Mitigating wildfire hazard in Colorado should be given high priority in the state budget, and it should be funded consistently over the long run. This will require the type of long-term funding program proposed by Sen. Ellen Roberts. Without recurrent, high-profile fires, it’s often easy for government to give wildfire mitigation – hazardous fuel treatments – low priority in the budget. However, as argued in a recent white paper by the three preeminent fire science organizations in North America – Association for Fire Ecology, International Association of Wildland Fire and The Nature Conservancy – failure to proactively mitigate wildfire hazard can lead to extremely high costs once a wildfire occurs.

Research shows that while fire suppression costs are high and only getting higher, it’s the other costs, such as human health effects, soil erosion, loss of business revenue, reduced property values, etc., that are having a huge and lasting effect on government budgets. These additional costs are often two to 32 times the suppression costs, affect all levels of government, and can occur up to a decade after the incident. Colorado has experienced this firsthand through a number of catastrophic wildfires followed by equally catastrophic rain events. Rain on severely burned soils is a recipe for a very expensive disaster – large-scale soil erosion, flood-damaged infrastructure and very expensive rehabilitation.

After one or two back-to-back quiet fire seasons, fire hazard mitigation often becomes a lower funding priority. A number of states and provinces in the West have ramped up mitigation funding following a catastrophic fire year only to see the funding cut a few years later. The systems needed to treat hazardous fuels, including large numbers of skilled contractors, barely develops before the funding disappears and the work dries up. The solution is to invest up front in reducing wildfire hazard at the landscape scale.

Robert W. Gray

Chilliwack, British Columbia

Daniel Godwin

Fort Collins

Leda Kobziar

Coeur D’Alene, Idaho

Editor’s note: Gray, Godwin and Kobziar are members of the Association for Fire Ecology’s policy committee.