.

We're going to have to fund both in order to be successful in this.

Having been a firefighter for many years, I can tell you we could do something here.

We can we can get a fire line and we can put people safely into an opening like this.

Typically, we look at maybe a 40 to 50 foot flame length coming out of the tops of these trees, which are 60 feet tall.

Well, we can't fight that with boots on the ground directly.

We can do things like build indirect fire line stuff.

We can only use air on that.

But guess what?

When it hits this opening, it doesn't have those trees anymore.

So now it's not flame lengths of 60, 70 feet up in the air and very intimidating.

It's going to come down on the ground and we're giving firefighters a fighting chance to make it to make a stand in the landscape, to protect our communities, to support these boots on the ground.

The state now has a fire hawk helicopter, which is a military grade Black Hawk, equipped to help put out fires, as well as a few other tools in their firefighting arsenal.

We have a Type 1 helicopter under our exclusive use.

We have two Type 2 helicopters.

Under our exclusive use, we have two single engine air tankers and we have one large air tanker.

In addition to that, we have the two Multi-mission aircraft, which are in the early detection and intelligence aircraft.

So that's our aviation fleet.

With all these organizations working together.

A homeowner may feel powerless in comparison, especially up against these mega-fires.

The first thing that all of us can do as homeowners is to make sure that we've got a defensive perimeter around our house.

A defensible space is an area surrounding your home that has been modified to reduce fire hazard.

The key is to create space between fuel sources such as trees, shrubs or even propane tanks, wood piles and your home itself.

When there's a fire in your area, that is not the time to start taking on a mitigation project.

Your focus then needs to be, you know, your family, your friends, you know, your lives, getting out and getting out of the way you know, of the fire response personnel so they can make an effective response and not have to manage the people.

Where if I'm out on a fire like couple of years ago, when I was on the the Cameron Peak fire, it felt like a jungle.

We're trying to save homes where the homeowner actually did nothing to to try to take away dead trees around their house.

So we do the best we can with limited amount of times.

There are times that we have to pick and choose what houses we think we can save.

It's challenging work for sure.

Start at your home and work your way out.

Reduce the likelihood your home will ignite during a wildfire, then create a defensible space around it, Hardening your home and doing all of this mitigation work around your home does not guarantee that it will survive a wildfire, but it definitely improves your home's chances.

Even if firefighters are unable to make it to the property, this house behind us survived because we worked with this landowner.

He did a lot of defensible space over the years.

He understood he lived in a fire environment and the work that he did before the fire and while the fire was approaching his house saved this this beautiful home behind us.

If you live in or even near to any grasslands, shrublands foothills or mountains, you are in the wildland urban interface.

We're seeing a growing population in Colorado, about one in two Coloradans live within the wildland urban interface.

We're seeing more and more fires.

And, you know, if you live within the wildland urban interface, I think it's safe to say that you're probably going to experience some type of fire behavior.

I live up in Summit County in Breckenridge.

You know, we average about 30 wildfires a season, and those numbers just kind of continue to rise as well.

The State Forest Service and your local authorities want to help residents.

And there are many resources created by these organizations.

But residents aren't the only ones who need to think about wildfires.

Most of these fires are created by human actions.

So anyone recreating in wild spaces needs to do their part to prevent a devastating fire from starting.

However, no matter what all of us do, the reality is that some wildfires will occur.

It's not.

It's not if it's when these forests are designed to burn that ecologically.

You know, those forests that were 300 years old or even older are never going to look like that again.

You know, those those are 300 year recovery time periods that we're looking at in many ways, that's difficult for people to hear and understand.

And I feel that, too.

You know, these are places I've been and spent time in, and it's sad to think about them not being what you remember for the rest of our lives.

Wildfires do not discriminate based on one's political affiliation.

They don't respect jurisdictional lines.

Right At the end of the day, wildfires impact Republicans, Democrats, Independents.

Unaffiliated voters equally.

And it is a issue of national concern and state concern that warrants the attention of policymakers.

Right now, we are all on the same page of protecting life, property and critical infrastructure, and that's never happened before.

So I'm very optimistic right now.

Our Granby Field office, we have five foresters and we live and work in this community, and we all know people that have lost everything in this fire.

But the neat thing is, is these people are hardworking.

Most people I know that lost everything.

They have already started rebuilding.

They're getting their lives back because they're resilient folks.

While these wildfires are inevitable and natural.

Finding the balance between protecting our homes and natural spaces and allowing nature to do its job will be an ongoing challenge.

Everyone from the federal and state governments down to the individual nature lover has a role to play in coexisting with wildfire.