Climate change, new construction mean more ruinous fires in the US - CNA

Many whose homes were spared remained without power while temperatures dropped to the single digits. The blaze burned at least 24 sq km.

The cause of the blaze is still under investigation, but experts say it's clear what allowed it to spread so fast.

“With any snow on the ground, this absolutely would not have happened in the way that it did,” said Keith Musselman, a snow hydrologist in Boulder.

“It was really the grass and the dry landscape that allowed this fire to jump long distances in a short period of time.”

Three ingredients were needed to start this fire – fuels, a warm climate and an ignition source, said Jennifer Balch, a fire scientist with the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And then you add a fourth ingredient, wind, and that's when it became a disaster.”

Temperatures in Colorado between June and December were the warmest on record, Balch said. The grasses grew thick because they had a wet spring, but saw no moisture until snow flurries arrived Friday night.

“All of Colorado is flammable, our grasses are flammable, our shrubs are flammable, our trees are flammable," Balch said.

"This is a dry landscape that is flammable for good chunks of the year, and those chunks of time are getting longer with climate change."

The lesson learned throughout this event is that the “wildland-urban interface is way bigger than we thought it was”, Balch said. That means a wider area is under threat of wildfire.

That border area, where structures built by people meet undeveloped wildland prone to fire, has always been the foothills, she said.

Firefighters in Boulder consider the interface west of Broadway, a busy road that passes through the centre of town. But Thursday's fire sparked east of that line, next to thousands of houses that have sprouted up on the east side of the Rockies since the 1990s, Balch said.

“There were stretches between Denver and Fort Collins that had no development, but now it’s just like one long continuous development track,” Balch said. “And those homes are built with materials that are very flammable — wood siding, asphalt roofing.

"We need to completely rethink how we’re building homes.”

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2022-01-02 06:06:00Z
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