Boulder Fire-Rescue deployed four firefighters on Jan. 10 to Southern California as part of nine strike teams from Colorado sent to help battle the fires raging near Los Angeles.
Boulder’s team has been working to secure fire lines in the Palisades area, where the destruction — along with the nearby Eaton Fire — has claimed at least 24 lives and destroyed more than 12,000 homes.
Even as it provides aid elsewhere, the scale of devastation in California — one of the largest urban fires in U.S. history — has sparked conversations in Boulder about local preparedness. With climate change intensifying extreme weather events — making them more frequent, severe and unpredictable — and prompting some insurers to withdraw coverage, questions about how Boulder is safeguarding its community have grown more urgent.
Boulder Reporting Lab spoke with Wildland Fire Division Chief Brian Oliver, who has been with the division since 1999 and noted that Boulder Fire-Rescue is fully staffed for the first time in his career, about the city’s investments in wildfire mitigation and its preparation for a worst-case scenario. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Do you feel the city is prepared for a worst-case urban wildland fire scenario?
Yes and no.
We’re doing all the things we can with the resources we have. Can we do more? Of course. But really, when we talk about worst-case scenarios, like what LA just saw or the Marshall Fire — when things are in that dire circumstance — our tools as firefighters don’t work.
Why are these scenarios so hard to manage?
Fire is the only natural disaster where humans are arrogant enough to think we can change the outcome. And when things are in alignment [for an urban firestorm], we really can’t. We don’t send a battalion of troops down to Florida when the hurricane is coming to turn the hurricane around. We know it’s a natural disaster. We evacuate everybody and then go back and see where we can clean up.
We [Boulder Fire-Rescue and partners] are really good at putting out wildfires. Ninety-eight percent of all of our wildfire starts are held to one acre or smaller. It is those outliers — when we have dry fuels and high winds all lining up — that sometimes the only thing we can do is implement a safe and effective evacuation and then come back and sort it out at the end. We do all the things we can to keep that from happening. But sometimes it’s out of our control.
I saw a really good interview with Brian Fennessy the other day. He’s the chief of Orange County Fire in California. He said none of the systems are built for that kind of fire development. To put it in perspective, the standard response for a structure fire is three fire engines.
Editor’s note: In the interview Oliver mentioned, Fennessy called the fire “unstoppable,” and Los Angeles Fire Chief Anthony Maronne said, “There’s not enough fire engines for this. We think we’ve lost 8,000 structures, so times three fire engines each, that requires 26,000 fire engines. I don’t think the state of California has 26,000 fire engines that could be at one place right now.”
Since the Marshall Fire destroyed 1,100 homes in Boulder County — while Boulder was spared, in part, due to favorable winds — what has the city done in the last few years to protect itself from a wildfire?
We’ve done a lot. We’ve always been at the forefront of fire mitigation and fuel management and response to wildfires. We’re one of the only municipal fire departments on the Front Range that has a designated wildland division. But post-Marshall [Fire], there was a lot of interest in [doing more], because that opened some eyes of folks who thought some of that work wasn’t as important.
We’ve recently completed our CWPP [Community Wildfire Protection Plan], which is a pretty encompassing document. It’s not regulatory, but it gives us a bunch of recommendations for vegetation management, fuel breaks, written warning improvements, dispatching and response improvements. We’re working through all those recommendations, costing them out and prioritizing them.
What has been done already?
We’ve made a lot of improvements in our alert warning system so that we can get people notified and evacuated in a timely manner. We’re currently working on an operational assistance tool, basically a geo-referenced live map that everybody — fire, police, rangers — can see, with pre-populated traffic control points and where we can populate evacuation routes, and see where we need to change direction. In Table Mesa, for instance, we [might] turn to all Eastbound traffic so we can drain a community and then use inside streets as ingress for responders.
One of the other big things that we’ve done in the last couple of years is changed our response model for wildland fires. It used to be that each individual agency set how they’d respond. We’ve gotten all of the local fire chiefs and local fire districts together and changed that. We have a very robust standard of cover across all agencies that changes based on fire danger.
If fire danger is low, it’s only an engine, a brush truck and a battalion chief. But as conditions deteriorate, that response package gets larger and larger. No matter what, we know exactly what’s coming, and that’s proven super successful in all of the fires we had this last summer.
Editor’s note: See a list of all the City of Boulder wildfire initiatives.
What are the top priority items in Boulder’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan?
The CWPP built on the three main tenets of the national cohesive strategy, which are resilient landscapes, safe and effective response, and fire-adapted communities.
Resilient landscapes fall more into the fuels treatment — where do we need to cut trees down or remove grass and fuel. It’s a pretty broad document. It’s like: Here’s an area that, if wildfire happens, would pose a threat to this community. We recommend you do a treatment there. Then it’s up to myself and my counterparts at OSMP [Open Space and Mountain Parks] and Utilities to determine if we need to mow 100 feet, trim trees or pull fuel away from the community.
Fire-adapted community is the outreach piece. That’s helping the homeowner help themselves, educating them on what they can do to harden their homes: creating defensible space, moving vegetation away from adjacent to those structures, getting rid of highly combustible vegetation like juniper trees. Anyone in the city can ask for a detailed home assessment. One of our risk specialists will go out and work through the entire property with the homeowner and make recommendations to improve their house’s ability to withstand wildfire.
The city has expanded its outreach this year. Are you seeing an increase in residents requesting home assessments?
Demand for it kind of ebbs and flows. To use the lava lamp analogy: When there’s lots of fires going in California, that issue heats up and rises to the top, and everybody wants something. When we get two feet of snow, people stop thinking about wildfire for a little while, and it sinks to the bottom.
The other big piece to that was we established a grant program. A lot of the things we recommend people do cost money. So the city has a grant program funded through the climate tax that offers refunds and rebates to homeowners to help offset those costs. When we released the news on the grant program, I think we ended up somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 requests.
Read: Boulder offers $1,000 home fireproofing grants as wildfire risks grow: How to qualify
We’ve been hearing a lot about fire breaks — areas cleared of vegetation to slow or stop the spread of fire — in the LA fires. What are the major examples of fuel breaks in Boulder?
Open Space and Mountain Parks has been working on that. The big thing they’ve done in the last year was a mowing program. They’ve hired a contractor to help reduce fuel loads, just mowing the tall grass. A big one they did last year was behind the Shanahan Ridge in Southwest Boulder.
Read: Boulder forestry crew thins trees on Shanahan Ridge to protect water tank from wildfire threat
The Boulder City Council is expected to pass a home-hardening ordinance this year, which will mandate homeowners make their homes more resilient to wildfires. What are you hoping to see from this ordinance?
It really is on council. Mostly, what’s going to help us from a response standpoint is some vegetation management in what we call the ‘home-ignition zone,’ that first 5 feet [around a property]. If we can create some language around making sure that that first 5 feet is devoid of combustible vegetation, it gives us more of a fighting chance to catch those spot fires and make a stand in that wildland-urban interface [where homes in Boulder meet fire-prone landscapes].
I would hope homeowners in our community would take that responsibility on themselves and use the carrot of protecting their homes, as opposed to the stick of government saying you have to.
Read: Boulder City Council eyes stricter wildfire hardening rules, including for existing homes
Can you expand on that?
It is a community effort. If folks are just assuming the fire department is going to show up and put the fire out before it’s a problem, they’re setting themselves up for disappointment. Because we can’t always do that.
Same as if they’re waiting for OSMP or utilities to come do all the mitigation work and cut all the trees down and remove the fuels. We’re working on it. But they also have to take ownership that they live in the wildland-urban interface, and they need to also do the work to harden their homes and make themselves more resilient to that impact.
It’s not if it happens — it’s when. It’s part of the ecosystem we live in, and it’s a year-round threat.
Given what we saw in the Marshall Fire and elsewhere, is the city making any adjustments to what it has traditionally considered the wildland-urban interface?
We are in conversations with Planning and Development [department] and city council on whether or not we want to implement stricter codes, and whether or not we want to expand the wildland-urban interface. What we’re working on right now is building out fuel models [to account for spot fires that spread beyond the wildland-urban interface, rather than within the interface itself.]
Generally, the threat for homes being lost in a wildfire is not a flaming front. Everybody pictures a big wall of fire going through the community, but typically what happens is embers start receptive fuels beyond the firefight. Once those homes start igniting, then it’s home-to-home ignition.
We’ll build out that model and see what that potential spotting distance is and create what we call a wildland-urban interface affected area. We know what our traditional wildland urban interface is — right there against the open space and around the outside city. But [we’re working on] how far those embers can cast into the city and generate spot fires that are truly almost a larger problem than the main fire itself.
A few years ago, Boulder Fire-Rescue requested additional funding to hire more staff. How are staffing levels today?
Any organization, especially in a response capacity, whether it’s police, fire or EMS, is going to tell you they need more people. And it’s true. Folks are always on overtime and things like that. But right now, Boulder Fire is 100% staffed for the first time in my career. We have a lot of folks.
Can we use more? Yeah, even just for day-to-day calls, let alone wildfire stuff, more resources are helpful. But those are those budgetary decisions that are above my pay grade.
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