Remote homes scattered in the woods across Colorado and the West pose growing safety and cost concerns to crews battling wildfires, according to two studies released Tuesday.
The difficulties of defending the houses – in many cases, luxurious vacation homes – will only get worse with continuing development on forest boundaries, the studies say.
Colorado has 94,739 residences in its so- called wildland-urban interface, the boundary between natural and developed areas, and 38 percent are seasonal homes or cabins, according to a study by Bozeman, Mont.-based Headwaters Economics.
While Boulder and Larimer counties already face some of the highest risk of home-destroying wildfires in the country, as much as 80 percent of the state’s danger zone remains open for development.
“We’re only just beginning to see the problem,” said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters, a land-policy organization.
A recent federal audit pegged the cost of protecting private property from wildfires at as much as $1 billion each year, Rasker said.
“It’s easy to understand why people want to live in beautiful forested areas, but our analysis indicates things will get much worse for U.S. firefighting efforts if current building trends continue,” he said.
The Sierra Nevada Alliance released a report Tuesday on the mushrooming problem of development in wildfire-prone areas in California.
The alliance called for tighter limits on growth and an understanding that fires are a normal part of the landscape.
The organization chiefly advocates clustering new homes on the perimeters of existing communities, instead of allowing isolated outposts and “leap frog” development, to give firefighters a smaller front to defend.
In Colorado – where hundreds of mining claims and old platted properties can be developed – such a move would be difficult, said Eric Philips, the Boulder County wildfire-mitigation coordinator.
“Many of those were never thought of as building lots. In some places, it’s almost indefensible,” he said.
After the 1989 Black Tiger fire destroyed 44 homes in the hills west of Boulder, the county established some of the nation’s first building codes aimed at wildfire defense, requiring new homes to include buffer zones free of vegetation and driveways suitable for fire trucks.
Firefighters in Larimer County, as in other mountain communities, perform a triage of which homes they will try to save in the face of an advancing wildfire, said emergency-services specialist Tony Simon.
“It doesn’t mean that the ones in worst shape don’t get protected,” he said, adding that it would depend on fire behavior, firefighter safety and how many other sites were threatened.
