Climate change drives need for firefighters

Colorado has acute shortage

BY OLIVIA PRENTZEL THE COLORADO SUN

Standing atop a parched, grassy knoll in the shadow of Pikes Peak and in front of miles of earth scorched by the Waldo Canyon re more than a decade ago, federal, state and local re experts called for more training and new approaches to ght the “public safety crisis” of wild re in a growing state.

For many, the mile-wide wall of re approaching the ridgeline bordering the Cedar Heights neighborhood in 2012 remains a vivid memory. Embers “the size of boxes” rained from the sky, Colorado Springs Fire Chief Randy Royal remembers. e ames destroyed 347 homes and killed two people, but stopped within feet of homes in Cedar Heights thanks, in part, to the mitigation work by the community.

But the risk of wild re has increased in the past decade, with more homes being built in the area next to undeveloped forest and climate change bringing more intense res to areas that were once not thought to be at risk.

“For years, we’ve viewed this re problem that we have as being more of a natural resource event. And as we’ve watched the forest health deteriorate, as we’ve seen the changes in the weather, and as we watch the growth in to the more rural areas of Colorado and across our country, we have created a public safety crisis,” Mike Morgan, director of Colorado’s Division of Fire Prevention and Control said April 19.

More than 36,000 homes lie in wild re-prone areas where development intermingles with wildland vegetation in Colorado Springs, which ranks as the largest wildlandurban interface in the state. Nationwide, that number has grown to 99 million people, or one-third of the U.S. population living in areas at risk of wild re, yet most have no idea what dangers they face, federal experts say.

“We’re going to have to learn to live with re in our country,” Morgan said. “We just have to learn ways to mitigate or lessen the likelihood or the severity of these events when they occur.”

Morgan joined U.S. Fire Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell and other re experts to discuss the challenges in addressing climate change, drought-driven wild res that are growing in intensity, size and destructiveness.

In the rst three months of 2023, there have been more than 9,000 wild res across the country, MooreMerrell said. About 800 people have died in residential structure res this year, and last year, there were more than 1.2 million structure res, and 69,000 wild res that burned more than 7.5 million acres, she said.

“ e threat of catastrophic wild re in America’s interface communities demands national attention. at’s why we’re here,” she said. “It demands a uni ed approach. Because our current approaches to wild re mitigation and management do not match the scale of the problem.” ere’s a need for more training, experts said, explaining that methods used to extinguish structure res are di erent from those used to ght ames along the wildland urban interface.

Most municipal re ghters lack the adequate training and equipment needed to ght res e ciently and safely in the wildland urban interface, said Edward Kelly, president of the International Association of Fire ghters, which represents 335,000 re ghters across the U.S. and Canada. e IAFF, in partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Academy, will host a course to teach re ghters how to attack res that spark near the border of urban and wooded areas. e JBC rejected the request because the department was already receiving money to support training, some still unspent, and some local jurisdictions were already underway with similar training, said Rep. Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat who sits on the powerful panel.

While most re departments are responsible for ghting res along the wildland urban interface, about 78% of them have unmet training needs, according to the latest U.S. Fire Administration report published earlier this year. Two-thirds of those departments lack su cient wildland personal protective clothing.

Colorado’s Department of Public Safety requested $6.5 million to “meet increasing training and certi cation demands statewide and maintain a robust re ghter training and certi cation program,” according to a November 2022 budget document, but the Joint Budget Committee rejected the request in March.

“We were unable to increase, at this point in time, our ability to expand training for re ghters,” Morgan said. “We will be back asking for that. We understand there’s only so much to go around. But this is a problem. We have to invest in our local communities.” e state needs about 2,500 more career re ghters and 1,100 volunteer re ghters in the next 12 to 18 months to address the growing demand of wild re response, e number of people interested in becoming re ghters is declining across the country, said Kevin Quinn, rst vice chair of the National Volunteer Fire Council. Fire departments that normally receive thousands of applications a year are now receiving a few hundred. Health risks associated with the job and long hours, mainly due to sta ng shortages, make it hard to recruit and retain re ghters.

Colorado’s re ghting corps has failed to keep up with the growing demand to ght wild res. According to the U.S. Fire Administrator’s report, the wildland urban interface continues to grow by about 2 million acres per year.

As numbers of interested applicants have fallen in the past three decades, the call volume to volunteer re departments has tripled, Quinn said. e industry also struggles to recruit and retain women and people of color.

Only 11.6% of career re ghters were Hispanic or Latino, 8.5% were Black and 1.3% were Asian, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women make up about 4% of career reghters and 11% of volunteer reghters, the National Fire Protection Agency reported in 2021.

Leaders also called for the need to implement building regulations that would protect growing communities on the edge of wildland.

Michele Steinberg, director of wild re for the National Fire Protection Association, called for a universal code that would require all homes and businesses in the wild re-prone areas to adhere to re-resistant building standards.

“Unfortunately, time and time again, what we see is that communities rebuild in the same way in the same areas as those that burned to the ground,” Steinberg said. “Without a new approach, we’re destined to repeat history at our own peril against a erce and unrelenting opponent. We won’t stop wild res from occurring, but codes and standards are the means to better withstand and lessen impact in the wildland urban interface.” e failure by local, state and federal governments to impose preventative building codes is increasing the re problem, added Shane Ray, president of the National Fire Sprinkler Association.

“Codes and standards established through a consensus process are a minimum and they should not be picked apart in a political environment,” Ray said. “ e more buildings built to an outdated or weakened code in the interface between the forest and the city, and where re departments are understa ed, undertrained or lack resources, is increasing the re problem in America.” is story is from e Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support e Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun. com. e Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.