Colorado faces an especially dangerous wildfire season, a fact that has caused federal agencies to take early action and should prompt private landowners to do so, too.
Parts of the West are more at risk than others, but none are safe. Winter graced the northern Rockies but denied snow to the Front Range, Eastern Plains and a swath from Durango to the San Luis Valley.
Fire hazard isn’t determined by how much water is in the lakes, but by how much moisture is in the trees. And the nearly decade-long drought left Colorado’s wild trees with so little core moisture they’ll need years to recover. Even now, forests statewide are apt to burn.
Colorado’s bark beetle epidemic is a visible example of the forests’ poor health.
A more subtle danger is at our feet: Colorado’s woodlands harbor an unnatural build-up of fire-prone deadwood, shrubs and scraggly trees, accumulated over the decades when humans snuffed out every wildfire, even small beneficial ones.
On top of these long-standing risks, this year’s early warning signs are unusual, even alarming. It’s almost unheard of for wildfires to erupt in April, but blazes already have charred 35,000 acres in our state. In January, Gov. Bill Owens banned open fires on state lands below 8,000 feet. Wildland fires have struck Boulder, Jefferson, Larimer and Broomfield counties.
It’s not just Colorado that’s in trouble. Tucson and Albuquerque have had their driest winters on record. Texas had huge fires in December, January and March.The fear is a repeat of 2002, which saw the biggest fires in decades erupt across the West, including the three largest in Colorado’s recorded history.
Conditions are so dire that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are gearing up for battle now. At Jefferson County Airport, the agencies have a single-engine air tanker at the ready with 16 heavy air tankers in other states on standby. Next month, they expect to move four more air tankers, seven helicopters, seven hotshot crews and numerous fire trucks into Colorado. To prevent huge blazes later, the agencies also are setting prescribed burns near Durango, Dolores and Pagosa Springs.
But the task is daunting. In Colorado, fire mitigation is needed on 120,000 acres of national forests a year, but the Forest Service has money to treat just 65,000 acres annually. The agency’s five-state region may get another $500,000 this year on top the $50 million it got for fire mitigation last year. But that’s just a fraction of the hundreds of million dollars needed to address scores of known fire hazards near the region’s watersheds, communities and infrastructure.
Recently, Sen. Wayne Allard persuaded Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth to shift an additional $500,000 in the agency’s budget to control pine beetles. It’s a good move but not enough. The fact is our region competes for resources with Arizona and New Mexico, where fire risks are extreme.
We live in an arid climate and among ecosystems that evolved with fire, so some blazes are normal. The key is to keep big wildfires from threatening human communities. Since federal resources are limited, private landowners and communities must take action by, for example, removing vegetation from around buildings. Wildfire risk reduction is as much a matter of public awareness and individual action as it is of public policy.
