Officials and scientists gather, discuss future of fires in Colo.

During the winter in areas east of the Rocky Mountains, it is not uncommon for strong, gusty winds to blow from the mountains down across the plains.

This meteorological phenomenon is called a Chinook wind, or a downslope windstorm.

It was this kind of wind that blew Dec. 30, and the same kind of wind that would transport flames over 6,000 acres in less than 12 hours during the Marshall fire.

Five months after the Marshall fire, local, state and federal officials, first responders, along with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and members of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee, gathered at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder during a discussion to share agency perspectives and forecasting technologies and to suggest mitigation tactics to prepare for future fire disasters.

“We know that what we’re doing isn’t enough,” said Jennifer Mahoney, director of NOAA’S Global Research Laboratory, to the group at large.

After the Marshall fire, NOAA began developing a new technology to map potential locations of a fire start. The Hourly Wildfire Potential model gives 24- to 48-hour indications of where fires are likely to start, based on data temperature, winds and soil moisture data.

This new technology will be an essential tool in predicting future fire disasters, which may be more common along Colorado’s Front Range than previously thought.

Michael Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, pointed out at the roundtable that there is a high potential for a fire similar to the Marshall fire to occur in other communities.

“This was not your traditional wildland urban interface event. This was a grass fire that turned into an urban conflagration,” Morgan said.

“While we sit here and say that was a fluke event — none of us have seen this in our careers — how many thousands of communities are there along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains coming down from Canada to the United States that are subject to Chinook winds?” Morgan asked.

“This is not an anomaly. This is something we need to be thinking about and preparing for in the future. As much as we’d like to think that this will never happen again, I’m afraid it’s going to,” Morgan added.

Congressmen Jerry McNerney, D-calif., and Donald Norcross, D-N.J., traveled to be at the discussion. Mcnerney represents California’s 9th District, of which the town of Paradise belongs. Paradise was almost destroyed in the 2018 Camp fire, California’s most deadly and most destructive fire.

Mcnerney shared his experience with fire mitigation with the group and asked for suggestions about how the government can help with disaster preparedness on the federal level.

“We need you to take climate action. This is going to continue to happen at a rate that is completely unacceptable,” replied Louisville Mayor Ashley Stolzmann.

“We need more financial support,” Stolzmann added.

“Why do we need more financial support? Because our insurance system is not structured in a way that protects homeowners and consumers. So at the end of the day, our federal government is paying because we have a system that doesn’t protect consumers, and is paying for our inaction for working on reducing carbon emissions,” Stolzmann said.

In addition to direct climate action, several members of the roundtable spoke about emergency notification alert systems in place.

After many Louisville and Superior residents reported not having received any emergency notification warnings on their phones before the Marshall fire, Boulder County has been working to improve the wireless communication systems to reach people when disaster strikes.

However, a gap still remains between emergency notifications and disaster mitigation. Mike Chard, director of the Boulder Office of Emergency Management, suggested to the members of Congress at the table that narrowing the areas receiving emergency evacuation alerts would be beneficial in future disasters.

“Being able to get those wireless alerts more to be geocentric so that we’re reliable in the strategies for police and firefighters to make the decision to evacuate communities is helpful,” Chard said.