NFPA Journal - January/February 2018 - 28

BUILD.
BURN.
REPEAT?

MILES APART, WORLDS AWAY
How the post-fire stories of Colorado Springs and El Paso County illustrate the
political challenges of enacting community wildfire mitigation measures
FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTAND the
politics of wildfire mitigation measures better than Colorado Springs
Fire Marshal Brett Lacey.
In 2012, the Waldo Canyon Fire
came barreling down a mountain
ridge into Mountain Shadows, a
neighborhood of Colorado Springs.
The community was unprepared
for a direct hit by wildfire, which
sparked an urban conflagration
similar to what occurred in October
in Santa Rosa, California, where
more than 3,000 homes burned.
In Mountain Shadows, the fire
decimated 344 homes in about five
hours-a rate of more than a home
a minute-and damaged about 100
more. At the time, it was the most
destructive fire in state history.
Lacey, who has been the fire
marshal for nearly two decades
and a member of the fire service
even longer, described Mountain
Shadows as a community with a lot
of fire vulnerabilities back in 2012.

Many of the homes had wood siding
and wood shake shingles. The area
was thickly settled with juniper
trees-"gasoline on a stick," as
Lacey's staff calls them-and many
homes had mulched perimeters.
Embers had no shortage of opportunities to spark ignitions.
"We knew all of this and had a
good idea of what would happen if
a fire hit that area," Lacey said in an
interview. "But in Colorado Springs,
we have large population that is
suspicious of government and they
do not like regulation. As the fire
marshal I have had to wait for opportunistic moments where the words I
speak can be validated by what the
public can see, feel, and touch."
As such, enacting fire code
changes to make Mountain
Shadows and other communities
safer was slow and incremental,
proceeding as politics and public
opinion allowed. The city passed
its first wildfire building codes

28 | NFPA JOURNAL * J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 8

in 1993, which included minimal
requirements restricting overgrowth
around homes. In 2002, after the
Hayman Fire burned 133 homes just
25 miles to the city's northwest,
Colorado Springs' fire advocates
mustered enough support to pass
an ordinance requiring all new
homes to have Class A roofs, which
are fire resistant and typically metal.
Homes built before 2002 weren't
required to make the change unless
more than 25 percent of a roof was
being replaced.
Lacey knew more still needed
to be done, and his office drafted
a substantially more comprehensive ordinance filled with tougher
rules for homes built along the
city's fire-prone hillsides, including
restrictions on building materials,
vegetation, and landscaping. After
the Waldo Canyon Fire struck, the
new document came off the shelf.
Within two weeks of the fire,
Lacey met with a local building

SUCCESS WITH WILDFIRE policy is
only jurisdiction deep-everything
can change dramatically when you
cross a border. Nowhere is that
contrast more clear than between
Colorado Springs and its neighboring jurisdiction, El Paso County.
A year after the Waldo Canyon
Fire, the Black Forest Fire replaced
it as the state's most destructive,
striking the county's rural unincorporated areas just 20 miles northeast of Colorado Springs. Although
roughly 500 homes were destroyed
in the blaze, little has been done
since to address ongoing wildfire
concerns. Shortly after the fire, in
an effort to speed recovery, the El
Paso County commissioners opted

GETT Y IMAGES

Despite a mandate that rebuilt homes
meet standards for fire resistance,
construction boomed in the Mountain
Shadows section of Colorado Springs
in 2013, a year after the Waldo Canyon
Fire. To date, 321 of the 347 homes
destroyed in the fire have been rebuilt.

association whose support he knew
was essential to enact a new wildfire
ordinance. From past battles, Lacey
knew cost concerns could easily
derail the effort, so he asked the
association to compile multiple cost
estimates for new homes of various
sizes, with and without ignitionresistant materials. The estimates
he received showed that adopting
the fire-resistant measures added
only about $2,000-$5,000 to the
cost of the average home.
"I think having them provide
those cost numbers really allayed a
lot of concerns," he said.
Next, Lacey and his staff
launched a public campaign to talk
about the fire, why homes burned,
and what measures could be taken
to prevent similarly catastrophic fire
events from happening again. After
six months of meetings and public
outreach, the ordinance passed.
Today, nearly all of the homes
in Mountain Shadows have been
rebuilt with fire-resistant materials
and landscaping. Cost and general
opposition to the idea of additional
regulation were the main points of
oppostion, but Lacey said that five
years later the ordinance has won
widespread acceptance.
"I think they are very comfortable with it," he said. "You will never
get everybody to agree-the best
you can expect is for people to begrudgingly go along. But they don't
have to be happy about it. They just
have to do it."

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - January/February 2018