Hundreds of thousands of Colorado homes are at risk of burning in wildfires, per report
A yearly report suggests that more than 300,000 Colorado homes are susceptible to wildfire, and the cost to rebuild those homes would top $100 billion.
CoreLogic released their yearly wildfire risk report. Colorado trailed only California in the number of homes at risk of burning in a wildfire.
The group estimated 332,716 homes are at risk in Colorado. The majority of those are in the Denver and Colorado Springs metro areas, not mountain communities. They estimate 69,284 homes in the Denver area and 51,321 homes in the Colorado Springs area are at the most risk, followed by 14,352 homes in the Fort Collins area. The Boulder area, where the Marshall Fire took place in December 2021, still has 9,754 homes at risk, and Pueblo has 3,242 homes in danger, according to this report. 3
The cost to rebuild all the homes listed in the report comes in at $141 billion.
The report points to the increasing cost of reconstruction materials and labor as reasons for the "inflated cost" of wildfires.
More and more homes are being built in Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) areas, which are prone to happen. A July 2022 ranking created for the U.S. Forest Service listed Evergreen and Morrison as the top fireshed in the Rocky Mountain region, including Colorado and parts of four other western states.
RELATED: Evergreen area ranked as most at risk for wildfire
California is the only state that outranks Colorado in the report, listing 1.28 million homes - 242,187 in the Los Angeles area alone - as in danger of burning in a wildfire.
The cost to rebuild the California homes comes in at $761 billion.
According to the NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information, the number of acres burned in wildfires has steadily increased every year since 1983. The average number of acres burned between 2010 and 2022 is 93% higher than the number from between 1990 and 2000.
The CoreLogic report states that an increased number of homes build in or near the WUI areas equates to a greater level of risk.
