Re: “16th Street Mall: Man arrested in stabbings,” Jan. 14 news story

After the horrific stabbings of four people, two fatally, the mayor’s assurances of safety on the 16th Street Mall appear to be wishful thinking. Where is the backing for adequate police protection, i.e., funding for a viable police force? Why aren’t the District Attorney’s office and our courts more stringent with lasting penalties for crime? What happened to our right to feel and be safe walking Denver’s streets?

B.J. Stratman, Denver

Time for leaders to heed lessons from wildfires

The untamable fires swept into Los Angeles thanks to wealth-driven land use decisions and decades of disregard for the inevitability of climate change.

It¶¶Òőap past time to rethink land use planning — especially on the fringe or red zone, where the natural environment meets urban neighborhoods. A spark in the red zone often goes unnoticed until lives and properties are lost.

Colorado had an opportunity to learn the peril of ignoring wildfire risk with the Waldo Canyon Fire (Colorado Springs) and the more recent Marshall Fire (Superior). But did officials and planners learn?

Unfortunately, the potential for deadly wildfires is seldom among the considerations that Colorado cities and counties weigh in approving residential and commercial developments. A century ago Los Angeles could have required permanent development measures (such as public defensible space,) required certain fireproof building materials and so much more. In some cases, they did; the Getty Museum was spared, while homes burned all around it.

There’s still time for Colorado to avoid the heartbreak of Los Angeles, but only if the lives of future residents and business owners are put before the profit of developers.

Karen A. Wagner, Fort Collins

Legislator conversations are central to being productive

Re: “2025 legislative session will be the first where lawmakers can discuss possible legislation in private. Good!” Jan. 12 commentary

Thank you for publishing Krista Kafer. The vast majority of Coloradans, and Americans for that matter, are just to the right or just to the left of center. But our politics are way too often pushed from the edges, which brings us the extreme divides we have today.

When it comes to actually making sensible, middle-of-the-road policy, which is what most citizens want, having the ability to discuss ideas, practical implications and consequences without the press watching is crucial.ÌęIt¶¶Òőap where we find those nearer-to-the-middle ideas.

Kafer’s broader point is that representative government, as designed by our Founders, requires private deliberation. With all its flaws, and there are many, the Constitutional Convention delegates in 1787 would never have written what they did if every Philadelphian had been in the room.

Having participated in literally hundreds of discussions about upcoming legislation before the bill was introduced, I can attest to how productive and consequential those conversations are. There is plenty of time for public input as a bill goes through the process of becoming law.

Lois Court, Denver

Editor’s note: Court is a former state senator from District 31.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

And within Colorado, metro Denver and Colorado Springs, not communities high up in the mountains, are where the largest property losses are most likely to occur.

CoreLogic, which provides risk estimates to insurers, utilities and local governments, estimates that 332,716 homes in the state have a moderate, high or very high risk of damage from wildfires. Rebuilding those homes, if they were destroyed, would cost an estimated $140.9 billion.

The only state with a higher wildfire exposure to its housing stock is California, with nearly 1.28 million homes at risk and an estimated replacement value of $760.8 billion. Texas has the third-highest wildfire risk ranking with 233,434 homes at risk and a reconstruction cost of $85.5 billion.

Although rural mountain communities have long dealt with forest fires, nearby urban areas are increasingly where the most severe losses are occurring. The fire that consumed Lahaina last week was the deadliest in recent U.S. history, costing 101 lives as of Tuesday and destroying $3.2 billion in property.

“There has been a lot of growth, especially in those Wildland Urban Interface areas. As we see the increase of population and development we will see that increase in total risk,” said Jamie Knippen, senior product manager with CoreLogic.

In 2014, CoreLogic estimated Colorado had closer to 200,000 homes in the path of potential wildfires. But the number has increased substantially, with nearly half of the homes now located in five more heavily-populated Front Range metropolitan areas.

‱ Metro Denver has 69,284 homes at risk with an estimated replacement value of $32.6 billion.

‱ Colorado Springs has 51,321 homes at risk of wildfire damage with an estimated replacement value of $22.1 billion.

‱ Fort Collins has 14,352 homes at risk worth an estimated replacement value of $4.6 billion.

‱ Boulder has 9,754 homes at risk with an estimated replacement cost of $4.2 billion.

‱ Pueblo has 3,242 homes worth $1 billion at risk.

Metro Denver consists of six counties, while those other Colorado metro areas cover their entire counties. Homes on the western side of those counties are most at risk. But having forests and grasslands adjacent to densely populated areas can set the stage for “urban conflagrations.”

The Waldo Canyon fire, after starting higher up in the mountains, reached into the Mountain Shadow neighborhood in Colorado Springs in 2012, destroying 347 homes. On Dec. 30, 2021, the Marshall fire, whipped by winds exceeding 100 mph, raced through Boulder County, destroying 1,084 homes and damaging another 149. Two people died in each fire.

Heavier moisture has meant fewer and less severe wildfires this year in Colorado and surrounding states, but wetter conditions are also creating more fuel to burn whenever drought conditions return, which climate scientists expect to happen due to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

If CoreLogic is correct in its estimates, about 13% of the state’s housing stock is vulnerable to wildfire damage, based on an estimated 2.45 million housing units counted in the state during the 2020 Census.

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Firefighters have constructed a protective line around the perimeter of the blackened burn zone, officials announced in a tweet. And firefighting crews will continue to patrol the burn zone to control hotspots, the officials said.

This fire broke out in the mountain foothills above the city on Tuesday in dry, windy, unusually warm weather — within the burn scar from the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire.

About 50 firefighters were deployed as flames burned grass and Ponderosa pines in an area near houses, about 2.5 miles southeast of Woodland Park. An aircraft dropped water on flames. The cause hasn’t been determined.

is 20 acres & 100% contained. Fire line has been constructed all around the fire and tied into the road. Crews will continue to patrol the fire as interior heavy fuels may still be smoldering.

— USFS_Pike&San Isabel (@PSICC_NF)

Sheriff’s deputies driving 45 mph couldn’t outpace the flames. Dense smoke, swirling dust and flying plywood obscured the firestorm’s growth and direction, delaying evacuations.

Within minutes, landscaped islands in a Costco parking lot in Superior caught fire as structures became the inferno’s primary fuel. It consumed the Element Hotel, as well as part of a Tesla service center, a Target and the entire Sagamore neighborhood. Across a six-lane freeway, in the town of Louisville, flames rocketed through parks and climbed wooden fences, setting homes ablaze. They spread from one residence to the next in a mere eight minutes, reaching temperatures as high as 1,650 degrees.

On Dec. 30, 2021, more than 35,000 people in and , as well as unincorporated Boulder County, fled the fire — some so quickly they left barefoot and without their pets. Firefighters abandoned miles of hose in neighborhood driveways to escape.

The Marshall Fire, the most destructive in Colorado history, killed two people and incinerated 1,084 residences and seven businesses within hours. Financial losses are expected to top $2 billion.

The blaze showed that Colorado and much of the West face a fire threat unlike anything they have seen. No longer is the danger limited to homes adjacent to forests. Urban areas are threatened, too.

Yet despite previous warnings of this new threat, ProPublica found Colorado’s response hasn’t kept pace. Legislative efforts to make homes safer by requiring fire-resistant materials in their construction have been repeatedly stymied by developers and municipalities, while taxpayers shoulder the growing cost to put out the fires and rebuild in their aftermath.

Many residents are unaware they are now at risk because federal and state wildfire forecasts and maps also haven’t kept pace with the growing danger to their communities. Indeed, some wildland fire forecasts model urban areas as “non-burnable,” even though the Marshall Fire proved otherwise.

The disaster put an exclamation point on what scientists, planners and federal officials warned for years: Communities outside the traditional wildland-urban interface, or WUI, are now vulnerable as a changing climate, overgrown forests and explosive development across the West fuel ever-unpredictable fire behavior. Fire experts define the WUI, pronounced woo-ee, as areas where plants such as trees, shrubs and grasses are near, or mixed with, homes, power lines, businesses and other human development.

They now agree that instead of a threat confined to the WUI, the entire state, including areas far from forests, may be at risk of a conflagration.

“The Marshall Fire was a horrible, tragic event that served as a wake-up call for the rest of our state,” said state Rep. Lisa Cutter, a Democrat who represents mountain and foothill areas. “I don’t think we realized how much wildfire could impact communities that aren’t deep in the forest — it¶¶Òőap not something any of us are immune to.”

Unheeded warnings

An early warning of the growing danger to suburban communities arrived in 2001. That year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies identified scores of Colorado municipalities adjacent to public lands as being at high risk of a wildland blaze-turned-urban conflagration. Some of these areas burned in the Marshall Fire.

A decade later, in 2012, another warning came, as an unprecedented weather-driven inferno, the Waldo Canyon Fire, destroyed several Colorado Springs neighborhoods.

Afterward, fire experts urged state lawmakers to adopt a model building code that communities in high-risk areas could enact. Such codes have been scientifically proven to reduce risk for residents and rescuers and to increase the odds structures will withstand a blaze by requiring fire-resistant materials on siding, roofs, decks and fences, along with mesh-covered vents that prevent embers from entering.

But lawmakers bowed to pressure from building and real estate lobbyists as well as municipal officials who demanded local control over private property.

Meanwhile, the number of new homes built in Colorado’s WUI — as defined by researchers several years ago — more than doubled between 1990 and 2020. And nationwide, the WUI is growing by 2 million acres a year. Homes in 70,000 communities worth $1.3 trillion are now within the path of a firestorm, according to a June report from the U.S. Fire Administration that featured photos of the Marshall Fire’s destruction.

In the months that followed the Marshall Fire, there were again calls to consider a statewide building code. A last-minute amendment to a fire mitigation bill in May would have created a board to develop statewide building rules, but it was pulled after builders, real estate agents, municipalities and others opposed it.

It wasn’t the first time the state’s powerful building industry asserted its influence over policy. Whenever a wildfire bill comes to the state legislature, well-heeled lobbyists routinely represent the industry, records kept by the Colorado secretary of state show. The state’s culture of local control and the construction industry’s $25 billion annual contribution to the economy hampered lawmakers’ ability to find middle ground on a minimum statewide building code.

ProPublica’s review of legislation introduced from 2014 to 2022 found only 15 out of 77 wildfire-related bills focused primarily on helping homeowners mitigate their risk from fires. Most of the 15 proposals offered incentives to homeowners and communities through income tax deductions or grants — some of which required municipalities to raise matching funds — to clear vegetation around structures.

None called for mandatory building requirements in wildfire-prone areas, even as 15 of the 20 largest wildfires in state history have occurred since 2012.

The lack of uniform regulations has cost the Centennial State millions in federal grant money: The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied the state grants from the agency’s resilient infrastructure funds, which from fiscal 2020 to 2022 totaled $101 million.

Colorado remains one of only eight states without a minimum construction standard for homes.

Municipalities weigh prevention and its cost

Developers have also influenced municipalities’Ìęrecent decisions, as homes decimated by the Marshall Fire are rebuilt in Boulder County, and the cities of Superior and Louisville located within it. The debate has reflected difficult tradeoffs between the cost of making homes more fire-resistant — particularly in an era of high inflation and unpredictable supply chains — and residents’ tolerance for risk.

Lawmakers in Louisville, where 550 homes and businesses burned, voted to remove a fire sprinkler requirement for homes, citing cost, despite evidence such systems reduce the risk of dying in a home fire by 80%. The City Council also voted to allow residents to choose whether to follow new energy efficiency requirements estimated to add $5,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a new home.

By contrast, in unincorporated Boulder County, which lost 157 homes to the Marshall Fire, commissioners in June voted to require fire-resistant materials on all new and renovated homes. Before the inferno, the eastern grasslands were exempt. (Mountain residents, who since 1989 have been required to follow mitigation practices, have seen the effectiveness of such codes: Eight out of 10 of their homes survived the Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010.)

In Superior, which lost 378 structures, the Board of Trustees voted down a proposed citywide WUI building code in May. After residents of the leveled Sagamore neighborhood requested they revisit their decision, trustees reconsidered in July.

The financial pressures facing Superior officials and their constituents were evident as they considered whether to require fire-resistant materials solely for homes destroyed by the Marshall Fire or for the entire city.

“This is all a huge cost we cannot bear,” said Robert Lousberg, a resident who wants to rebuild several homes. “I understood this is a once-in-a-lifetime fire.”

Some neighbors disagreed.

“Sagamore burned down in less than an hour — one of my neighbors ended up in the hospital after trying to escape the fire on foot — that¶¶Òőap the main reason we need these codes, to slow the spread of fire,” Dan Cole said. “We have an opportunity to build a more fire-resistant neighborhood right now, and it would be foolish and short-sighted not to take it.”

Builders estimated that costs for tempered-glass windows, fire-resistant siding and other materials could reach $5,500 to $30,000 per home. Procuring the materials and labor to install them could delay rebuilding.

Like residents, town trustees were divided about whether the cost outweighed safety benefits to residents and first responders should there be another conflagration.

“To me, it¶¶Òőap unconscionable to have people rebuilding in an unsafe manner,” said Trustee Laura Skladzinski, who did not seek reelection last month. “I would rather have residents pay $20,000 now. If they cannot afford it, how are they going to be able to afford it when their house burns down?”

Some noted that most residents didn’t have enough insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding their homes.

Trustee Neal Shah said the city should have adopted tougher codes after the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs, which prompted calls for a voluntary statewide building code that communities could institute requiring fire-resistant materials in homes.

“I fundamentally believe in Shah said, “what I can’t solve is the math.”

The body voted 5-1 to institute the code, then added an opt-out clause for those rebuilding their residences.

Colorado Springs fire foreshadowed the risks

A decade before the Marshall Fire, a blaze was burning in the mountains above Colorado Springs on a 101-degree June day. That afternoon a thunderstorm caused a sudden shift in the wind, pushing a wall of burning debris out of the Rocky Mountain foothills into the state’s second-largest city.

Firefighters fled the 750-foot-high fire front — as tall as a 53-floor building — as it chewed through pine, pinyon and juniper dried by a record-hot spring. Sixty-mile-per-hour gusts peeled back the door on a fire truck. Fist-sized embers rained down on the city’s Mountain Shadows community. The fire incinerated 79 homes per hour, or 1.3 per minute, over 5 Âœ hours, a report found.

In the aftermath of the Waldo Canyon Fire, which destroyed 347 homes and killed two people, Colorado Springs drew lessons from which residences had survived and capitalized on fresh memories of burned neighborhoods to institute tougher building requirements.

Standing recently in the shade of a still-scorched tree behind her home, Patty Johnson described how her house was relatively unscathed, even as eight of her neighbors lost their residences. She credited ignition-resistant materials, including stucco walls, siding, a composite deck and a concrete tile roof. Drought-resistant landscaping also helped. Her family sold the home in September to move into a smaller place in the city.

After-action reports found neighbors’ work clearing vegetation around homes helped firefighters save 82% of residences in the 28-square-mile burn area.

FEMA estimated that minimal expenditures to protect Colorado Springs neighborhoods had paid off. In Cedar Heights, $300,000 in mitigation had prevented about $77 million in losses.

“The Waldo Canyon Fire was shocking, but it could have been so much worse if the city of Colorado Springs had not spent decades getting ready,” said Molly Mowery, co-founder of the Community Wildfire Planning Center.

Even so, the fire reached 2,000 degrees and moved so fast it incinerated some homes with fire-resistant material and fire-proof safes inside.

Nevertheless, the city followed a 30-year pattern and took its lessons to heart to institute additional building requirements to fortify homes in wildfire-prone areas. Timing was everything, Mowery’s nonprofit concluded in a recently released analysis.

The city had done the same in 2002. With smoke still in the air following the Hayman Fire — which started about 35 miles northwest of the city and destroyed 600 structures — a coalition of fire officials, homeowners’ associations and local builders and roofing contractors devised rules that banned wood roofs on all new homes and repairs greater than 25% of the total roof area.

Similarly, after the Waldo Canyon Fire, as heavy machinery cleared charred neighborhoods, the city updated its code to increase the distance trees had to be from homes and require fire protection systems, ignition-resistant siding and decks, and double-paned windows for all new or reconstructed homes in hillside areas.

Fire officials used spatial technology to hone the city’s definition of the WUI. The tool identified a 32,655-acre area — one of the largest high-risk regions in the United States. The city recruited homeowners to educate neighbors in the threatened area about fire-resistant practices.

Peer pressure worked, said Ashley Whitworth, wildfire mitigation program administrator at the Colorado Springs Fire Department. If a homeowner’s property is flagged red on the city’s online risk assessment map (denoting it needs work), neighbors reach out to learn why they haven’t completed mitigation.

Colorado Springs’ voters overwhelmingly approved the allocation of $20 million in city funds toward incentives to gird wildfire-prone properties.

Days after the vote in November 2021, the Marshall Fire unfolded 90 miles to the north across communities with little history of wildfire mitigation.

Scientists, some of whom lived in Boulder County and were evacuated, proclaimed it a “climate fire.” They cited the extreme weather that preceded it: Abnormally high levels of snow and rain in spring and summer had nurtured abundant 4-foot grasses that baked to a crisp during a historically dry fall. Chinook winds blasted the region for an unusual nine-hour period and propelled the firestorm. And even though there’s growing understanding that fire season is now year-round, no one believed a December blaze could ravage entire cities.

While it began as a wildfire in grassland, once it reached nearby communities it transformed into an urban conflagration — the type of fire that destroyed Chicago in 1871 and San Francisco in 1906 and that until the early 20th century consumed more property than any other type of natural disaster.

“Was this a wildland fire or an urban fire?” Sterling Folden, deputy chief of the Mountain View Fire Protection District, asked during a July legislative committee meeting. “I had five fire trucks in the entire downtown of Superior — I had 20 blocks on fire — I usually have that many for one house on fire.”

Whitworth, of the Colorado Springs Fire Department, said there were more lessons to learn about the threat of wildfire.

“The Marshall Fire was a really big hit for people here because it happened in December and it happened just like that,” Whitworth said. “Everyone said to me, ‘It could happen here,’ and I said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’”

Is the entire state now vulnerable to wildfire?

With the 2023 legislative session days away, fire chiefs, county commissioners, scientists and planners are once again calling on Colorado lawmakers to institute statewide rules that mandate fire-resistant materials in high-risk areas.

Cutter, who will be sworn in as a state senator in January, is developing a bill that would require the state to create a WUI code board to write minimum fire-resistant building requirements. It¶¶Òőap patterned in part after the amendment that failed at the Capitol this spring.

Such laws save lives, said Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control. The 36-year fire service veteran cited studies from the nonprofit and the federal showing that building codes work.

“Firefighters take extraordinary risk to protect lives and property,” he added. “If we start building communities and structures out of materials more resistive to fire, we are upping our odds of success — we’ve got to do something different and do it better.”

The insurance industry is also warning that if Colorado lawmakers and communities don’t reinforce homes against wildfire, mounting claims from blazes could put premiums out of reach for many. The industry supports a statewide building code.

“Unlike other disasters, wildfire is one of those risks there is much we can do from a mitigation standpoint to put odds at least in favor of that home surviving,” said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

“We’ve got to get it done,” she added. “Colorado right now is at 
 a tipping point with concerns about keeping insurance here and keeping insurance available.”

But such rules won’t be adopted without a compromise among local control advocates, builders and fire officials.

Construction industry representatives who met with Cutter and Morgan recently said builders are wary of one-size-fits-all requirements imposed by the state. Together with the insurance industry and municipal governments, they have met the past few months seeking to influence the bill’s language.

“It¶¶Òőap important to make sure we match codes with risk,” said Ted Leighty, chief executive of the Colorado Association of Home Builders. His members “are not opposed to talking about what a code board might look like — if we were to adopt a model code that local governments could adopt to match their communities’ needs.”

The idea for such a board emerged after the Colorado Fire Commission received a letter from Gov. Jared Polis in July 2021.

The first-term Democrat, who was reelected in November, sent the missive following conflagrations in 2020 that exhibited unimaginable fire behavior: The 193,812-acre East Troublesome Fire traveled 25 miles overnight and incinerated 366 homes; and the 208,913-acre Cameron Peak Fire, which torched 461 structures, burned for four months despite firefighters’ efforts.

Polis wrote that legislators in 2021 had failed to “address a critical piece of the wildfire puzzle in Colorado: land use planning, development and building resiliency in the wildland-urban interface.”

Instead, lawmakers focused on fire response, restoration of burned lands and voluntary mitigation by communities.

In answer to Polis’ missive, a little-known subcommittee, which included state, county and city fire officials, met between August 2021 and April. The 51-member group agreed it¶¶Òőap time to rethink which communities are prone to wildfire, offering a new definition of the WUI: The group concluded “almost the entire state of Colorado falls within the WUI,” according to minutes from a Feb. 10 meeting, “which could make a strong argument for adopting a minimum code.”

Fire officials also countered the long-held belief that communities favor local control over building requirements. They pointed to a 2019 law that established a minimum energy code that local jurisdictions must adopt when they update local building codes. About 86% of the state’s 5 million residents now live in a community that mandates such measures.

“There is minimal evidence that people voluntarily regulate themselves,” committee members concluded, according to minutes of their Feb. 28 meeting.

Rebuilding like before

A report on the Marshall Fire released in October by the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control noted how wooden fences abutting grasslands had accelerated the blaze’s spread, leading flames from the grass directly to homes. Firefighters also described fence pickets flying past at 80 mph and landing to start new fires.

This month, as homes were being rebuilt on Cherrywood Lane in Louisville, in one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, evidence remained of first responders’ frantic efforts to cut down fences to prevent them from spreading flames to neighboring homes.

New homes are going up across the 9-square-mile burn zone. A recent drive through the area revealed many are being rebuilt with the same kinds of fences. With no building code dictating that the fences be made of fire-resistant materials, homeowners are using flammable materials that have been standard in the past, unaware it will again put them at risk in the next blaze.

Wooden fences such as these touch homes and grasslands in communities up and down the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.

Rebuilding without ignition-resistant barriers leaves the homes vulnerable to the next climate-driven wildfire, said Morgan, the state fire chief.

This month, with snow on the ground and temperatures in the 40s, another blaze ignited not far from where the Marshall Fire burned. Thirty-five-mile-per-hour winds spread the flames and forced evacuations before the threat subsided.

“I’ve heard people say the Marshall Fire was just a fluke,” he said. “I would disagree — there are literally thousands of communities along the Front Range of the Rockies from Canada to New Mexico subject to these Chinook winds multiple times a year, and when the conditions are right this can happen.”

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The neighborhood, Pinon Soleil in north Castle Rock, is also designated as a “very high risk” wildfire hazard zone, according to a adopted by town leaders last week.

“Flammable outbuildings, decks, projections, and fences,” as well as “decadent timber stands” and “natural and ornamental vegetation close to structures” are a threat to dozens of families living there, the plan states.

It’s a hazard rating that has taken on a sharper significance and gravity since a wildfire blazed through southern Boulder County less than a month ago, destroying nearly 1,100 homes and damaging another 149 — a catastrophe that many homeowners never thought possible in a suburban setting miles removed from the fire-prone foothills.

“You just need to be aware the danger exists,” Diekmann said, glancing out at late afternoon shadows cast by the ridges and promontories looming over her house. “On those windy days, I’ll be a lot more alert.”

Diekmann is not alone. Castle Rock’s wildfire protection plan, which has been in the works for several years but was only approved by the town council on Jan. 18, sliced the town of 80,000 residents and 24,000 homes into 19 zones. Seventeen of those zones were deemed “high” or “very high” risk for wildfire hazard while just two zones in town fell into the “moderate” risk category.

No parts of Castle Rock were considered at low or extreme risk.

Norris Croom, chief of the Castle Rock Fire and Rescue Department, said while the town’s new wildfire plan is critical to identifying danger spots, fuel loads and susceptible building materials — and hopefully getting ahead of fires once they ignite — there are certain weather and environmental conditions that can’t be corralled or restrained by even the most capable firefighting forces.

“When you throw in outside factors, specifically that day with a wind-driven (Marshall) fire, there’s not a lot you’re going to be able to do,” Croom said. “When Mother Nature decides that this is what she’s going to do, there’s not a lot we can do to stop that until she decides to settle down.”

He pointed to seven homes that burned in The Meadows neighborhood on the west side of Castle Rock nearly four years ago. In that case, a fire that started in one house was quickly pushed by wind to half a dozen others before firefighters were able to gain control.

But in a part of the Front Range that has seen its share of wildfires big and small over the last 20 years — The Hayman fire (2002), Cherokee Ranch (2003), Burning Tree (2011), Waldo Canyon (2012) and Black Forest (2013) — Croom said Castle Rock’s new wildfire protection plan will be helpful in pointing out ways to minimize damage from the overwhelming majority of burns.

“It’s to keep the typical wildland fire we see down here from becoming a major catastrophe,” he said. “This plan will help reduce the risk — it will not eliminate the risk.”

Aside from urging residents to create defensible space around their homes, in which trees and bushes near a structure are cut back to deprive a fire of fuel, Castle Rock’s plan talks about building homes out of ignition resistant materials and creating “linked defensible space,” or fire-resistant perimeters, around clusters of houses that have been built close together.

The plan, authored by Boulder-based wildland fire consultancy Anchor Point Group, also notes the challenge of keeping the town’s nearly 6,000 acres of parks and open space and 95 miles of trails from becoming a “highway for fire.”

“Development plans have encouraged open space islands between clusters of homes where natural fuels have been retained,” the plan states. “These factors have created a patchwork of islands and stringers of natural fuels occurring throughout the town limits.”

But those natural areas are a big part of Castle Rock’s attraction. Carol Reed’s home southeast of downtown backs up to Memmen Ridge Open Space and gets a “very high” risk rating from the town’s plan.ÌęA 43-year resident of the Glover neighborhood, Reed is well aware of the fire danger posed by the land behind her home, which the town’s wildfire protection plan describes as containing “heavy fuels” — specifically “oak brush fuel islands.”

“We’ve seen wildfires burn close enough that we could see the orange glow on the horizon,” Reed said. “I still feel pretty safe here.”

But she said there’s no doubt that the Marshall fire 50 miles north has brought her and her neighbors a “heightened awareness” that they may not be as safe as they thought they were.

Town Councilwoman Caryn Johnson calls the Marshall fire a “wake-up call” for Castle Rock. She says one of the biggest challenges for the fast-growing town is to achieve a balance between the inspiration and awe the open and rolling landscape around town gives residents and visitors and the fatal potential that same land possesses should it ever go up in flames.

“Finding that balance is hard but we hope to find something that will keep Castle Rock looking the way it does with open space and keeping our residents safe,” she said.

She’s gotten it over and over again since October 2020, when the CalWood fire ripped through the foothills outside Boulder, its flames turning her family’s home into a pile of smoking ruins and charred bricks.

Everyone inevitably asks, “Are you going to rebuild?”

“I hate that word — ‘rebuild,’ ” says Walsh, 40, who’s still torn nearly 15 months later. Her family is living in a rental house, trying to figure out what comes next — and whether they want to return to the same place. “There’s no such thing as rebuilding something. You can’t rebuild something that’s already gone.”

More than 1,000 new families in Superior, Louisville and unincorporated Boulder County are now in the same position after late December’s devastating Marshall fire wiped out their homes.

The Denver Post spoke in recent days with people like Walsh who know what it’s like to lose everything, forced to start anew. They said traumatic goodbyes to their homes, including the family heirlooms, keepsakes and baby photos contained within them, during disasters ranging from the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs to the 2013 Colorado floods to 2020’s historic wildfires.

Walsh and several others detailed the myriad obstacles that came their way after those seismic events: insurance nightmares, wholescale life disruptions and mental health struggles, not to mention the difficult conversations with people who didn’t quite understand what they were going through.

When images of flames leaping between houses once again filled Coloradans’ TV screens on Dec. 30, “I couldn’t stop watching it,” said C.J. Moore, 75, who was flooded with memories of losing her own house in the Waldo Canyon fire nearly a decade ago.

At the time, it stood as the state’s most destructive wildfire, destroying 347 homes and killing two people in a collection of suburban neighborhoods after a days-old forest fire charged down the hillside, giving residents little time to get out. A year later, the nearby Black Forest fire eclipsed its destruction. It stood as the worst until the Marshall fire, which according to Boulder County’s latest assessment destroyed 1,084 homes and damaged another 149, a total residential loss estimated at $513.2 million. Dozens of businesses also were affected.

Moore rebuilt her house, as did most of her neighbors. Today, the Mountain Shadows neighborhoods exhibit few signs of the utter devastation that befell them.

She had a message Wednesday for the new fire’s still-shocked survivors: “Our hearts are with them. And they can make it through this — we did.”

Beginning of a long ordeal

But the Marshall fire survivors should steel themselves for a long, arduous, frustrating ordeal, say members of Colorado’s fellowship of disaster victims.

“It makes you more resilient,” Walsh said of her experience. “It makes you grateful for what you have. But it changes you.”

The immediate challenge facing the displaced is to initiate the insurance claim process, as many Marshall victims have done in recent days. It¶¶Òőap something that takes months — and in some cases longer. Often, past survivors say they leaned on others for help navigating the tricky insurance claim process, whether informally or through an official assistance office set up by local officials to aid them, similar to in Lafayette.

Kristin Hulinsky has been living in Lakewood with her daughter ever since the East Troublesome fire engulfed the Winding River Ranch in Grand Lake, where she lived and worked as the office manager.

Fifteen months later, Hulinsky and the ranch’s owner, Travis Busse, have seen barely any insurance money for their 240-acre, multimillion-dollar property, which used to host weddings and veterans’ retreats. Some buildings weren’t insured, the two found out, while others were double-insured by different companies.

As they battle with the insurance company, Busse has turned his ranch into a dumping site for other Grand County residents who need somewhere to haul metal and concrete as they rebuild their own homes. The ranch may not host another celebratory event for a couple years.

“It’s heartbreaking to start from scratch, with no help,” Hulinsky said. The ranch owner hired a private adjuster to help with their claim, but it could take a year or two for everything to shake out in the courts. “I feel slapped in the face — it makes me not trust insurance companies at all. It’s ugly.”

Insurance woes are par for the course for families trying to resume a semblance of normalcy after natural disasters — even for those with a simpler claim for a single home. While some past victims, including Moore, recalled smooth experiences, others remembered difficulty after difficulty.

The common refrain: Be ready to be your own fierce advocate, ask a lot of questions, and push for the full coverage you’re entitled to. Some didn’t realize at first that their policies covered immediate costs, including hotel rooms, meals and basic supplies. Under state law, an insurance advance is due to a victim when a primary residence was lost.

“The insurance company will probably seem like they’re trying to railroad over the top of you,” suggested Tom Henderson, chair of the Burg Simpson law firm’s bad-faith insurance division, “but if you show you’re Johnny-on-the-spot, memorializing everything with email confirmation, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.”

Financial crunches during recovery

Gregory Simon, an associate professor of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Colorado Denver, has tracked several fire recoveries. It¶¶Òőap an interest rooted in his own family’s weathering of the Oakland firestorm of 1991, when he was a teenager and many homes on their block burned down, though theirs was spared. He wrote a 2016 book, “Flame and Fortune in the American West.”

Many victims end up being made financially whole by their insurance, Simon said, but it takes time and persistence. And delays are possible when it comes to safely removing and disposing of the piles of toxic debris left behind by the fire, he said.

“The households that have (robust savings) will probably be OK,” Simon said, “but it¶¶Òőap the people who don’t have a savings account of sufficient amount that will be finding this to be more difficult. They most likely will be compensated later, but it’ll be really difficult.”

So far, more than $25 million in donations have been collected to help fill the gap, and a federal declaration has unlocked some disaster assistance aid.

Still, there’s a big risk in Colorado, where home values have risen quickly: Some families in past disasters were underinsured or hadn’t updated their policies. And in the case of floods, some victims lacked the right coverage.

It took Dan Shannon and his wife, Stephanie, four to six months to get the insurance process in motion after the East Troublesome fire consumed their log-cabin home outside Grand Lake in October 2020. They acknowledge that they won’t receive quite what the house was worth — even if their coverage is better than that of some of their neighbors, who bought homes years ago.

“I almost got a college degree in insurance from this,” said Shannon, 42, a firefighter, with a chuckle.

It’s a daunting process: The insurance company asks fire victims to detail, item by item, every possession that was in the home. That means every fork, T-shirt, pair of socks, antique or heirloom. Not everyone has documentary photos or videos to aid them.

“The whole thing is overwhelming,” said Shannon, adding that he’s already been through five adjustors.

A nonprofit called United Policyholders is among groups at the new Lafayette assistance center, 1755 S. Public Road.

Mental health should be priority, too

Financial affairs are crucial to sort through, but Coloradans who’ve weathered other disasters say practicing self-care and talking to someone after such a traumatizing event are also critical.

After the CalWood fire, Walsh had her children talk to school counselors. Her son, then 7, also went to play therapy, which helps children process their emotions and deal with unresolved trauma through play-time.

Walsh started going to yoga more, focusing on meditation and eating right.

“When I lost everything, you realize your health is the only thing you actually own in this world,” she said.

Hulinsky took to heart a friend’s advice by scheduling her cries. She waited until her daughter went to sleep, then ventured to the closet to shed her tears.

“You almost look forward to those moments when you know you can cry and grieve,” she said. “Take that moment, wipe your tears and then put your big girl pants on.”

These emotions don’t go away overnight. Donna Boone says she can barely watch the news these days since the heart-wrenching images bring her back to 2013, when historic floods swept through her Lyons mobile home park, wiping it clean.

She still thinks about the items she didn’t save that day — especially her father’s barber license, the one piece she had to remember him after he died.

“It¶¶Òőap a long process,” Boone said this week from her mobile home park in Loveland. Lyons never rebuilt its two mobile home parks that washed away in the flood. “It takes years for people to recover. Long after it¶¶Òőap out of the news, people are still struggling to get everything put together to get through it.”

An immediate outpouring of support comes in the days immediately after the tragedy, disaster victims say, as government officials mobilize along with the business and nonprofit communities. But sometimes that focus wanes.

After the Waldo Canyon fire, Moore and her neighbors leaned on each other repeatedly, she said, whether for help or just a hug when they visited to dig through ashes. Another resident, Carol Lyn Lucas, said she helped organize a support group that met regularly during the recovery period, called Wonderful Waldo Women.

Simon, the CU Denver professor, said the fire victims who have social networks they can rely on tend to be more resilient. He raised a worry about the new Boulder County victims, given that Denver’s suburbs attract new arrivals.

“In many respects, it¶¶Òőap the recent transplants to Denver who are the most at risk and whom we should be paying attention to,” he said. “Because they don’t have that kind of social capital built up,” at least not locally.

Walsh says that after the well-wishes die down, people still need support — and encouraging words.

“It’s helpful when people touch base and say, ‘we’re checking on you,'” Walsh said. And instead of asking people if they’re going to rebuild, she suggested, simply ask how they’re doing, how they’re coping.

“It’s a higher level of humanity,” she said.

Rebuilding at last — but where?

Building a new home is a hard-won step that puts recovery within sight, past survivors say. When that happens can vary widely. After the Waldo Canyon fire, the first building permit was pulled in 29 days, said Eddie Hurt, who led the Mountain Shadows Community Association during the recovery period.

But it took as long as five years to rebuild, he said.

Clearing the debris was a Herculean effort, he and other residents recalled, one made easier by a task force called Colorado Springs Together, convened by the city’s mayor, that was able to speed up the demolition process by cutting red tape. The same group mobilized public and private resources to help residents in many other ways, too. And then for years, dozens of builders were at work on the neighborhoods’ winding streets, including some where nearly every house had burned.

“Ten years later, our neighborhood’s been not only rebuilt but it¶¶Òőap been restored,” Hurt said, adding: “You drive through our neighborhood today, and if you don’t look up at the mountainside, you wouldn’t know there was a fire. I like the neighborhood better — I think the people who stayed have deeper relationships. A lot of the people who moved in tended to be younger families, with kids who brought some new energy.”

He estimated that roughly three in four families stayed, far more than community leaders had expected based on fires elsewhere. The new homes were built with more fire-resistant materials, sometimes due to rewritten covenants.

In 2014, two years after the fire, The Gazette newspaper reported that the new homes built so far were nearly 14% larger, on average, than the ones they replaced. In some cases, streets of tract homes built off the same templates were replaced by hodgepodges of custom homes.

“I was back in my new house in 15 months,” said Moore, a widow who had managed to grab her husband’s ashes when she fled the fire. “I knew I was going to rebuild the same house. I did not want to move. I love my neighborhood. Several of us were military families who had retired, and we took care of each other.”

Others decided it was time for a change, including Lucas and her husband, Jim, who spent 22 years in their house until it was incinerated in an afternoon. Both nearing retirement age, they built a ranch-style house several miles away, one with a view of Pikes Peak.

Regardless of where it was, they said building a house from scratch, using the insurance payout, offered a chance to design it to fit their needs.

Thinking about the Marshall fire’s victims, Lucas, now 68 and still a real-estate agent, said: “Everybody just needs to get through this tough time, nose to the grindstone. I mean, I cried and cried and cried, every day, and I don’t cry easily. I was broken open. And then one day, it just was over — and the crying stopped.”

She said the couple has built new memories in their new home in the years since.

“I wish I could say to those people, you’re going to be fine — I know it seems like now you don’t have anything, but you will get through this,” Lucas said. “You will not just survive. You will thrive again.”

Tips for starting a disaster insurance claim

Tom Henderson, head of the Burg Simpson law firm’s bad-faith insurance division, detailed wildfire victims should take to initiate and solidify a claim for a destroyed home:

• Immediately contact your insurer to open a claim.
• As soon as possible, take pictures and videos of your property.
• Ask your insurance for a complete copy of your policy, not just your most recent declarations page.
• Ask your insurance company for an advance, which helps you get temporary housing, buy clothes or a laptop to resume work. In fact, state law requires one in the case of a total loss of a primary home.
• Ask the insurance company what documents or information they need and how long to expect before action is taken on the claim.

1. Marshall fire, Boulder County ‱ 2021 — 991 homes

2. Black Forest fire, Colorado Springs ‱ 2013 — 489 homes

3. Waldo Canyon fire, Colorado Springs ‱ 2012 — 347 homes

4. East Troublesome fire, Grand County ‱ 2020 — 300+ homes

5. High Park fire, Larimer County ‱ 2012 — 259 homes

6. Cameron Peak fire, Walden ‱ 2020 — 224 homes

7. Fourmile Canyon fire, Boulder County ‱ 2010 — 169 homes

8. Spring Creek fire, Costilla and Huerfano counties ‱ 2018 — 141 homes

9. Hayman fire, Lake George ‱ 2002 — 133 homes

10. Iron Mountain fire, Cañon City ‱ 2002 — 106 homes

Colorado watched as the state’s population exploded, marijuana became legal, a beloved sports icon died and gay marriage became the norm. The state grieved over mass shootings and celebrated a Super Bowl.

And on the eve of a new decade, we can only imagine what’s next.

With that in mind, here’s a look back at some of the decade’s biggest news stories, as selected by the editors of The Denver Post:

Explosive growth and development

Colorado added nearly 800,000 people to its population over the decade, pushing it from under 5 million to above 5.7 million. The bulk of that gain came from people relocating to the state, rather than births, which are decreasing. Most newcomers settled in metro Denver and in a narrow band of counties from Larimer and Weld to the north to El Paso and Elbert in the south.

The construction industry, devastated in the housing crash the previous decade, has struggled to keep pace, and median home prices in metro Denver have doubled, one of the biggest gains in the nation. As Denver-area homes became less affordable, buyers moved up and down Interstate 25, making Fort Collins and Colorado Springs some of the hottest housing markets in the country.

In Denver, developers snapped up land and scraped off old homes and buildings to make room for luxury apartment buildings and row homes. Many long-time residents of Denver’s older and poorer neighborhoods have been dislocated, contributing to concerns about gentrification that weighed heavily in the last city election.

— Aldo Svaldi

Aurora theater shooting

Colorado remembers their names: Jonathan Blunk, A.J. Boik, Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Thomas Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Micayla Medek, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, Alex Matthew Sullivan, Alex Teves and Rebecca Ann Wingo.

Those are the 12 people killed on July 20, 2012, when a gunman opened fire in a crowded movie theater during a midnight screening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.” Another 70 people were wounded in the killing spree that happened in a decade that witnessed some of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history.

A jury found the killer guilty of murder in 2015, but spared him from the death penalty.

The shooting would have significant political ramifications in Colorado. State lawmakers passed a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines and approved mandatory background checks for private and online gun sales. Those laws continue to be controversial and challenged by gun rights groups. Tom Sullivan, the father of Alex Sullivan, who was killed inside the theater, was elected in 2018 to the Colorado House of Representatives.

— Noelle Phillips

Advancements in equality

Hours after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Utah’s ban on gay marriage in June 2014, Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of then-Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. Suthers failed to stop Hall, and pretty soon, Denver and Pueblo counties began issuing licenses to same-sex couples.

In July 2014, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered Boulder County to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. But by October of that year, the state high court legalized gay marriage across Colorado — and the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit in 2015.

Same-sex marriage became part of the normal fabric of the community. In 2018, Coloradans elected Jared Polis, the country’s first openly gay governor, and welcomed First Gentleman Marlon Reis into the governor’s mansion.

The fight over a balance between LGBTQ rights and religious freedoms dragged on. In 2012, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips refused to bake a wedding cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins. The couple sued, and the case eventually went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Phillips’ favor, saying the Colorado Civil Rights Commission failed to act as a neutral party in the dispute.

— Noelle Phillips

Marijuana legalization

Stoners everywhere celebrated in 2012 when Colorado voters blazed the trail for legal recreational marijuana. Colorado not only became the first state to legalize pot, but it became the only place in the world with such a liberal policy on pot sales.

Since Amendment 64 passed in 2012, Colorado businesses have sold more than $6 billion worth of weed and related products, and the state has collected more than $1 billion in tax revenue.

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have followed Colorado’s lead.

Being a trailblazer, though, means being the first to encounter big questions: Just how much THC should be in one serving of an edible; how should pesticides be regulated; does legal weed mean a spike in traffic deaths; where can businesses deposit their money. Meanwhile, the federal government still says marijuana is illegal.

— Noelle Phillips

Transportation growing pains

With the addition of nearly 800,000 newcomers to the state, government planners had to figure out a way to keep them moving. Officials turned to rail, toll roads and more airport gates to alleviate congestion, and they found controversy at almost every turn.

An express toll lane on U.S. 36 opened in March 2016 between Denver and Boulder, and a toll lane is under construction on a heavily traveled stretch of Interstate 25 just south of Castle Rock known as The Gap.

Federal, state and local officials broke ground in January on a $1.2 billion, 10-mile Interstate 70 upgrade through Denver that will build new bridges, add lanes and adjust the interstate’s path by eliminating a two-mile viaduct between Colorado and Brighton boulevards. The project was opposed by residents in the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, who worried about pollution, noise and ultimately gentrification of their neighborhoods once the project is complete.

Denver International Airport announced two projects: It will add 39 gates at a cost of $1.5 billion and it will expand its terminal in a project that will exceed $650 million. The terminal project has overrun its projected cost amid a fight with the original lead contractor, a lengthy delay and the selection of a new company to lead the construction.

Finally, RTD expanded its train lines, opening the University of Colorado A-Line’s 23-mile route in April 2016 that connects downtown Denver to DIA. The G-Line was overdue when it finally started running in April between Denver, Adams County, Arvada and Wheat Ridge. The starts were less than perfect, with construction overruns, problems with gate crossings and delays that frustrated travelers.

— Noelle Phillips

Oil and gas regulation

While Colorado’s economy chugged along, the oil and gas industry remained a critical, albeit controversial, piece of the pie. Whether it was an up-and-down oil market, fracking in neighborhoods or defining the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission’s mission, the industry dominated business news.

By the end of the decade, natural resources and mining represented $13.1 billion of the state’s gross domestic product and made up 1% of the state’s jobs. In the past decade, crude oil production topped $10 billion at its peak in 2017, up from $2.3 billion in 2010. Natural gas production ended the decade just below $5 billion, down from almost $7 billion in 2010, according to the 2020 Colorado Business Economic Outlook produced by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business.

But Coloradans grappled with the health, environmental and public safety impacts of natural gas extraction and drilling.

Earlier this year, Colorado officials announced their intention to toughen oversight after a scientific study found operations could expose people to unhealthy levels of benzene and other chemicals. In 2017, a fatal home explosion in Firestone killed two people and injured another because gas was seeping through a cut-off underground pipeline into the house. That incident forced an audit ofÌę A found that at least 51 oil and gas workers were killed on the job between 2003 and 2014, amid lax industry oversight.

— Noelle Phillips

Women in sports

From Olympic podiums in Canada, Brazil and Russia to the wrestling mats at Denver’s Pepsi Center, Colorado’s female athletes pushed the boundaries of excellence.

The world watched Vail’s Lindsey Vonn became one of Alpine skiing’s all-time greats, while fellow skier Mikaela Shiffrin became the youngest slalom champion in the sport¶¶Òőap history.

Domination didn’t end on the slopes. Centennial’s Missy Franklin set world records in the pool, Golden’s Lindsey Horan took home the National Women’s Soccer League MVP trophy, and she and Littleton’s Mallory Pugh helped the U.S. women’s national soccer team win the 2019 FIFA World Cup. Boulder middle-distance runners Jenny Simpson and Emma Coburn pushed the U.S. women’s track and field team to new heights in the Olympic games.

As veterans like Vonn retire, the next generation of Colorado stars are ready to shine. Regis Jesuit¶¶Òőap Fran Belibi dazzled the nation with one-handed power dunks on the basketball court while Valley High School’s Angel Rios and Skyview High School’s Jasslyn Gallegos shattered wrestling’s glass ceiling.

— Sam Tabachnik

Devastating wildfires

Colorado’s renowned forests are a statewide treasure that can all too quickly turn to kindling. And as the state’s climate shifts toward greater aridity, the decade has seen some of Colorado’s most devastating fires, which consumed lives, homes and natural habitats.Ìę

In June 2013, the Black Forest wildfire in Colorado Springs became the most destructive fire in Colorado history, scorching 14,280 acres, burning 489 homes and killing two people. The blaze caused an estimated $420.5 million in property destruction.Ìę

The state’s second-most destructive fire, the Waldo Canyon fire, came a year earlier, killing two people and wiping out 347 Colorado Springs homes. And the decade opened with the Fourmile Canyon fire in Boulder County, which destroyed 169 homes in 2010 — and that, too, was the state’s most destructive fire at the time.

Then in the summer of 2018, the Spring Creek FireÌęravaged more than 108,000 acres of Costilla and Huerfano counties, and aÌęcoal-fired train operated by a historical railroad started the 416 wildfire that burned more than 50,000 acres north of Durango.

Experts blamed extreme drought conditions for making 2018 one of the most destructive fire seasons in the state’s history, but 2019 was much milder thanks to large amounts of snow in the mountains.

— Elizabeth Hernandez

The Broncos and the Bowlens

On Feb. 7, 2016, minutes after the Denver Broncos defeated the Carolina Panthers to win the team’s third Super Bowl, president and general manager John Elway grabbed the Lombardi trophy and declared, “This one’s for Pat.”

The touching tribute was an ode to owner Pat Bowlen, who in 2014 gave up day-to-day control of the team because of his Alzheimer’s disease. Although he wasn’t able to be in the stands to see his team win Super Bowl 50, “Mr. B” was omnipresent, the guiding presence for four decades of team success.

But as Bowlen disappeared from public eye, the team struggled to regain its championship glory. Since Peyton Manning’s retirement, the Broncos have missed the playoffs four consecutive years and finished the last three season with losing records.

On June 13, Bowlen died at the age of 75. Team ownership remains a question as the Bowlen family engages in a bitter, public battle for control. A three-person board of trustees oversees the team, and will pick Bowlen’s successor. And as the decade comes to a close, there is no sign that any of Bowlen’s children has a clear path to succeed their father.

— Sam Tabachnik

Changing telecom industry

An iconic Colorado phone company evaporated in 2011 when CenturyLink acquired Qwest in a $24 billion deal. The merger created the country’s third-largest landline phone company that employed 47,500 people and served 15 million phone and 5 million broadband customers in 37 states.

Qwest was founded by Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz and invested heavily in building fiber-optic internet infrastructure. Its growth was fueled by a mega-merger of its own in 2000 when it absorbed US West, the Denver-based progeny of the antitrust breakup of AT&T, in a $45 billion deal.

After the CenturyLink deal, Qwest¶¶Òőap bright blue sign was removed from its 52-story downtown skyscraper, and in 2011 the building at 1801 California St. was sold for $215 million.

The merger was part of shifting communications landscape as more people dropped landlines in favor of mobile phones and companies gobbled up each other to expand their networks across the country.

As a new decade dawns, Douglas County-based Dish Network is poised to reestablish the Front Range as a telecom hub. If a T-Mobile-Sprint merger is finalized, Dish (and its stockpile of wireless spectrum) has been approved to become the country’s fourth major mobile phone service provider.

— Noelle Phillips and Joe Rubino

Flood of 2013

The clouds swelled in September 2013, dropping a five-day deluge of rain across two dozen counties along Colorado’s Front Range. Rivers overflowed. Homes flooded. Roadways crumbled.

Nearly a year’s worth of precipitation pounded the state in less than a week, causing a that was deemed Colorado’s costliest natural disaster with damage reaching $4 billion.

Nine people died, more than 1,800 homes were lost, almost 500 miles of roads were shut down and more than 1,000 people had to be rescued and evacuated by helicopter.ÌęMore than 17 inches of rainfall cut access to entire communities including Jamestown, Lyons and Estes Park.

The flood re-shaped entire towns and neighborhoods, displacing thousands of Coloradans and prompting upward of $2 billion in federal, state and local money allocated toward recovery efforts.

— Elizabeth Hernandez

The beer industry

Changes brewed in the Colorado beer industry over the last decade — and, in particular, this past year.

Coors, a 147-year-old company, made Chicago its new headquarters, leaving its Golden brewery as its major presence back home. New Belgium Brewing, the largest craft brewer in the state and the third-largest in the country, sold to an international conglomerate. And Colorado’s oldest craft brewery, Boulder Beer, planned to shrink from distribution across 34 states to solely selling pints out of a local brewpub — until Denver-based contract brewer Sleeping Giant swooped in, keeping Boulder Beer on shelves.Ìę

And longtime Colorado residents now only have fond memories of beer with 3.2% alcohol by volumeÌęafter Jan. 1, when 1,600 grocery and convenience stores across Colorado were allowed to sell full-strength beer for the first time since Prohibition.Ìę

Looking back on the 2010s, sales to private equity or big beer, growth in specialty brewpubs and second taprooms were other common themes. Starting in 2015, Fireman Capital invested an undisclosed amount in Longmont-based Oskar Blues, and Anheuser-Busch InBev bought out Breckenridge Brewing. Then Denver’s founding Wynkoop Brewing in 2016 stopped all of its retail sales. By 2017, Boulder’s Avery Brewing had sold a 30% stake to Spain’s Mahou San Miguel (). Meanwhile, cash infusions and competition led to Colorado breweries opening taprooms as far afield as North Carolina or closer to home in Denver, as was the case for Oskar Blues, New Belgium, Odell and now Ska Brewing.

For all the upheaval, Colorado still ranks second-highest in the U.S. with 396 active craft breweries, based on the . We also rank first for craft beer’s economic impact. Ìę

— Josie Sexton

Updated Dec. 31, 2019, at 3:47 p.m. Because of an error by a reporter, the original version of this story misidentified one of the two major wireless carriers that are looking to merge. T-Mobile is the company seeking to acquire Sprint. Also, in the section about the Aurora theater shooting, John Thomas Larimer’s last name was left out.

The insurer, Allstate, had concluded — after an assessor visited the property — that the house was too likely to be destroyed by a wildfire. Cook, a tech executive and recent transplant from the San Francisco Bay Area, said his reaction was something like, “Wait, what?!”

Mortgage companies require homes to be insured, so the cancellation put Cook’s financing at risk. He worried that getting another major insurer to sign off on the home would be more challenging after one had turned him down.

He’s not alone. As more and deadlier fires sweep through Western states, it¶¶Òőap becoming harder to get home insurance on a property surrounded by forest, reachable only by back roads, or on slopes where a wildfire is likely to run.

While most homeowners in fire-prone places can still get policies, insurers often make coverage conditional on homeowners managing trees and undergrowth. And some might get denied by several insurers before finding one willing to take on the risk.

States and counties are beginning to step up their efforts to help homeowners make their properties as safe as possible.

The challenge is most acute in California, where catastrophic wildfires in 2018 caused more than $9 billion in losses to insured property, according to the state Department of Insurance. The Camp fire that blazed through the town of Paradise and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes drove a small, local insurer into insolvency.

California’s insurance department doesn’t have hard numbers on how many homes have been denied insurance because companies aren’t required to report that information, said press secretary Nancy Kincaid.

But since 2014, more than 15,000 homes in medium or extreme fire-risk areas have turned to the state’s lender of last resort, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, which insurance companies created to serve people unable to find coverage elsewhere. Premiums also are rising in high-risk areas, Kincaid said.

Scientists expect wildfire danger to increase as the climate changes, according to the latest federal climate report. Meanwhile, more people than ever live in forested areas, with millions of homes threatened in California, Colorado and Texas, according to Verisk Analytics, a company that models wildfire risk for insurers.

“The (California) commissioner remains concerned,” Kincaid said, “that between climate change, and drought, and the way and where we built homes, that we’re going to see a growing trend of nonrenewals.”

Homeowners can reduce risk, however, by removing fire hazards. In Boulder, Cook’s broker told him that he likely could get Allstate’s underwriters to reconsider if he worked with a nationally regarded Boulder County program to remove problem trees and brush.

The program, Wildfire Partners, helps people create what foresters call “defensible space” around their homes by lopping off low tree limbs, removing leaves from gutters, and taking other steps that make it harder for fire to travel.

The program’s coordinator, Jim Webster, wants homeowners ultimately to think of mitigation as another form of home maintenance, he said. “It¶¶Òőap becoming more and more standard, and the expectation of living in the wildland-urban interface.”

Insuring homes in a fire-prone place

Insurance companies now use satellite data to assess fire risk at a given location. Verisk’s FireLine tool, for instance, weighs factors such as topography, vegetation, wind patterns and accessibility — because homes are safer if it¶¶Òőap easier for firefighters to get there.

When a potential customer calls Truett Forrest, a State Farm agent in the Colorado mountain town of Pagosa Springs, he plugs their address into his company’s wildfire risk rating tool. The algorithm puts the home in one of three categories: no concerns, high risk or extreme risk.

Forrest estimates that about 10 percent to 15 percent of properties land in the third category, a classification that means State Farm won’t provide insurance.

“It doesn’t matter if they cut every tree and bush on their property, we would not insure it because of where it sits,” he said.

Houses judged to be at high risk — the second category — can get insurance if the owners take steps to protect their property, such as clearing brush and taking piles of firewood off their deck.

“For most homeowners, it¶¶Òőap affordable,” said Bill Trimarco, the Archuleta County coordinator for Wildfire Adapted Partnership, a nonprofit that helps property owners in Pagosa Springs, the county seat, plan and pay for wildfire mitigation work.

Trimarco estimates that treating a 150-foot radius around a house typically costs less than $2,500. That¶¶Òőap “less than a new heater, if it broke.” At least one insurer, USAA, gives discounts to homeowners who live in a Firewise USA community.

The designation from the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association affirms residents have reduced their fire risk. There are 1,500 Firewise communities nationally, according to the association.

But mitigation is time consuming and somewhat subjective, some experts say. Many variables determine why one house burns and another doesn’t.

Homeowners can end up getting advice from an expert like Trimarco that contradicts that of an assessor sent by their insurer to look at the property. They also might hear different things from the same insurer over time, as risk models and underwriting standards evolve.

Forrest said his own home was formerly classified by State Farm as an extreme fire risk. The company doesn’t drop current customers in very risky areas, but if Forrest had sold the home, the new buyer likely would have been denied State Farm insurance. His home is now classified as high risk, he said, thanks to a 2017 update to the company’s risk analysis software.

The Wildfire Partners approach

Since 1993, Boulder County has required everyone who builds a house on the western side of the county — where the city ends and the Rocky Mountains begin — to do wildfire mitigation work. After the 2010 Fourmile Canyon fire tore through 169 homes in the foothills, county land use officials decided they needed to step up mitigation efforts.

They created the Wildfire Partners program in 2014 in response, to clear up confusion about mitigation best practices and push more homeowners to take part.

The Wildfire Partners program is staffed by forestry and fire protection experts and advised by insurance companies, including Allstate, that have pledged to accept certificates earned by families who complete work on their property.

The program has two employees and several contractors, and is funded by a mix of county money and about $2.6 million in state and federal grants. It¶¶Òőap open to residents who are required to participate and those who are not. Close to 1,900 homeowners have received advice so far.

After Cook got the letter ending his insurance, he called Wildfire Partners for help. Within a week a specialist was at his property, walking around the house and the forested mountainside behind it, pointing out problems.

“I was prepared for ‘Oh, you’ll have to clear-cut everything,’ ” Cook said. He was advised, instead, to keep a healthy distance between trees and cut back saplings and brush pressing up against them, which both reduces the chance of a dangerous fire and allows the savanna-like grassland among the pines to flourish.

The specialist later sent Cook a to-do list — mostly cutting back long grass that was creeping up to his back patio and removing some nearby bushes and trees — which Cook hired the local fire protection district to complete. The work cost $1,100, but Cook paid only $500, thanks to a subsidy from Wildfire Partners. The program paid for the visit from the specialist, too.

When the work was done, Cook received a certificate of completion and submitted it to Allstate. It had taken weeks of stress, peppered by threatening letters to him from his mortgage lender, but thanks to the certificate, his insurance was reinstated.

Without Wildfire Partners, “I’m not sure what the answer would have been,” he said, standing on his back patio one sunny morning as his two dogs snuffled in the pine woodland beyond. Maybe he would have had to hire an expert to give the insurance company a second opinion, he said. Or get an expensive insurance policy from a bottom-tier company.

Cook’s mortgage broker didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Tanya Robinson, a communications consultant for Allstate, said in a statement that, generally, the insurer requires defensible space to be created and managed in high-risk areas. The company uses the Colorado State Forest Service’s guidelines to identify issues, and the customer needs to address those issues to continue their coverage, she said.

Planning for the future

Some researchers who study businesses’ response to climate change say insurers should be doing much more to prevent people from living in areas where fire danger is severe. “At some point, insurance companies have to adapt. It has to happen,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

And some policymakers say the government should be cracking down. Given the intensity of recent fires in California and the likelihood that such blazes will continue to tear through communities, localities should consider banning home construction in some areas, California’s top firefighter told The Associated Press last month.

“We’ve got to continue to raise the bar on what we’re doing, and local land use planning decisions have to be part of that discussion,” said Ken Pimlott, director of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He also suggested updating wildfire warning systems and making buildings more fireproof, particularly those that may shelter evacuees after a disaster.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, in 2013 convened a task force on wildfire insurance. The group of local, state and federal officials and representatives from the insurance, mortgage and homebuilding industries recommended that the state rate homes’ wildfire risk from 1 to 10.

It also suggested sharing that information with insurers and homebuyers, creating a statewide mitigation program, and charging a fee to homeowners in high-risk areas.

Homebuilders opposed the risk rating idea, arguing that it was tantamount to placing a “scarlet letter” on a home and that it was unnecessary, said Ted Leighty, CEO of the Colorado Association of Homebuilders. “We don’t necessarily think a rating needs to happen from the government. It¶¶Òőap already happening, through insurance underwriting.”

But policymakers also face pressure from residents, homebuilders and insurers who don’t want to disrupt the property market or leave some people trapped in uninsurable homes.

“When you put a number 10 on a house, it can change the game. In a lot of cases, it could make property unsellable,” Amie Mayhew, then the head of the Colorado Association of Homebuilders, told The Denver Post after the task force released its report.

The task force recommendations didn’t result in any legislation, although Hickenlooper in 2013 did sign a separate bill that addressed insurance issues such as replacement coverage in a bid to help disaster survivors. Meanwhile, about half of Coloradans now live close to or within areas at risk of wildfire, according to the state Forest Service’s latest assessment. That¶¶Òőap 2.9 million people.

In California, advocates for property owners are pressuring lawmakers to help people find and keep their insurance, but want to avoid shaking a market that still works for most people.

“We are trying not to use the word crisis, because we’re trying to keep the insurance industry calm,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a group that advocates for consumers.

New building codes in California

California lawmakers have in recent years passed a slew of legislation intended to help homeowners. A law passed in September prohibits insurers from canceling policies for one year after a declaration of a state of emergency solely because a residence is in or near the emergency zone.

The state since 2005 has required homeowners in high-risk areas to maintain a 100-foot defensible space around their homes. Since 2008 it has required them to use fire-resistant methods, such as installing vents that won’t trap embers, in new home construction.

But the new building codes don’t apply to existing homes, said Yana Valachovic, a forest adviser at the University of California cooperative extension in Humboldt. And the defensible space rules don’t focus enough on landscaping immediately around a home, she said.

Grassroots efforts such as Wildfire Partners are a better approach than top-down state regulations, its director Webster said, because communities all face slightly different situations.

For instance, the individual home certification model doesn’t work in places where homes are packed tightly together, he said. In those cases, what neighbors do to address risk matters, and it makes more sense for the entire development to work on mitigation together.

Defensible space isn’t guaranteed to stop a fire from consuming a home, particularly if that blaze is a fast-moving inferno like the one that swept through Paradise. But many communities across the West are hoping that a more coordinated approach to mitigation will help reduce their risk.

One other Colorado county and a six-county region in the state have programs like Wildfire Partners, and Trimarco’s group in Pagosa Springs would like to set up something similar in southwest Colorado. Webster is now getting calls and emails from officials in California who want to learn more about the program.

Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association, a Colorado-based industry group, says she has talked to local leaders who want to replicate the program but can’t afford to.

Homeowners, local governments, and state and federal governments have a role to play in encouraging and funding the work, she said. “It¶¶Òőap a dangerous situation. It needs to be addressed, from a public safety standpoint.”

While some homeowners resist the idea that they need to cut down trees on their property, many are happy to spend a little extra money to keep their families safe. “I’m glad we had to go through the process,” Cook said, “because I know a lot more about how to keep things prepped.”

Sophie Quinton is a staff writer at Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

The insurer, Allstate, had concluded — after an assessor visited the property — that the house was too likely to be destroyed by a wildfire. Cook, a tech executive and recent transplant from the San Francisco Bay Area, said his reaction was something like, “Wait, what?!”

Mortgage companies require homes to be insured, so the cancellation put Cook’s financing at risk. He worried that getting another major insurer to sign off on the home would be more challenging after one had turned him down.

He’s not alone. As more and deadlier fires sweep through Western states, it¶¶Òőap becoming harder to get home insurance on a property surrounded by forest, reachable only by back roads, or on slopes where a wildfire is likely to run.

While most homeowners in fire-prone places can still get policies, insurers often make coverage conditional on homeowners managing trees and undergrowth. And some might get denied by several insurers before finding one willing to take on the risk.

States and counties are beginning to step up their efforts to help homeowners make their properties as safe as possible.

The challenge is most acute in California, where catastrophic wildfires in 2018 caused more than to insured property, according to the state Department of Insurance. The Camp fire that blazed through the town of Paradise and drove a .

California’s insurance department doesn’t have hard numbers on how many homes have been denied insurance because companies aren’t required to report that information, said press secretary Nancy Kincaid.

But since 2014, more than 15,000 homes in medium or extreme fire-risk areas have turned to the state’s lender of last resort, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, which insurance companies created to serve people unable to find coverage elsewhere. Premiums also are rising in high-risk areas, Kincaid said.

Scientists expect wildfire danger to increase as the climate changes, according to the . Meanwhile, more people than ever live in forested areas, with , according to Verisk Analytics, a company that models wildfire risk for insurers.

“The (California) commissioner remains concerned,” Kincaid said, “that between climate change, and drought, and the way and where we built homes, that we’re going to see a growing trend of nonrenewals.”

Homeowners can reduce risk, however, by removing fire hazards. In Boulder, Cook’s broker told him that he likely could get Allstate’s underwriters to reconsider if he worked with a nationally regarded Boulder County program to remove problem trees and brush.

The program, Wildfire Partners, helps people create what foresters call “defensible space” around their homes by lopping off low tree limbs, removing leaves from gutters, and taking other steps that make it harder for fire to travel.

The program’s coordinator, Jim Webster, wants homeowners ultimately to think of mitigation as another form of home maintenance, he said. “It¶¶Òőap becoming more and more standard, and the expectation of living in the wildland-urban interface.”

Insuring homes in a fire-prone place

Insurance companies now use satellite data to assess fire risk at a given location. Verisk’s FireLine tool, for instance, weighs factors such as topography, vegetation, wind patterns and accessibility — because homes are safer if it¶¶Òőap easier for firefighters to get there.

When a potential customer calls Truett Forrest, a State Farm agent in the Colorado mountain town of Pagosa Springs, he plugs their address into his company’s wildfire risk rating tool. The algorithm puts the home in one of three categories: no concerns, high risk or extreme risk.

Forrest estimates that about 10 percent to 15 percent of properties land in the third category, a classification that means State Farm won’t provide insurance.

“It doesn’t matter if they cut every tree and bush on their property, we would not insure it because of where it sits,” he said.

Houses judged to be at high risk — the second category — can get insurance if the owners take steps to protect their property, such as clearing brush and taking piles of firewood off their deck.

“For most homeowners, it¶¶Òőap affordable,” said Bill Trimarco, the Archuleta County coordinator for Wildfire Adapted Partnership, a nonprofit that helps property owners in Pagosa Springs, the county seat, plan and pay for wildfire mitigation work.

Trimarco estimates that treating a 150-foot radius around a house typically costs less than $2,500. That¶¶Òőap “less than a new heater, if it broke.” At least one insurer, USAA, gives discounts to homeowners who live in a Firewise USA community.

The designation from the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association affirms residents have reduced their fire risk. There are 1,500 Firewise communities nationally, according to the association.

But mitigation is time consuming and somewhat subjective, some experts say. Many variables determine why one house burns and another doesn’t.

Homeowners can end up getting advice from an expert like Trimarco that contradicts that of an assessor sent by their insurer to look at the property. They also might hear different things from the same insurer over time, as risk models and underwriting standards evolve.

Forrest said his own home was formerly classified by State Farm as an extreme fire risk. The company doesn’t drop current customers in very risky areas, but if Forrest had sold the home, the new buyer likely would have been denied State Farm insurance. His home is now classified as high risk, he said, thanks to a 2017 update to the company’s risk analysis software.

The Wildfire Partners approach

Since 1993, Boulder County has required everyone who builds a house on the western side of the county — where the city ends and the Rocky Mountains begin — to do wildfire mitigation work. After the 2010 Fourmile Canyon fire tore through 169 homes in the foothills, county land use officials decided they needed to step up mitigation efforts.

They created the Wildfire Partners program in 2014 in response, to clear up confusion about mitigation best practices and push more homeowners to take part.

The Wildfire Partners program is staffed by forestry and fire protection experts and advised by insurance companies, including Allstate, that have pledged to accept certificates earned by families who complete work on their property.

The program has two employees and several contractors, and is funded by a mix of county money and about $2.6 million in state and federal grants. It¶¶Òőap open to residents who are required to participate and those who are not. Close to 1,900 homeowners have received advice so far.

After Cook got the letter ending his insurance, he called Wildfire Partners for help. Within a week a specialist was at his property, walking around the house and the forested mountainside behind it, pointing out problems.

“I was prepared for ‘Oh, you’ll have to clear-cut everything,’ ” Cook said. He was advised, instead, to keep a healthy distance between trees and cut back saplings and brush pressing up against them, which both reduces the chance of a dangerous fire and allows the savanna-like grassland among the pines to flourish.

The specialist later sent Cook a to-do list — mostly cutting back long grass that was creeping up to his back patio and removing some nearby bushes and trees — which Cook hired the local fire protection district to complete. The work cost $1,100, but Cook paid only $500, thanks to a subsidy from Wildfire Partners. The program paid for the visit from the specialist, too.

When the work was done, Cook received a certificate of completion and submitted it to Allstate. It had taken weeks of stress, peppered by threatening letters to him from his mortgage lender, but thanks to the certificate, his insurance was reinstated.

Without Wildfire Partners, “I’m not sure what the answer would have been,” he said, standing on his back patio one sunny morning as his two dogs snuffled in the pine woodland beyond. Maybe he would have had to hire an expert to give the insurance company a second opinion, he said. Or get an expensive insurance policy from a bottom-tier company.

Cook’s mortgage broker didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Tanya Robinson, a communications consultant for Allstate, said in a statement that, generally, the insurer requires defensible space to be created and managed in high-risk areas. The company uses the Colorado State Forest Service’s guidelines to identify issues, and the customer needs to address those issues to continue their coverage, she said.

Planning for the future

Some researchers who study businesses’ response to climate change say insurers should be doing much more to prevent people from living in areas where fire danger is severe. “At some point, insurance companies have to adapt. It has to happen,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

And some policymakers say the government should be cracking down. Given the intensity of recent fires in California and the likelihood that such blazes will continue to tear through communities, localities should consider banning home construction in some areas, California’s top firefighter .

“We’ve got to continue to raise the bar on what we’re doing, and local land use planning decisions have to be part of that discussion,” said Ken Pimlott, director of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He also suggested updating wildfire warning systems and making buildings more fireproof, particularly those that may shelter evacuees after a disaster.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, in 2013 convened a task force on wildfire insurance. The group of local, state and federal officials and representatives from the insurance, mortgage and homebuilding industries recommended that the state rate homes’ wildfire risk from 1 to 10.

It also suggested sharing that information with insurers and homebuyers, creating a statewide mitigation program, and charging a fee to homeowners in high-risk areas.

Homebuilders opposed the risk rating idea, arguing that it was tantamount to placing a “scarlet letter” on a home and that it was unnecessary, said Ted Leighty, CEO of the Colorado Association of Homebuilders. “We don’t necessarily think a rating needs to happen from the government. It¶¶Òőap already happening, through insurance underwriting.”

But policymakers also face pressure from residents, homebuilders and insurers who don’t want to disrupt the property market or leave some people trapped in uninsurable homes.

“When you put a number 10 on a house, it can change the game. In a lot of cases, it could make property unsellable,” Amie Mayhew, then the head of the Colorado Association of Homebuilders, told The Denver Post after the task force released its report.

The task force recommendations didn’t result in any legislation, although Hickenlooper in 2013 did sign a separate bill that addressed insurance issues such as replacement coverage in a bid to help disaster survivors. Meanwhile, about half of Coloradans now live close to or within areas at risk of wildfire, . That¶¶Òőap 2.9 million people.

In California, advocates for property owners are pressuring lawmakers to help people find and keep their insurance, but want to avoid shaking a market that still works for most people.

“We are trying not to use the word crisis, because we’re trying to keep the insurance industry calm,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a group that advocates for consumers.

New building codes in California

California lawmakers have in recent years passed a slew of legislation intended to help homeowners. A law passed in September for one year after a declaration of a state of emergency solely because a residence is in or near the emergency zone.

The state since 2005 has required homeowners in high-risk areas to maintain a 100-foot defensible space around their homes. Since 2008 it has required them to use fire-resistant methods, such as installing vents that won’t trap embers, in new home construction.

But the new building codes don’t apply to existing homes, said Yana Valachovic, a forest adviser at the University of California cooperative extension in Humboldt. And the defensible space rules don’t focus enough on landscaping immediately around a home, she said.

Grassroots efforts such as Wildfire Partners are a better approach than top-down state regulations, its director Webster said, because communities all face slightly different situations.

For instance, the individual home certification model doesn’t work in places where homes are packed tightly together, he said. In those cases, what neighbors do to address risk matters, and it makes more sense for the entire development to work on mitigation together.

Defensible space isn’t guaranteed to stop a fire from consuming a home, particularly if that blaze is a fast-moving inferno like the . But many communities across the West are hoping that a more coordinated approach to mitigation will help reduce their risk.

One other Colorado county and a six-county region in the state have programs like Wildfire Partners, and Trimarco’s group in Pagosa Springs would like to set up something similar in southwest Colorado. Webster is now getting calls and emails from officials in California who want to learn more about the program.

Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association, a Colorado-based industry group, says she has talked to local leaders who want to replicate the program but can’t afford to.

Homeowners, local governments, and state and federal governments have a role to play in encouraging and funding the work, she said. “It¶¶Òőap a dangerous situation. It needs to be addressed, from a public safety standpoint.”

While some homeowners resist the idea that they need to cut down trees on their property, many are happy to spend a little extra money to keep their families safe.Ìę“I’m glad we had to go through the process,” Cook said, “because I know a lot more about how to keep things prepped.”

Sophie Quinton is a staff writer atÌę, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts