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Can't see the forest for the homes

When wildfire comes to town, home values trump forest values

A favorite technique of wildland firefighters is to fight fire with fire.

They will find a safe barrier such as a river or a road and then light a backfire in the path of the main blaze, depriving it of fuel.

But when Rick Trembath, a veteran Montana firefighter, came to Durango to help manage the Missionary Ridge Fire in 2002, he couldn't use the technique.

“You couldn't burn out from a control line, because we had lots of houses in the way,” Trembath said.

He confronts this issue more and more often on the fires he manages each summer. Fighting fire in the wildland-urban interface – those zones where cities and their neighborhoods abut the forest – adds a new and troublesome element to his job.

“We're totally defensive with structures instead of being offensive,” Trembath said.

With the pace of rural homebuilding, it's a problem that has room to get much worse.

In the lingo of fire managers, they fight fires based on their risk to different “values” – watersheds, animal habitat, the forests themselves. More often than not these days, there's some kind of human value at risk, such as roads or subdivisions, said Dan Dallas, supervisor of Rio Grande National Forest and a Type II incident commander.

Fire managers will choose to protect houses instead of letting fire take its historic place on the landscape.

“In a lot of the West, we have created a situation where there isn't room for fire to play its role as the primary ecological disturbance agent, because we have human values in the way,” Dallas said.

For Dallas, it's a circular problem. Urban growth in the forest brings more aggressive firefighting and a buildup of fuels. But aggressive firefighting entices more people to move next door to the wilderness.

“We've created a situation where it's very difficult to get out of the circle,” he said.

Room for more

Although many people worry about how much of the wildlife-urban interface has been developed, Roy Rasker is worried about how much of it is left open to construction.

Rasker, an economist with Montana-based Headwaters Economics, estimates that 84 percent of the interface in the American West hasn't yet been occupied.

“Most of this land is not developed. We're only beginning to see how huge this problem is going to get,” Rasker said.

La Plata County is a slight exception. Using U.S. Census data, Rasker estimates that 51 percent of the county's interface is developed, placing it in the top 20 counties in the American West. Three out of four La Plata County residents live in the interface, according to a separate analysis by I-News, an investigative news nonprofit from Denver.

A quarter of Colorado's 5 million residents live in a fire-prone area, according to I-News.

Rasker estimates that 30 percent of the federal wildland fire budget is spent on protecting homes. That amounts to a billion-dollar yearly subsidy from federal taxpayers to builders and residents in the forest, he said.

“The fundamental problem behind why we keep building in dangerous places is the bulk of the costs are not borne by the people who make these decisions,” Rasker said. “There's no cost accountability at the local level.”

Rasker has suggested cutting the federal wildfire budget and forcing states and counties to shoulder more of the cost. That could give local governments the political cover to be stricter about forest development.

“They need to be able to say, 'We can't afford it.' But right now, it's the federal taxpayer subsidizing development,” Rasker said.

Mapping the red zone

The public is getting better information about the danger zones all the time. This spring, the Colorado State Forest Service released an online map that shows the highest-risk areas of the state, based on vegetation, nearby buildings, historic fires and many other factors.

The Colorado Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal uses color codes, from green to orange to red, to convey the threat.

It's just a tool and not the final word on wildfire safety, said Rich Homanns, who manages the mapping program.

“People have to know what risk is before they can make decisions,” Homanns said.

Twin Buttes, one of Durango's newest subdivisions, sits just downhill from a large patch of orange – denoting an elevated risk – on the wildfire risk map.

The developers, however, are trying to reduce the threat before they start building houses next spring, said Marc Snider, spokesman for the development.

The landowners gave 290 acres to the city for open space, and crews have been working all summer to clear out undergrowth and oak brush. Slash piles will be put through a wood chipper and removed, not left on the forest floor, Snider said.

Home sites will be clustered near the highway at the bottom of the hill, and the houses will use fire-resistant building materials where appropriate, he said.

Prospective homeowners already seem savvy about fire risks, Snider said.

“The majority of people we talk to ask what we're doing to manage it,” he said.

That's the kind of individual responsibility that firefighters want to see. More than anything, people who live near the forest need to get over a “911 mentality,” said Keith Worley, president of the Pikes Peak Wildfire Prevention Partners.

Worley saw 488 homes in his area burn in June's Black Forest Fire, and he was amazed at how many people thought air support should have been on the scene minutes after the fire started.

“It's like they're hovering, waiting, like you dial 911 and get your slurry bomber,” Worley said. “That is just absolutely unrealistic.”

jhanel@durangoherald.com

Complete wildfire coverage

For related articles, photo galleries, video, maps and a quiz to test your fire IQ, visit www.durangoherald.com/wildfires

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