A second consecutive year of below-average snowfall and above-average temperatures has firefighters across the Western United States concerned.
In La Plata County, fire departments are anticipating a particularly severe wildfire season.
“We’re set up for a really bad year,” said Durango Fire Protection District Chief Randy Black. “We thought last year was going to be bad, and this year’s looking worse.”
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, nearly the entire Western half of the United States is facing drought conditions because of a lack of snowfall.
Locally, snowpack in the San Juan Mountains is about 49% of the historical February average – levels similar to 2002 and 2018, when the Missionary Ridge and 416 fires ignited – according to the National Resource Conservation Service.
In a typical year, different regions across the West face heightened drought conditions heading into fire season. Because so much of the Western United States is already experiencing drought, wildfires could ignite across the region, stretching local, state and federal firefighting agencies thin as they work to protect communities and infrastructure.
Because of that, fire agencies in La Plata County are beginning to front-load resources ahead of the upcoming fire season. But preparing communities for wildfire requires more than equipping agencies with resources, Black said. That is where homeowners come in.
“You need to be taking advantage of this weather and be making your house as safe as possible,” he said.
Fire agencies and community nonprofits like Wildfire Adapted Partnerships will send certified staff members to a resident’s house and examine its risk. The home assessments are free of charge and can be a valuable tool to help people learn where to start on their home fire mitigation.
Paul Valdez, Upper Pine River Fire Protection District’s wildfire coordinator, has studied wildfires and how they interact with structures for years.
Contrary to popular belief, most homes that burn in wildfires are not engulfed by walls of flame, he said. Rather, they are ignited by hot embers.
Valdez said embers can remain hot for extended periods and travel long distances, eventually landing on or near homes. If they land on wooden decks, open-air carports, HVAC vents or gutters filled with dry leaves and pine needles, they can ignite a structure.
The Home Ignition Zone by the Colorado State Forest Service is a guide to creating defensible space around homes.
“Firefighters may not be present at your home during a wildfire – they are trained to protect structures only when the situation is safe for them,” it says. “You should prepare your home and property to withstand wildfire without firefighter intervention.”
Of course, firefighters are trying to protect homes. But, working to make a home more likely to survive a wildfire helps firefighters quickly contain blazes, conserve resources and stay safe.
“We do a thing called structure triage,” Valdez said. “If there’s oncoming fire, we look at a house and say, ‘This one’s defendable, we can make a difference here, let’s park an engine here.’”
A well-mitigated house is more likely to be judged as defensible, mainly because the fire will be less intense and slower moving.
“(Creating defensible space) also helps limit local production of embers and reduces the chance a structure fire will spread to neighboring homes or surrounding vegetation,” the guide says.
The Home Ignition Zone Guide identifies three zones around a home:
- Zone one, the first 5 feet from a home, should contain no flammable material.
- Zone two, 5 to 30 feet around a home, mitigation work should focus on thinning fuels to drastically slow fires and reduce their intensity.
- Zone three, 30 to 100 feet from a home, mitigation work should focus on keeping fire on the ground. Fires that crown across treetops move fast and are extremely difficult to extinguish.
Valdez said residents should start in zone one and work outward into zones two and three.
“We want these embers to find nothing that’s going to ignite on, around or under your house,” he said.
Valdez recommended installing a one-eighth inch or smaller metal mesh under decks and over vents and gutters. That prevents flammable material from building up and stops embers from infiltrating and igniting a home from the inside.
Nick Luca, a former firefighter with Upper Pine who now owns homebuilding company Luca Real Estate LLC, said he mostly build homes in Edgemont, a subdivision in the wildland-urban interface northeast of Durango. He said using less flammable materials, such as stone, metal and stucco, is an effective way to harden a home’s exterior.
Other than home hardening, the most important thing is removing flammable material from the perimeter of the house. That could be tree branches hanging over a house’s roof, firewood stacked on the deck or pine needles in gutters.
Luca said creating a barrier in zone one between a house and the surrounding area, such as rocks, can serve as a way to block fires from getting to the base of a house. From there, working out into zone two reduces the chances of intense fires, which can throw off embers and land in gutters, under decks and in house soffits.
“Knocking down a lot of underbrush is super important because fast-burning fuels will creep up a tree and burn a tree, and then the embers will land on roofs and get in soffits,” he said.
Those fast-burning fuels are called ladder fuels, Valdez said. In effect, they are vegetation that a fire can use to climb into the forest canopy and spread more easily.
“We want to reduce those ladder fuels,” he said. “When we do mitigation, we want a nice big space between tree limbs so when one tree torches, it’s not going to affect its buddies, right? When a single tree torches, that takes very little resources and is easy to control.”
Additionally, removing branches from the first 10 feet of a tree and removing thickets of Gambel oak or juniper from the base of a tree reduces those ladder fuels, Valdez said.
If enough homeowners mitigate their properties, any wildfire that starts will spread more slowly, helping firefighters protect more homes and bring blazes under control faster, he said.
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
