On Oct. 2-3, 251 attendees from across the American West converged on Snowmass Village for the 2024 Colorado Wildland Fire Conference (CWFC). The gathering, which was first held in the 1990s, occurs every 18 months. Host cities rotate around the State of Colorado to ground the conversation and the broad vulnerability to wildfires. Paul Cada is the Fire Adapted Colorado chairperson and the Wildland program manager for Vail Fire. He spoke with The Sopris Sun to share takeaways from this year’s conference.
Nationwide, CWFC is one of the longest-running state conferences for knowledge sharing. This year’s event saw record participation, with representation from almost every western state, and noticeable participation from California, New Mexico and Arizona, in addition to Colorado agencies. “I think that’s the cool part of a conference like this, it brings together agencies from different geographies,” Cada said. “We share a lot of similar challenges even if communities don’t look alike.” Each conference sees increased engagement with more attendees from government agencies and nonprofits.
CWFC addresses much more than the topic of managing active wildfires. With climate change and warming temperatures, Cada explained that this year’s event had conversations around insurance, insurability and preemptive mitigation in areas of human infrastructure. Given the increasing risks, fire insurance conversations have become a priority for major employers, from ski companies to Front Range tech companies to law enforcement. “Insurability is on everybody’s mind,” he said, noting that many of the new attendees have been representatives from government entities and private agencies seeking to learn from fire responders about best practices for community protection and decreasing infrastructure risks.
“The proactive things people do make a difference,” Cada said, both for actual safety and for insurance eligibility. The more coordinated preventative actions are, the better, he elaborated.
“Actions that extend across communities are more helpful for fire mitigation and insurance eligibility,” so people shouldn’t just be engaging with their immediate neighbors. It is more effective to work with neighborhoods, HOAs, caucuses, cities and counties.
”How do we create fire-adapted communities?” is one of the key questions considered at CWFC, Cada emphasized. Over the years, that question has evolved from the outdated policy of putting out all fires as quickly as possible. Due to that old policy, “Colorado has overall degraded forest quality from decades of mismanagement.” That is true for the entire North American West, Cada said, and in combination with increasing air temperatures, it makes those stressed forest ecosystems quite literally a tinder box for wildfire.
Fire agencies in recent years have been asking, “How do we let fire do what it should be doing on the landscape while minimizing negative impacts on people?” explained Cada. Some strategies wildfire groups have employed with success are confinement and big boxing in response to larger wildfires. After the initial critical fight with the Grizzly Creek Fire in 2020, these were the strategies applied, as troops let the fire expand across the landscape until it burned itself out, only intervening to protect human infrastructure.
On the preventative mitigation side, when agencies do pre-emptive burnouts and prescribed fires, it can help prevent catastrophic wildfires. Controlled burns in late winter and early spring, when the landscape is more saturated with water, can help fire function as an ecosystem service while stabilizing the danger to humans. Cada cites the Roaring Fork Valley as a watershed that has so far done a good job and seen good results from the burnout strategy.
It is important to remember that fire is a valuable part of the ecosystem, Cada said. Fire is the best regenerator for old stands of aspens and oak brush, and when wildfires consume accumulated ground fuel in dense coniferous forest, it helps vary ecosystems for wildlife. Wildlife generally need both dense stands of forest for shelter as well as open spaces for roaming, grazing and hunting. Fire agencies have learned the hard way that putting out fires when they’re easy to contain can sometimes create longer-term ecosystem issues.
In fact, Cada said, dense forest areas with significant ground fuel tend to see worse outcomes in wildfire because fires are higher intensity and spread to larger areas, doing more damage. The East Troublesome Fire is an example of what can happen when fire is prevented to the detriment of an ecosystem. When a wildfire occurs in such deteriorated forest, it is extremely difficult for fire agencies to mitigate.
These days, fire agencies are focused on protecting human communities first, then managing fires as feasible in hopes of big-picture ecosystem benefits. The ultimate question in a warmer climate, concluded Cada, is “how do we learn how to live with fire?”
You can learn more about proactive community fire mitigation and CWFC at www.fireadaptedco.org