Another costly Colorado fire season sparks search for solutions
Another costly Colorado fire season sparks search for solutions
01 September 2013
published by www.denverpost.com
USA — Ponderosa pine trees hugged the home where Paula Warren lived for four decades in the Black Forest and, in a manner of speaking, she hugged them back.
She declined to carve a wide clearing in the maze of timber that offered such wondrous seclusion that even the sun barely peeked in.
“That’s not why I moved out there,” said Warren, whose home became one of nearly 500 burned to the ground by the windswept June fire that also claimed two lives and set an ominous tone for the season. “I wanted to live in the woods. That was one of the risks I took. I knew those trees could ignite any day.”
More than 200 miles to the southwest, residents of the towns of South Fork and Creede had gazed at the national forest lands around them, where beetle-kill pine tinged the landscape reddish-brown, and recognized the inevitable: It was only a matter of time before nature triggered an overdue ecological cleansing.
The fire known as the West Fork Complex, sparked by lightning about a week before the Black Forest blaze, burned through more than 100,000 acres across three locations in the Rio Grande Valley. Property destruction was minimal, but it took an economic toll in terms of lost tourism, much like the devastating Royal Gorge fire near Cañon City.
These defining fires of the 2013 season, coming on the heels of last year’s disastrous High Park and Waldo Canyon incidents, have intensified efforts to address burning issues that, amid parched long-range forecasts, show no signs of abating.
Search for solutions
A governor’s task force and a legislative committee have been exploring possible solutions to problems that continue to grow as more and more people move into Colorado’s “red zones,” the high fire-risk areas that more than one-fourth of the state’s population calls home.
It’s here that policy intersects politics: Will those panels lead to legislation or executive orders mandating tougher statewide standards, such as more fire-conscious building codes or property mitigation? Or will they lean toward incentives and recommendations that preserve local government control?
It could be a little of both, said state Sen. Jeanne Nicholson, D-Black Hawk, who heads the bipartisan legislative committee. She can envision a “wildfire mitigation package” of bills rather than a single “megabill” being introduced in the next session to address several issues.
Among them: the possibility of an air fleet, either alone or in partnership with another state; mandatory disclosure of fire dangers and homeowner responsibilities in real estate transactions; incentives and resources to coax property owners toward voluntary mitigation; and possibly a bill to create a statewide consistency in some aspects of fire mitigation.
The Wildfire Task Force, which will make recommendations to Gov. John Hickenlooper by Sept. 30, has talked about encouraging counties to develop new building and zoning codes, advancing public education campaigns about mitigation, instituting the real estate disclosure and clarifying parameters for controlled burns.
Local control
One of the primary concerns remains creation of uniform standards for mitigation across the state.
“There isn’t consensus across the board about the best way to approach it,” said task force chair Barbara Kelley, who heads the state Department of Regulatory Agencies. “The concern at the county level is a question of local mandates and the problems at the county level if they’re required to undertake efforts without resources to get the work done.”
Colorado, which has so far spent more than $35.7 million on fire suppression this season, faces the conundrum of several Western states when it comes to crafting a plan for minimizing the devastation to property and human life in the so-called wildland-urban interface dubbed the WUI, or “wooey.”
The state’s strong affinity for local control, whereby counties or municipalities adopt fire standards as they see fit, has left Colorado a regulatory patchwork. And that, some contend, makes individuals or even entire communities that practice fire mitigation vulnerable to fires sweeping through areas where residents don’t.
“Wildfire is notoriously disrespectful of political boundaries and property lines,” said Lloyd Burton, professor and chair of the Environmental Affairs Working Group at the University of Colorado Denver. “To have one county that has mandatory mitigation and the next has nothing, the ones who have nothing imperil the ones who do.”
In describing Colorado’s uneven mitigation regulations, Burton noted that the mountain town of Breckenridge in 2009 actually rolled back a local wildfire mitigation law requiring property owners to thin trees around their homes.
“We’re a state with a political culture heavily weighted toward local control, as little government authority exercised as possible,” Burton said. “But to some extent now we’re living with the consequences of that history. There are some hard questions that it’s time for us to start re-asking.”
Reduced to ash
Sue and Patrick Hoeffel raked and removed fallen pine needles around their two-story home on nearly five acres in Black Forest and trimmed tree branches lower than 10 feet on the trunks surrounding them.
It wasn’t perfect mitigation by any stretch. But the property wasn’t crying out for emergency measures. And after a discussion with the local fire chief just weeks earlier and having put their name on a list to be further advised, the Hoeffels felt pretty good.
The first flames flared around 1:30 p.m. that June day. Sue Hoeffel figures their house had been reduced to ash, disfigured metal and its foundation by 5:30 p.m., among the early victims of a fire propelled by 45-mph winds.
As the fire burned as hot as 2,400 degrees, Hoeffel was told the artifacts of her family’s life collapsed on themselves into layers of chalky ash. Volunteers showed up with framed screens to help sift through the layers in search of mementos that survived.
The process, which improbably yielded remnants of her son’s knife collection and a ring her father gave her mother for their 25th wedding anniversary, elicited an odd sensation “like people’s hands touching inside your soul, inside your heart,” she said.
The Hoeffels have shifted their focus to the future, to the anticipation of a new house, but not without struggling through some practical and emotional recalibration.
“We moved here to live in the forest we wanted our trees,” said Hoeffel. “What I’ve come to terms with is that now, we’ll live in a beautiful meadow.”
Can that kind of paradigm shift be translated to a grand scale?
Today’s wildfire issues across the country can be traced to a century of suppression policy that, while largely successful in the short term, resulted in forests that grew unchecked and primed for fire.
Over time, development further complicated the issue.
“Because we’ve built so much in the forest, we no longer have the ability in many cases to let nature run its course,” said Paul Cooke, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control and who also serves on the state task force. “We continue to build in forested areas, in some cases without applying best practices as it relates to wildland-urban interface standards. So we continue to build the future fire problem.”
Cooke, whose division emerged from last year’s reorganization of state agencies attending to wildfire mitigation and response, remains a proponent of local control, but with minimum standards for development in WUI areas regarding issues such as water supplies, adequate road access, mitigation, defensible space and fire-resistant construction.
Along with that, he adds, there needs to be a shift in expectations for measures employed to protect property.
“If homeowners don’t do mitigation, it’s their right not to,” Cooke said. “But don’t expect a firefighter to defend your property.”
Post-fire assessments at Black Forest showed the impact of mitigation in developed areas to be the difference, in many cases, between houses torched or saved.
“It could’ve been a lot worse,” said Black Forest Fire Chief Bob Harvey, noting that mitigation efforts in the area were patchy. “We had some remarkable saves.”
The Cathedral Pines development, where measures had been taken during construction to minimize risk, lost only one home. High Forest Ranch, where the state had thinned the forest with a grant about 25 years ago, didn’t lose any.
In those cases and others, Harvey said, collaboration between property owners or developers and the fire department had eliminated subcanopy fuels, forcing the flames to the ground, where firefighters could more effectively deal with them.
The effects of the West Fork Complex on the environment remain to be seen, but wildlife already appears to be rebounding, said Mike Blakeman, a spokesman for the Rio Grande National Forest. Animals such as deer and elk have again returned to grazing on the land.
Colorado state forester Mike Lester said there are 24 million acres of forest in the state, 68 percent of which is federal land, and 700,000 acres of wildland-urban interface, where development abuts public lands. The WUI is expected to grow to 2.2 million acres by 2030.
“It’s fair to say we took about 100 years to get in this situation,” Lester said. “And it’s going to take us about 100 more to get out.”
A few miles west of Creede, Starr Pearson, who manages Freemon’s Guest Ranch, struggled with the sparse tourist trade like many area businesses.
But she said residents have come to grips with the natural burn-off and already have started to plan for the inevitable next fire.
“Everybody’s made their peace with it, and now that we know how it goes, we’re ready for another round,” Pearson said. “With all the beetle kill, we haven’t seen the end of it. It’s our new normal.”
Even seasonal residents who once adamantly opposed the concept of controlled burns have started to see the wisdom of that approach, she added.
Still, human beings seem unable to accept the inevitability of fires, said Andrew Dunham, a political science professor at Colorado College who studies responses to wildfires.
“The fundamental problem is we’re living in Colorado because we love nature,” he said. “And nature burns.”
Nature lovers such as Paula Warren, who lost everything in the Black Forest fire, have had to adjust to that reality. A huge, yawning gap in the trees defines the area where she’ll rebuild, and a new horse barn is nearly finished complete with plumbing that will allow her to live there until she starts a new house in the months ahead.
“It was like I lived in Wonderland,” Warren said, recalling her refuge in the forest. “It was awesome. Now, we have no trees, no buffer. But the alternative is to move to the city which I absolutely cannot do.”
