With wildfires breaking records for acreage and destruction and insurance prices steadily climbing in recent years, firefighters are shifting their approach to fire management.
These days, it’s normal to see regular headlines about small lightning-sparked or other accidental wildfires being allowed to burn. Firefighters are present and active when this happens. Still, instead of smothering the flames as quickly as possible, they often focus on creating strategic blockades known as fire breaks. This entails removing enough foliage to prevent fire from spreading in certain directions, but allowing it to burn itself out in others.
Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District Chief Rob Goodwin and Public Information Officer Jenny Cutright shared details about this shift away from blanket fire suppression.
Goodwin, who has been with the fire district since 1987, has noticed significant changes in the character and destructiveness of fires in the Roaring Fork Valley — particularly in the past 10 years. While his career includes the tragic 1994 Storm King Fire, officially recorded as the South Canyon Fire, he emphasizes that the average scale of wildfires has increased, and not just because of climate change. While warming temperatures and beetle kill stands of forest are partially to blame for higher risk, Goodwin says, “the 150-plus years of full fire suppression set the stage for catastrophic fires.”
Fire departments and districts have been joining together to adapt techniques. New groups include the nonprofit Roaring Fork Valley Wildfire Collaborative, which brings together regional firefighters, city and county administrations, state agencies, the United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and think tanks to accelerate tactical shifts and community engagement. This style of harmonic management is needed given the scale of threat. “Fire management has been a problem,” Goodwin explained. “It took decades to create the problem and it will take decades to get out,” adding that fire departments are already multiple decades into the remedial strategy: adaptive mitigation.
“Mitigation works,” he said. “It’s as important or more important than suppression.” Cutright chimed in, “For example, last year’s Mountain Shadows fire [in Glenwood Springs]. The mitigation I had done on my property saved it and multiple others.”
What does mitigation mean, exactly? It is a toolbox of strategies that go far beyond suppression’s aim of putting out all fires as soon as possible. In Colorado, many agencies are wildland-urban interface fire departments. Their remit is to protect both human infrastructure and wilderness from excessive fire damage. In the case of neighborhoods and commercial areas, that means establishing fire perimeters around buildings and fire breaks between forest and towns or subdivisions. These gaps stall wildfires long enough for firefighters to combat flames and ideally prevent property loss.
An even higher priority mitigation step is identifying — and when necessary, creating — evacuation routes or
corridors. Many residential areas are reached by roads surrounded by dry brush species like gamble oak and sage. Such neighborhoods face a potential trap if a wildfire spreads in the area when mitigation corridors aren’t maintained around access roads. Individuals can engage support from their local fire agency to address threats like this. Private families to full HOAs or apartment complexes can contact Carbondale Fire or their town’s equivalent to request a free mitigation consultation. Goodwin explained, “We’ll come and walk your property with you, and then provide you recommendations of steps to take for protection.”
Goodwin and Cutright both elaborated that they hope to see more accountability and engagement from the general public. “We have a great group of firefighters and first responders,” Goodwin asserts, “but every one of us has a responsibility.” Cutright added that individuals should go beyond just thinning brush close to their homes: “Sign up for Reachwell and county alerts, including adjacent counties.” While firefighters aim to “keep small fires small” close to towns, that is much easier with grassroots engagement and proactive mitigation.
For proof of this, we can look at two of the Roaring Fork Valley’s largest and most recent fires, the 2018 Lake Christine Fire and the 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire. During the latter, said Goodwin, “the areas that had done mitigation in Spring Valley saw virtually no property loss. It’s an example of what should be done and a great success story.” He and Cutright agreed that the same was true along the eastern edge of Missouri Heights during the Lake Christine blaze.
On a larger scale, controlled burns and prescribed burns are forms of mitigation conducted in spring, when ecosystem moisture helps to limit risk during fire-based removal of excess brush and timber on ranches or at-risk sections of forest and public land, respectively. Prescribed burns have become more frequent as a means of preventing larger summertime wildfires.
Current fire management recommendations and area fire restrictions are available at www.rfvwildfire.org and www.carbondalefire.org in addition to other city and county-level agency sites. Contact your local fire department to request mitigation consultation.