Coloradans Reflect On New 'Normal' Of Year-Round Fire Season
DRAKE, Colo. (CBS4) - Firefighters jumped on a fire that burned through 23 acres of meadow and surrounding forest in the Soul Shine Fire in Drake Monday. It's yet another fire in what used to be considered the off-season.
"I don't know if there's a fire season anymore. It's more of a year round event," said Erika Goetz, chief of staff for the Estes Valley Fire Protection District.
It came after a weekend in which the NCAR Fire threw a new threat on Boulder County and burned across more land at the doorstep of homes in the wildland-urban interface.
"The environment has always been flammable. We live in a flammable environment. It's becoming more flammable more of the year," said Brett Wolk, assistant director of CSU's Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.
"Fire and humans and been on the Front Range for centuries, a millennia," he pointed out. "Native Americans used to use fires a lot."
For over 100 years, we've been stopping fires and setting up wildland areas thick with fuels.
"We've known that there's a big risk out there. Actually the risk is small in a lot of these fire areas, but that's increasing and being multiplied by climate change," said Wolk.
A few miles from Drake, Estes Park resident John Cooper thought about how things have changed over the 30 years he has lived there. Now he and all the people he knows in town keep a go-bag packed and ready.
"It's all happened in the past five years. That people have become aware enough and afraid enough that it could happen any time."
For the people of Estes Park, the big scare was the East Troublesome Fire in 2020.
"Nobody thought it would spot fire above tree line, above tundra, but it did," he remembered. Getting out was tough. "So that day was really scary."
It's not only mountain areas though, but wildland urban interface as was shown again in the NCAR fire, which threatened Boulder and of course, the Marshall Fire that reached out into the grasslands and the homes built there, skipping and picking in 100 mph winds.
"Just the number of people who live on the Front Range has increased dramatically in several decades, but also the number of people that who are outside, interacting with these wildland environments increasing exponentially," explained Wolk about the risks. "As we continue to expand there's just more chances for the fires to get out of control."