Several Roaring Fork Valley communities have started using a cutting-edge model to predict their wildfire risk.
The model was developed at Colorado State University by Dr. Hussam Mahmoud in 2022.
Other models focus on how fires behave on wildlands, but Mahmoud’s is the first to predict how a fire will progress through a developed community. It’s since been tested against real-world fires with up to 86% accuracy.
The Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley is behind the push to bring Mahmoud’s model to the area. Angie Davlyn directs the nonprofit, which is focused on mitigating fire risk on landscapes and in communities.
Traditional fire maps show how intense a fire could be in a given area and how fast it might move, Davlyn said.
“But what they don't tell us is how fire would actually travel through a town,” she continued. “So this modeling shows us how wildfire is likely to move through our real communities, through vegetation, across roads, and critically, from building to building based on how our neighborhoods are built today.”
“I’m confident in it,” said Rob Goodwin, Fire Chief of the Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District.
He spoke last week to the Carbondale Board of Trustees about employing the model.
“I'm so excited to have a chance to do this, not only in Marble, but here. I've been here a long time. This is my place, and it's a big thing for me personally,” Goodwin said.
Davlyn’s nonprofit recently finished collecting data from Marble, Snowmass Village and two parts of Glenwood Springs to share with Mahmoud, who now works at Vanderbilt University. Final results from that analysis are expected this spring.
In the meantime, Davlyn and her team are about to begin the data collection process in Aspen and Carbondale.
That starts with a “user friendly” survey sent to residents, including basic questions like whether they have a propane tank and what sorts of trees surround their property.
“We're hoping to get as many community members as possible to take a survey. They know their homes best, and they also know things that we can't see on the exterior of the home,” Davlyn said. “But regardless, we are committed to getting 100% of homes, and that means traveling home to home to home to collect that data in person.”
Davlyn estimates they’ll have to manually log data for about 3,000 homes in Carbondale and 6,000 in Aspen.
She hopes the findings will highlight areas for fuel breaks or prescribed burns, what she calls “easy wins.”
But she said much of the responsibility for fire mitigation will fall to private homeowners.
“I'm not interested in shaming people. I'm not even interested in fear mongering,” Davlyn said. “But there is a reality here where we're in an incredibly high risk area, and resiliency is in the hands of the people who live here.”
The good news is that, according to Mahmoud, reducing the fire risk in just 10% of the highest-risk homes is more effective than mitigating 30% of the whole community.
“That’s pretty cool, because 10% feels really doable,” Davlyn said.
