The Town of Carbondale and the Carbondale and Rural Fire Protection District (CRFPD) have joined forces with the Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley (WCRFV) aiming to develop what will be the most detailed and accurate prediction of how a wildfire could affect our community. To implement this, they have teamed up with Dr. Hussam Mahmoud of Vanderbilt University, who has developed a highly sophisticated computerized wildfire modeling program.
In a Feb. 9 CRFPD press release announcing the endeavor, Carbondale Town Manager Ryan Hyland said, “This project represents a significant step forward in how Carbondale plans for wildfire,” adding that it will be “equipping Carbondale with better information to protect people, homes and critical infrastructure in a very real and growing risk environment.”
Wildfire risk
The Sopris Sun met recently (via Zoom) with CRFPD Chief Rob Goodwin, Deputy Chief Jenny Cutright and WCRFV Executive Director Angie Davlyn to discuss wildfire risk and the modeling project. Davlyn stated outright, “Where we live, everything is problematic. It’s hard for us to figure out where we should invest limited resources” to implement fire mitigation (e.g., prescribed burns, tree thinning) and slow a fast-moving fire.
Goodwin elaborated on current conditions: “For the last 18 months we’ve been in kind of drought mode. The soil moisture around here … is nonexistent.” Plant life is drought-stressed. He added, “This winter has been a double-whammy,” with low snow totals and warm and breezy conditions. The prospect of a hot, dry summer “is concerning for us.”
He plans to start wildland fire patrols possibly at the beginning of May (about a month early), utilizing more equipment and firefighters. He said, “We believe that if we can keep small fires small, then we won’t wind up on CNN.”
Davlyn again: “Traditionally, wildfire planning relies on risk maps that look at data that we have — vegetation, slope, fuels, wind, weather.” As useful as they are, “All of the critical parts, where all the people live … are treated as ‘urban areas,’ and they don’t show how wildfires move from home to home.”
Indeed, what they depict for these urban areas (including the map accompanying this article) typically is described as “Non-burnable/Developed.” That assumption has been resoundingly debunked by the recent horrific Marshall Fire on the Front Range and massive urban conflagrations in California and Hawaii. As Goodwin put it, “Most of our fire district is in the high-medium to high-risk [category] for wildfire,” notably Missouri Heights and the area surrounding Carbondale.
Goodwin has been fighting wildfires here “since 1987,” including the deadly Storm King fire in 1994. The Waldo Canyon subdivision fire outside of Colorado Springs in 2012, Goodwin said, “showed us something completely different.” Embers whipped down the canyon by high winds caught wooden fences connected to houses on fire, which then set the houses ablaze. “No one had thought of that; it was a complete surprise.” He noted that the subdivision was “almost exactly like River Valley Ranch.”
AGNI-NAR
Enter Dr. Mahmoud. His modeling program, called Asynchronous Graph Nexus Infrastructure for Network Assessment of Wildland-Urban Interface Risk (AGNI-NAR), has been shown to be nearly 90% accurate at predicting how fire can run through an urban area and the extent of structural damage it can cause.
Davlyn explained: “What Hussam’s work does is radically different from these other maps.” Utilizing his understanding on how fire can travel — connection, radiation and ember-spotting — he can build “a 3-D model of a community that is incredibly detailed,” including factors such as plotting thousands of ignition points. She added, “No other models that we have can do that.”
As the press release states, “Using advanced graph-based modeling, [AGNI-NAR] simulates how wildfire spreads, not only through surrounding vegetation but through neighborhoods, capturing how fire can move from structure to structure based on building materials, landscape conditions and environmental factors.”
Goodwin commented, “It allows us to better understand how … smoke will travel and where it will settle, where evacuation challenges may arise, and how targeted mitigation could slow fire spread. That kind of clarity directly supports much safer operations for first responders and significantly better outcomes for the community,” including, importantly, “a detailed and effective evacuation planning process.”
Wildfire survey
This modeling only works, however, if it has highly detailed information. To that end, the CRFPD has put together a short online survey (see the link below) and is strongly urging residents to fill it out. Cutright reminded people that the survey is in English and Spanish “to make sure that everyone takes the survey.” She emphasized that, “You don’t have to live in the Town of Carbondale to take the survey.” Those in the surrounding area should take it as well. And Davlyn added that the survey is “judgement free,” and that personal information will not be shared.
Davlyn said that about 250 people have taken it so far, and that a mailer will be going out soon. She continued, “Bottom line is that we are committed to getting to 100%,” which will include “home-to-home data collection if we need to.”
Once the data is collected, it will be sent to Dr. Mahmoud, who will incorporate it into a compilation of maps with different scenarios that are likely to start fires (e.g., lightning strikes, trucks dragging chains). As Davlyn put it, “We will have this incredibly robust picture of, almost regardless of ignition spot, how a fire would run through our community,” adding that the real value was in “help[ing] us identify which interventions produce the greatest reductions and fire spread.”
Although Goodwin doesn’t want to be a “fear-monger,” wildfire is “the biggest threat our community faces — period, paragraph, full stop.” He anticipates that the AGNI-NAR model will provide “real, effective areas and targets that we can mitigate around Carbondale,” noting that “practiced mitigation is the best thing we can do to preserve life and property.”
Survey data will be collected through April, with a report slated for release in December. This modeling work is already underway in Marble, Snowmass Village and parts of greater Glenwood Springs, and is also (concurrent with Carbondale) being done in Aspen.
Here is a link to the survey: www.bit.ly/Cdale-fire