Our Safe Place: The Burn Scar Part 3

Credit: Ariel Lavery

Ariel’s neighbors all want to know what caused the Marshall Fire. Then a new forensic report comes out, confirming climate change isn’t at the door…it just burned the door down.

Meeting Amy

Mom and Dad are settled in the senior living facility. They are doing okay, though struggling with learning to live in a much smaller space than they’re used to. Mom has been sleeping on the couch. She has daily duties helping my dad dress and clean himself, as well as keeping up with the changing financial situation. It’s about all she can handle. Yet, she starts seeing that some of our neighbors have jumped right into rebuilding.  

“I was really impressed with how resilient Paul Austin was, and how right away he says, ‘We’re rebuilding.’ And he just got right back in there,” says Mom.  

The Austin’s were our neighbors to the south. They were also some of the very first people in the neighborhood. When I interview Amy Austin, we spend a lot of time reminiscing about the days when everyone was still new to The Enclave.

“You know what one of my very best memories is about you?” Amy asks. “Halloween, and opening my front door. I don't even think we had any landscaping, we just had snow on the dirt. And you're standing there. And you were covered in snow, just covered, and I had no other trick-or-treaters. I just poured all the candy into your bag.”

Amy is also the mother to my little sister’s best childhood friend.

“Katie and Kevin's friendship is one of my most delightful memories. I have never seen two children play together better than them. Katie would come over to our house and they would play together for four hours, and then they would go over to your house and play together for four hours. They were so incredibly compatible. They turned out to need different kinds of partners, but I kind of figured they were always going to get married” Amy says, laughing. 

Their house also burned down in the Marshall Fire. And, like my parents, the Austin’s made out okay with their insurance situation.  

“We've not had the typical experience. It was just by the stroke of luck of changing our insurance on December first,” says Amy.

But their luck hasn’t diluted Amy’s frustration with the “typical experience” of so many Marshall Fire victims.

“I talked to one of our neighbors who was literally having to do inventory down to, ‘How many forks did you have in your drawer?’ Amy says. “Do you know how many forks you have in your drawer? In a nation that pays so much money for insurance, and where insurance companies have so much money, and we pay all of these taxes, and the government has so much money, why are these people losing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they have saved over time for their future?”

Amy reminds me of a lot of the people I grew up around in our little Boulder suburb. Sometimes they’re called, “Bleeding Heart Liberals,” “Tree huggers,” and, “Snowflakes.” But Amy didn’t always subscribe to such liberal ideals. When they first moved to Louisville, Amy and her husband Paul thought about the world much differently.  

“Oh, Ariel,  you're going to have to do a whole other podcast on Amy's transformation from Card-Carrying, Born Again Christian Republican to socialist,” Amy says, laughing.

Louisville is very influenced by the liberal Boulder bubble, and I think people who move to this area of the country are also heavily influenced by the culture here. It is a bubble I needed to escape when I was young because I felt like I didn’t really know anything about the world. I grew up sheltered from poverty and hardship. I also grew up relatively unaware of outside threats, like the fact that we were right in the path of potential wildfire. 

A Never Predicted Monster

A year after the fire, during our annual holiday visit, Mom and I are both getting over the flu, and we cozy up in the office of my parent’s mountain house in Tabernash, Colorado.

“I think that the fire behavior surprised everybody. Nobody would have predicted, even fire experts!” says Mom.

“Yeah, I mean, nobody did predict it,” I say.

Mom tells me her entire experience of the day of the fire. She remembers how hopeful she remained that entire day, even when the fire was literally at their doorstep. A year later, we’re still trying to understand what happened.

“When you got out of the house it was filled with smoke, enough to make your eyes water, and then you saw the bushes past the neighborhood on fire. Did your expectations of how this day might end change?” I ask.

“They still didn’t change, no! You’d think that I would sort of put things together and say, ‘Yeah, I think our house might burn.’  But no, I still thought, ‘It’s okay. The fire guys are there. They’re putting out the little bushes, and we’ll be fine!’” Mom says, chuckling. 

“I definitely remember seeing Kyle Clark from Nine News Broadcasting, from Harper Lake, with huge flames behind him. He was probably standing on McCaslin or somewhere close to the lake. I was hoping that they would kind of pan over into The Enclave neighborhood. I still kept hoping that maybe our house was still there. Yeah, you just keep hoping,” says Mom.

Footage from this broadcast shows Kyle Clark reporting on the fire’s movement. 

“We are at Washington and McCaslin and Louisville, where the fire is moving through a neighborhood. The winds are pushing the fire back up closer to Harper Lake and towards our position. There are homes now that are flanked on three sides by fire. This is a very bad situation for this neighborhood,” says Kyle Clark.

People say hope will get you through the day.  And I think it did for Mom the day of the Marshall Fire.  But I’ve always been a bit suspicious of unrelenting hope, wondering if maybe it’s actually more like willful ignorance.  

Who Can Explain This to Me?

I think everyone asks the same question when a disaster event destroys everything you have.

“Why me?” my mom asks. “We’ve lived in this house for thirty 33 years. How could this happen? I thought we were pretty secure. We were just about to pay it off. I’m retired, and Dad’s just about to retire. It was going to be our safe place.”  

“Did you find yourself going down a line of thought about trying to answer that question? Did you ever question God, or anything like that?” I ask Mom.

“No, I don’t think those really work for me. And if people are biblical it’s more like, ‘You just have to accept what happens to you sometimes. It’s the story of Job, and that’s the way it is! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?’” Mom says.

Job is the wealthy guy in the old testament that God tests by taking all his possessions, his children, his health, but still, Job never curses God. But Mom doesn’t think of all of this as a test.  My parents are scientists and researchers. They raised me to evaluate the evidence. So while we talk about the fire having behavior, like it was a discerning monster, we also know that it was a physical event with a cause, and any behavior the fire exhibited was really due to the conditions that were present. The conditions of that day are what we want to understand.

I speak with Abby Silver, who is a wildfire mitigation specialist with Boulder County, and part of a really cool Boulder program called Wildfire Partners. I decide to talk to her to see if she can help me understand the factors involved in the Marshall Fire. After the Four Mile Fire, the most expensive Colorado wildfire to date in 2010, Boulder County determined that having fire mitigation codes on new construction alone wasn't enough.

“When the conditions are extreme, what you've done to prepare beforehand is really going to have the biggest impact on what happens during the event. So, Wildfire Partners was conceived, and that started off as a purely voluntary program,” Abby says. 

The program was for existing homeowners who wanted advice on protecting their mountain properties against wildfires. Today, homeowners can get a certification for their fire-mitigated home.  Abby got into this work after volunteering as the wildfire mitigation liaison for her mountain community.  

“That was kind of how I got my feet in the water, or, maybe I was about up to my waist at that point in community wildfire mitigation,” Abby says.

Wildfire Partners was created before there was any kind of certification program for wildfire experts. Abby has also been at the helm for helping develop a new certification program. I am super interested to learn that this is a burgeoning field, despite how desperately it is needed.

“I think what we are all coming to realize, professional and probably lay person alike, is when the winds are whipping at that kind of intensity and force, there’s not a lot you can do to control fire behavior except for modify fuels before the fire reaches the area,” says Abby.

Abby educates me on what it takes to create a fire-safe home. She lists things like having a five-foot clearing all the way around your home, with nothing flammable in it. This is called “defensible space.” Having at least 50 feet between your house and the next building, which as you can imagine, is pretty tough for a lot of suburbs, is another way to protect your home from fire. Having a roof made from fire resistant materials and a simple roofline that does not have areas where embers might collect can also help guard your house from fire. These are all things my mom and I have never heard of before. Learning about what a fire-safe house looks like gives me a little insight into how the Marshall Fire may have burned so easily through neighborhoods. But there is another place where I find a ton of answers to the question of why the fire behaved as it did. As I’m going through my email one day, I see a story in a newsletter about a forensic report that’s been published. The Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control led a Facilitated Learning Analysis on the Marshall Fire. It’s intended to educate first responders and help those involved better understand what happened. This report is kind of remarkable.

“It's a page turner for sure!” says Abby.

It’s 175-pages long, with additional videos and links.  Abby says it’s the most comprehensive post-disaster report she’s ever seen. It includes first person stories, first responder footage, and data analysis. It has been the best way for me to try to understand what my neighbors and my parents went through that day. Before reading it, I was expecting something dry and difficult to follow, but it is written from a place of sensitivity that I would never expect from a forensic report. 

“I also think it's a little bit emotionally challenging to read because it's about real people's lives and what they were going through. But it reads sort of like a fiction novel could, or like very good journalism” Abby says.

The report describes the scene of the day of the Marshall Fire.

“On a dry winter morning between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 2021, the communities in Boulder County braced for the wind. The area lies at the base of the Front Range, made up of flat-topped mesas and open grasslands where creek bottoms are lined with cottonwood trees. On the outskirts of the communities are scattered homes and ranchettes. Farther east are established neighborhoods with mature landscaping and newer subdivisions sparsely planted with shrubs and ornamental hardwoods…​​Several small wildfires sparked that morning… As the winds began to pick up, a new fire was reported just after 1100 on Marshall Road,” the report says.  

So Much Wind

I get to meet Abby in the flesh on a windy winter day in The Enclave, a year after the fire. I invite her to come do a tour of the neighborhood with me, my mom, and Amy, and we walk up to the mesa, where my mom first saw smoke billowing over the hill.

“Is this where you were when you took that video?” Abby asks.

“Yes, right here,” says Mom. 

The relentless wind evokes a sense of what happened the day of the Marshall Fire, while also ruining nearly all of my audio. Even with a huge fuzzy windscreen, my shotgun mic is clipping every word we say. But it’s a good demonstration for all of us, about the powerful force that drove the fire.

“The scope of the fire was certainly because of the wind,” Amy says.  

“Right, if the wind hadn’t been blowing that day, the fire department would have put out that fire in that little shed, and end of story,” says Mom. 

There have been a lot of theories about where this fire started and why it spread so far, including one my mom mentions about a shed that was seen on fire that morning, over near Marshall.  But, like she said, regardless of where the fire came from, it’s this wind that made it so destructive. The report has a detailed section analyzing the weather leading up to, and on the day of, the Marshall Fire. They describe something called a “mountain wave wind event.”  

The report says, “The wind event that drove the Marshall fire was the result of a meteorological event referred to as a mountain wave. During a mountain wave, winds flow downhill along the terrain, accelerating towards the base on a large mountain range. This wind event generally only affects a narrow zone in the foothills and adjacent plains.” 

On the day of the Marshall Fire the winds were literally hurricane force, with some gusts clocked at 115 mph. Doors were ripped off the hinges of fire engines and windshields were broken.  The report states that these mountain wave wind events are rare.

“However, there are numerous other well-documented, and professionally researched cases of mountain wave winds causing mass blow down in forests and damage to infrastructure,” the report says.

A diagram in the report shows how a windstorm moves downslope from the top of the front range, into Boulder Valley, and up onto the planes beyond, where Louisville and Superior are located.  

The report says, “The strength of the westerly winds with mountain waves is most pronounced in the terrain transition, where the foothills meet the plains. Picture a narrow band, approximately five miles wide, that runs parallel along the front range near the toe of the slope. This is the zone where the effects of a mountain wave are the most pronounced.”

The area where the fire started and spread is right where the toe sits, and right beyond that, sits The Enclave.  

So if this mountain wave wind event is rare yet well-documented, why haven’t we seen anything like this before? And why didn’t anyone predict it? And can we really blame the Marshall Fire on climate change? My brother doesn’t think so.

“It had been raining a lot and everything was really green, growing really well. So what part of that is climate change?” my brother Andrew asks.

Fuel Makes Fire

Remember how I said I am always skeptical of hope? Well, I think my brother has always been skeptical of my skepticism. My family loves to get around the dinner table and bash on politicians, big oil, selfish CEOs, you get the picture. But my brother has grown weary of those conversations. 

One of the things I’ve thought a lot about is how much I’ve witnessed the changing climate right from our backyard. My parents could go cross country skiing out our back door 30 years ago, but not anymore. I wonder if my brother, being eight years younger than me, remembers it the same way.

“I remember making snowmen a couple of times a winter, or at least once. I don’t know if you have those kinds of memories,” I say to Andrew.  

“I remember making snowmen, for sure. But we’ve also talked about how your memory can kind of trick you. You could remember one day specifically that you made snowmen, and then maybe later that same winter it snowed a couple more times, and you didn’t exactly do what you remember doing. And then the next winter after that, it does snow again, and you didn’t build snowmen then, either. But in your mind it sticks as, ‘Oh we always made snowmen whenever it snowed,’ because you remember that one instance where you did. And all of a sudden, that’s what you’re comparing your memories to, when I don’t know if that is really the case,” Andrew says. 

“Based on just your memory, which as you just stated is so inaccurate, would you say that the difference in the winters is perceptible to you?” I ask.

“I guess, yeah, I would say that the difference in winters is perceptible. But not in terms of, ‘Oh it doesn’t snow anymore.’ I think it’s really hard to separate what is actually true from what you’re constantly being told is occurring. So for us, being Colorado people, we’re told that it’s just getting dryer,” says Andrew. 

While Mom and I talk about the Marshall Fire as a symptom of the climate crisis, Andrew doesn’t subscribe so easily. 

“I remember getting back into town from a trip, I think in July, six months or so prior to the fire, and flying back into town and seeing how green everything was. I think it had just rained. It had been raining a lot and everything was really green, it was beautiful. All of these open spaces and grasslands, those were all green and they were growing really well, so what part of that is climate change? Because that kind of goes against the typical climate change that we think we're seeing in the Front Range, which is drought, right?” Andrew asks.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about the effects of climate change on areas around the world, it’s that we can’t really know exactly what the effects of climate change are until they’re here. After the Marshall Fire Facilitated Learning Analysis report is published, I see that Andrew is right, about part of it.

“The Front Range had a very wet first half of the year, with above normal precipitation and substantial grass growth. The January to May period was one of the wettest on record,” the report says. 

The first half of the year had seen low temperatures, tons of rain, and high humidity.  

“But in the next six months all of that really dried up, that’s what really helped fuel the fires,” Andrew says. “In Colorado, everyone guesses when it’s going to first snow. Whether it’s going to be October, or mid-October, or November, and this was January 1st. This fire was happening and it still hadn’t snowed, that’s why it was so dry. I mean this was a fire in the middle of winter!” 

Like Andrew says, this fire happened well outside of Colorado’s fire season. But as the report points out, temperatures were warmer and the air was drier than usual. 

”...It should be noted that December of 2021 was characterized by temperatures 6 degrees above average (based on the most recent 19 years of data) and relative humidity was 10% drier than normal during the same period of record,” the report says.

In other words, the earlier part of the year was much wetter than years past, the latter part of the year was hotter and drier, making the air “thirstier.”  Grasses and shrubs grew big and tall in the spring and summer, then went dormant, the water literally sucked out of them, meaning kindling was everywhere. But a rainy spring and dry fall are also a normal part of Colorado’s seasonal cycle. So, is my brother right? Can we really attribute any of this to climate change?

In a 2023 interview on Face the Nation with Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, Kate discusses climate change.

“There’s different impacts in different regions. I think what’s important to keep in mind is that climate change is more than just temperature.  It’s also affecting things like the water cycle.  So we’re seeing more heavy precipitation events, more droughts,” says Kate.

Recently, NASA led a study that confirmed that years of data show increasing wet and dry spells as symptoms of human-caused climate change. Higher global temperatures create more precipitation, but NASA’s study shows the overall trend for the Rocky Mountains is drought. So, again, how do we know the increased precipitation in the spring of 2021 is related to climate change? Well, climate change also means that the growing season in Colorado is getting longer. With higher temperatures, there is less snowpack and much of the precipitation Colorado is getting is coming in the form of rain instead of snow. This makes for wetter, greener springs, followed by thirstier summers and falls. The writers of the Marshall Fire report also don’t hesitate to blame climate change for more wildfires.  

“The episodic nature of drought in Colorado will continue to yield years of very little fire activity and years of substantial fire activity. As climate change continues, more areas will burn on average, exposing more structures, destroying more communities, and killing more people,” the report says. 

The Most Inconvenient Truths

If we are moving toward a climate where fires will become more common, Abby says we all need to watch out. 

“Fire doesn't only just happen in the mountains. It can spread on the plains and through the grasses as well. I think there had been sort of a sense of complacency, or false sense of security, for people who lived down in the lower elevation parts of the county that has eroded since the Marshall Fire,” Abby says.

For most of the neighbors in The Enclave, the fact of climate change being a contributor to the Marshall Fire was undisputable.  But there is another reason this fire got so big, and it has to do with how well your neighbors are maintaining their property.  

On our tour Abby, Amy, Mom, and I talk about the probability of how the Marshall Fire entered The Enclave. There isn’t consensus, even among us tree huggers. Amy is convinced that the fire had come up through the Hillside neighborhood, directly south of The Enclave.

“People are like, ‘Well, of course your house was going to burn eventually, you’re right on the mesa.’ I'm like, ‘That is not how the fire came!’” Amy says.

Mom and Abby seem unconvinced about whether the fire entered from the south or the west, through the mesa.

“I’m really not sure, but most people feel like it came up to our neighborhood from the south,” says Mom. 

But I was convinced the fire had come in from the mesa to the west.

“You can see everything on the east end of the lot was completely black,” I say.  

As we explore the neighborhood we see that the lots all along the mesa, where my parents’ house was, are charred on the east side of the lot. But the wooden fence along the west side of the lot is still there.  A couple of my mom’s trees and the flagstone patio right next to the fenceline look virtually untouched. This means if the fire had come from the mesa, it had somehow jumped the fence line and landed on the houses. If you’ve ever made a campfire that’s contained by rocks, maybe you’ve noticed the embers flying up into the sky.  Have you ever wondered where those embers come down?

When a small fire becomes a bigger fire, there will be more of those embers going up into the air, which means more of those embers will be coming back down. In a wildfire situation, everything the fire burns will emit embers. Those embers can be small, like the ones you see flying out of your campfire. But they can also be huge, as big as tree limbs. As embers of all different sizes continue spreading, they continue igniting more fuel which begets more fire, which begets more embers, until there is something called an “ember blizzard.”

It’s a perfect description for what firefighters and first responders see at the front end of a wildfire because it’s a literal blizzard of blowing embers. This is fascinating to learn because it helps explain how the Marshall Fire got to so many homes and why it got so big. A lot of the science looking at the spread of wildfires shows that homes are not often ignited by flames, but by the embers raining down on them. When those embers get stuck in divots on the roof, or rain into openings, the house is much more likely to burn. The concept of the ember blizzard explains, for me, how the fire might have jumped our back fence and patio, and landed on the roof and many trees my mom had planted around the lot.  

Another person joins about 20 minutes into our tour. His name is Larry and he lived in the Hillside neighborhood. Deb Fahey had told him about our tour and it turns out he knows quite a bit about wildfires, having worked as a volunteer firefighter for twenty years. 

“I lost my home over in Hillside,” Larry says.

As we walk down the hill on the southern part of the neighborhood, the side where Amy and other neighbors think the fire came in, I notice that there are parts of the fence here that are totally gone, and parts where it’s still standing. There is also a line of houses still standing on the north side of the road. They run west to east down the hill. I hear Larry telling my Mom what he saw that day.

“It came from the west?” Mom asks.

“It went right over the hill, right down into our neighborhood,” says Larry.

He says the fire got into his neighborhood, Hillside, from two sides, the southwest and the north, The Enclave side.  

“So I was under the impression that your neighborhood burned before our neighborhood, is that not the case?” Amy asks.

“No,” says Larry. “As far as I know, it came through here first. As far as I know, they were fighting the fire from that side. When I was parked up here I saw the fire coming through the field above, and of course these houses were already on fire at that time.” 

We continue debating as we walk down the hill toward the entrance. 

“I want to point out one thing while we're standing here,” Abby says. 

Abby points out some trees that are partially burned on one side. 

“When I look at those two trees that are still there, I think there was a building burning, and the heat was going back towards those trees,” says Abby.

The trees look singed on the east side, but okay on the west side.  

“The wind was definitely coming this way. Plus, the whole tree would have caught fire if the wind was heading towards it,” Abby says.

This clue tells Abby that the building to the east of these trees was burning, and the wind was blowing in from the west. Larry and my Mom are having a bit of their own conversation and I hear him telling Mom what he knows about the wind’s behavior. 

“Basically what we were faced with was this just incredibly intense high wind in a single direction, and that's why you see some homes remaining while so many other ones are gone,” Larry says.

Larry paints a picture of wind blowing so hard that the fire is being blown continually in one direction. So, if it misses one house, the house behind it might be saved. He explains that wind always pushes downhill and during the Marshall Fire, the downhill force of the wind also pushed the fire downhill.

“That's very unusual fire behavior,” Larry says.

There is also a projected wind map in the Marshall Fire report that shows, in our area, wind had a northeasterly path, meaning the fire could have entered the neighborhood from the west and the south. And looking at the terrain of the whole neighborhood, we see sections where the wind was likely stalled because of upslopes, perhaps saving a house or two.

But why does it matter so much where the fire came from when most of the houses in The Enclave burned to the ground, regardless of where they were?  Well, it matters where the ember blizzard came into the neighborhood because that point is a threshold. Remember, The Enclave sits just beyond the toe of the mountain wind wave event, where the wind can be at its highest force, so the houses along the threshold are the neighborhood’s first line of defense. If the houses on the windward side, the most exposed side, are not properly mitigated, they will ignite.  Then, the burning houses on the perimeter invite the fire into the neighborhood. This threshold is called the wildland urban interface. Once that threshold has been passed, homes on the other side are much more likely to burn. 

The Marshall Fire report discusses how home-to-home ignition was the major factor keeping this fire going on such a large and devastating scale. In Louisville, 67% of homes were projected to burn from indirect exposure. In other words, they didn’t catch fire from the burning prairie, they caught fire from other houses that were burning. In Superior, 78% of burned homes caught fire that way.  So in some ways, the threat of wildfire taking your home has more to do with your neighbor’s vigilance than anyone really wants to admit.  

Digesting Over Coffee

After our walk through of The Enclave, Amy, Abby, Mom and I sit down together to talk things over at a local coffee shop. It’s a busy day, but we get a table in the back where I set up my recorder. Mom and Amy are remembering their responsibility of mowing part of the open space beyond the fence. It was one way the city got residents to help maintain the wildland urban interface. This brings us back to how the fire spread.

“We had to keep three feet mowed. But then, there was probably another four feet that was unmowed. It just kind of looks to me like that isn’t where the fire came from,” Amy says.

Amy is still certain that the fire didn’t come from the west. But she also doesn’t want to put the onus on the people around the perimeter of the neighborhood, because that would put the blame on all of us. 

“Can we put that kind of responsibility on houses that are adjacent to open space? Can we really think of that saving an entire neighborhood? Because I feel like in this case, it wouldn't have made a difference,” says Amy. 

With how huge this fire was, Amy can’t imagine that good fire mitigation on perimeter lots would have changed anything. She acknowledges the importance of it.

“We need to make our homes as safe as we can individually to protect the neighborhood, but I’m also thinking that had we all done that, we would have had the same result, right?” Amy asks.

“Well, yes and no,” says Abby. 

Up to this point in our day, Abby has been mostly an observer, observing the charred patterns in the neighborhood, observing us espouse our theories.  But now she does a little educating. 

“If the embers that are flowing out of that aren’t triggering the next event then, yeah, maybe you lose that house, or a few houses, directly next door to it,” Abby says.

She makes the point that, if more people had that defensible space, had cut down more shrubs and trees around their house, maybe the firefighters could have gotten ahead of this thing. Maybe they could have successfully set up fire blocks and the fire wouldn’t have turned into the giant monster that it was. So many neighborhoods burned at once, fueled by houses, fences, and ornamental landscaping, all adding to the ember blizzard carried downwind to the next house, and the next, and the next. But she’s also talking about community action. In a world where fire is going to be more common and more devastating, creating a firewise neighborhood means nearly everybody has to be actively maintaining their property. If people want to help protect their neighborhood, they may have to give up the ornamental bushes, the wooden decks, and the big shade trees my mom loved so dearly.  

“When I go out and do outreach and education, a big part of it has to be about giving people realistic expectations. We all have to do our part. And then the other thing I think, is realigning our aesthetics and choices that we make on a community level with the future,” Abby says.

In an environment where we now know wildfires can occur, and will occur, an environment that is experiencing more extreme droughts, Abby says we need to live according to the laws of the land, this land that we’re trying to live on.  

“The thing that was sort of disturbing to me was thinking about fire mitigation, just, in total,” Amy says. “And the idea of, really, how far away from your home that you ideally need to have defensible space, in order to prevent the spread of fire. I can't think of a community that I know of here in the Front Range of Colorado that would meet that criteria.”

Amy’s family is a year into the process of rebuilding their home, a lot of the neighbors are. And they are moving forward without any new Wildland Urban Interface building codes from the city of Louisville, and I wonder why. It seems to me, like maybe one of the first things the city would want to do is get ahead of this in case it happens again. As the Marshall Fire report points out, it will happen again.

“Without coequal action, no change to the current trajectory of the Front Range of Colorado will occur, and increasingly severe wildfires resulting in widespread community destruction will occur again,” the report says.

As soon as our neighbors start rebuilding they discover that the city of Louisville does have new building codes, passed just a couple months before the fire, but they don’t pertain to wildfire mitigation. To some, these new codes are just more red tape. For our neighbors, they stall rebuilding efforts even further. Plus, they are really expensive. A lot of the people who lost their homes are already overwhelmed by trying to start over, and new building codes add yet another hurdle.

“When they made those decisions to change the codes, they were looking at a small number of houses being added to Louisville. No one imagined that there was going to be over 500 houses having to be rebuilt,” says Amy.  

Yet it doesn’t deter victims from coming back strong, including my mom. With all her neighbors mustering the courage to rebuild, she’s having a change of heart about staying in the senior living facility.

“I’m part of this Enclave neighborhood email group and people are all talking about rebuilding and coming back, and I start thinking, ‘Well maybe that’s what we should do,” says Mom. 

That’s next time on The Burn Scar.