Dry conditions in high-risk areas threaten 750,000
Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
By JERD SMITH
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
VAIL, Colo. -- At least three-quarters of a million Coloradans live in high-risk fire zones, where wildlands bump up against heavily populated urban areas. With 2006 already turning hot and dry, communities need to join forces now to protect themselves and their homes, fire officials said Friday. “It’s time to learn to love your neighbor,” said John Gulick, fire chief for the town of Vail.
Gulick’s comments came during the Colorado Mitigation and Wildfire Conference, which drew more than 125 firefighters and emergency response officials from across the state. “Cooperation is a tough thing to pull together, but it’s something everyone is going to have to achieve,” Gulick said. Many mountain communities are isolated and served by small volunteer fire departments. Stopping fast-moving wildfires often means bringing together firefighters who live dozens of miles from the scene. But communities that have thinned forested areas, that have mutual aid agreements with neighboring towns and that have evacuation plans in place are much more likely to survive a catastrophic burn, officials said.
Since February, Gov. Bill Owens has set aside $2.35 million for firefighting this summer. Still, Colorado State Forest officials say the state faces an uphill battle because wildland-urban interface zones span more than 6 million acres and support more than 750,000 residents. The zones are primarily along the Front Range, but also in places around Vail, Grand Junction and Steamboat Springs. “Much of our population growth is occurring in wildland areas,” said Rich Homann, wildland fire division supervisor for the State Forest Service. “And that increases the potential for fires that affect population.
Is this fire season going to be as bad as 2002? I don’t know. But last year by this time 14,000 acres of land had burned on state and private lands. This year, we’re at 42,000 acres already.” In mountain counties such as Eagle, Summit and Grand, as well as Jefferson and Boulder, fire officials are deeply worried about the fire risk caused by thousands of acres of dead trees. More than 450,000 acres of lodgepole pine forests have died because of a pine beetle infestation, according to Ron Cousineau, an assistant district forester for the Colorado State Forest Service.
Cousineau and others are encouraging those who live in critical urban-wildland interface zones to craft Community Wildfire Protection Plans to make sure they’re prepared, and because such plans often give residents access to federal grants to improve firefighting capability. “We’re seeing a lot more interest in these plans,” Cousineau said. “We’ve been telling people for years, ‘Hey, you live in a fire environment.’ But they couldn’t see it. Then the fires of 2000 and 2002 happened and they began to understand. Now they’re seeing the disease (in trees). Now there’s a lot of interest.”