Colorado faces a stark reality after California fires
Some 50,000 more people were under evacuation orders Wednesday as another wind-blown wildfire hit California north of Los Angeles. The fires have again renewed focus on dangers in what it known as the wildland-urban interface or WUI, where fire has marched into urban areas in both California and Colorado with greater losses than ever in recent years.
"It was a couple hundred yards from the first house. And only because the wind died down completely did they get a really good handle on it," recalled Todd Houghton, a realtor in the Willow Springs area up against the mountains south of Highway 285, who has become a community organizer. He was remembering the 2022 Snow Creek Fire that had people packing up to evacuate.
"That was a wake-up call," said Houghton, who has gotten wildfire mitigation certification as he thinks about the open space areas and the thousand or so homes that are potentially at risk.
"There's going to be a fire, you can't prevent it. And there's not enough water to stop a fire when the wind is blowing 50 mph. So you have to protect your own property and teach others how to do it."
West Metro Fire's Tom Welle, a wildfire mitigation specialist points out that Colorado faces many of the same risks as California.
"We're no different than what's happening in LA. It's just the frequency of it happening there is because of their climate and their fuels."
It's clear that there may be draconian solutions ahead to protecting homes, but much of the problem has already been created with the way homes have been built and where.
"Because of what we build them out of and we build them too close together. But there's a lot of economics that goes into that and we can't ignore that."
There are pressures to create housing and developers may be loathe to create larger homesites in WUI areas because it raises the cost of building.
"We have to embrace as a society that we've got to live differently, we've got to build differently, in order for us to withstand when that bad day comes," said Welle.
In terms of disasters, wildfire is less driven by nature than other major incidents says Alexander Maranghides, fire protection engineer, and technical lead of WUI research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland. NIST has been studying fires for fifty years.
"The energy from a tornado, the energy from a hurricane, the energy from an earthquake is from the land or the soil from the earth, the energy in the WUI is from the built environment itself."
He talks about changes needed that vary greatly.
"There are many challenges and fire. Science is giving us a path forward to get there. But I'm not naive enough to think that fire science is the only part that's missing here… There are a lot of other components, including sociological components where we need paradigm shifts of how we live."
And what we permit in WUI areas.
"You cannot have sheds in high density. You cannot have parallel fences in high density. You cannot park your RV next to your house," he explains about potential rules. Simple things we do now will have to be re-learned.
"You take your shed, and you want it away from your house. So you put it next to your wooden fence on the edge of your property.
and I do the same on my side. So what we're creating is corridors of high fuels."
Properties will need to be hardened by creating safe zones surrounding them says Welle and changing vents and gutters to prevent ember intrusion and fuel availability. Decks and lawn furniture are also fire risks.
There are also political realities. Houghton notes that strong legislation cannot be shoved down voters' throats.
"I don't think so. Not in America," he answered when asked.
"I think it's very difficult. You know it's real easy to throw rocks at politicians over this stuff and I don't think it's always fair," said Welle. "Cost and revenue are huge." That is revenue from a tax base.
It may not be elected or government officials at all deciding what can and can't be done.
"If it's not a fire, it will be the insurance company. We've got lots of them dropping here already," said Houghton. He tries to get his neighbors to take on mitigation. There has been growing interest and volunteers come out to help in open areas. But some others don't want to join the effort. There are ten different HOAs and with close to 1,000 homes built in different eras, needs of the Willow Springs and Willow Brook areas are different.
"Protect your own property. That's the only message I can come up with that works," said Houghton.
