Bigger, hotter, and more severe wildfires are changing Colorado's fire seasons. They change the way watersheds work, and can hurt drinking water resources across the state.
Denver Water, the state’s largest utility, provides water to more than 1.5 million people in the metro area. It attempts to address some of these concerns in its From Forests to Faucets program, a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service, the Colorado State Forest Service, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute to protect watershed health.
Some of those priority areas are in the Pike, Arapaho, and White River national forests in Boulder, Grand, and Summit counties. They also include non-federal lands in Jefferson, Park, Clear Creek, and Douglas counties.
Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist for the utility oversees the program, and spoke with Rocky Mountain Community Radio’s Caroline Llanes to share more.
Editor’s note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Llanes: Tell me a little bit about From Forest to Faucets as a program, how did this all get started?
McDonald: The ‘why’ we invest through From Forest to Faucets is because the risk of wildfire is not a theoretical one to Denver Water. We've seen it, we've experienced it. We've been managing the impacts of high-severity fire for almost 30 years now. Going back to the 1996 Buffalo Creek Fire that was followed up shortly afterwards by the 2002 Hayman Fire, which both occurred above a critical piece of infrastructure for Denver Water called Strontia Springs Reservoir. About 80% of Denver Water's water supply moves through Strontia Springs Reservoir. And after those two fires, a few rain events over the burn scars mobilized all that newly loose sediment and ash and debris, carried it downstream, and deposited it in that critical reservoir, Strontia Springs Reservoir. So Denver Water saw pretty intense water quality impacts. We saw sediment and debris loading to the reservoir, reducing our storage capacity and interfering with our operations.
And in total, Denver Water spent over $27 million of our own money recovering from just those two, those two fires alone. And so after the Hayman Fire in particular, Denver Water just decided that it was more expensive to be reactive to managing wildfire, than to taking a more proactive approach. So From Forest to Faucets program really started as just a small business decision. We were spending so much money recovering from the impacts of these two fires, and we knew that if we invested in forest restoration work, we could offset and minimize those impacts. So the From Forest Faucets program was started initially just as a partnership between Denver Water and the U.S. Forest Service in 2010. And the goal was to do just that: to invest in areas where both Denver Water and the US Forest Service had risk and knew there was great wildfire risk. And for Denver Water, that was in our priority watersheds. So all told, Denver Water's committed $48 million combined, matched dollar for dollar by the partner, so an additional $48 million coming in. So to date, Denver Water and our partners have committed $96 million to forest restoration work in our high priority watersheds.
Llanes: Gotcha. Okay, so what does your work on the ground actually look like?
McDonald: No Denver water staff is out there kind of cutting trees, or managing a contractor to do that. We do rely on the experts of, of our partners. You know, we've added these partners to the From Forest to Faucets partnership because they are the best at what they do. They're the forestry experts. And our job beyond the funding is to help select and prioritize the areas where to work more than select, you know, which, which trees you know, should, should be part of the, the project. So we work with the U.S. Forest Service and the (Colorado) State Forest Service through annual meetings, through quarterly meetings, through field visits, just to get on the same page about where our priority areas are and and where their priority areas are.
We're doing forest restoration work. We're restoring the forest to how they historically functioned, their historic structure, and composition. Most of Colorado's forests are actually ecologically departed from how they historically were. Back before European-American settlement here, we used to have pretty frequent low-intensity fires in our ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forest that we see on the Front Range, in Denver Water’s watersheds. So these low-intensity fires would sweep through about every 25 to 30 years, and they would maintain some pretty good spacing among the ponderosa pine trees. It would eliminate some of the competition from, grasses and understory and new seedlings, and give those ponderosa trees enough resources to survive and, and mature and resist some of those smaller fires.
Since we have settled in these communities and placed critical infrastructure in these communities, we've gotten really good at putting fires out. We've put out all of those low intensity surface fires that were maintaining that spacing in our ponderosa pine forest. And the result has been this, this overgrown forest, this overly dense forest that again, is ecologically departed from how a ponderosa pine forest historically looked. I love the analogy that the U.S. Forest Service uses to describe productive forest management of weeding a garden. That's pretty much what we're doing when we're doing this proactive forest management work. We're going in, we're reducing the density just like you would weed a garden, take out some of the unwanted and unnecessary vegetation there, and restoring that ponderosa pine forest, how it looked when it had that frequent low-intensity surface fires, so those ponderosa pine trees can be mature and more resilient to natural fires. You can do that restoration work, you can do that weeding work through a variety of techniques, such as mechanical forest treatments, hand forest treatments, or prescribed fire. And those are all types of projects that we find through From Forest to Faucets.
Llanes: As you know, Colorado is continuing to deal with the impacts of climate change and how that impacts our forests. And a big piece of that is longer wildfire seasons and hotter, more severe fires. So how are those kinds of considerations shaping your work in the years to come?
McDonald: I think we're getting more innovative in the types of projects that we're pursuing. We're getting more strategic in where we're placing projects. I think we're getting more holistic in what proactive forest management and watershed protection looks like. And by that I mean we're continuing our forest management, proactive forest management work, but we're pairing that with more instream restoration work.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board has a program called Wildfire Ready Watersheds that we've been involved in. And that's looking at, ‘what other tools do we have in our toolbox to minimize the impacts of wildfires within our watersheds?’ And the forest management work has been the gold standard. We're certainly going to continue with that type of work, but we can make our streams more resilient to some of that post-fire flooding and sediment and debris flows as well. And so that could look like flood plain enhancement, or streambank stabilization projects, or installing post-assisted log structures, or some other ways to maybe capture sediment within a stream that would enhance that ecosystem rather than have that sediment interact with a home and flood a home or be deposited in a reservoir.
And so there's some fantastic momentum there as well. That Wildfire Ready Watersheds program is relatively new, but we are starting to execute some projects there that are not necessarily geared towards minimizing the intensity of a wildfire, like forest management work is for, but it's geared more towards minimizing the impacts of a wildfire in the post-fire setting. We're taking this very kind of holistic view of, ‘what does resilience look like in our watershed?’
Llanes: There's been quite a lot of changes at the federal level this past year, and I'm curious: how does some of that, maybe, instability or uncertainty from partners like the Forest Service impact your partnerships?
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, the first thing to say about that is the folks I work with at the U.S. Forest Service are some of the most dedicated passionate public servants I think you could come across. And part of the benefit of the partnership is that we are able to be pretty nimble and flexible. And so when we did have some slowdowns, for instance, we had one agreement that we were hoping to sign at the beginning of the year, delayed for a few months. We could pivot pretty easily to continue getting work done in our priority watersheds. We have certainly seen some delays. We've certainly seen some projects deferred. We're hopeful, you know, some of them will come back next year once things maybe stabilize out a little bit.
But instability with our partners is never really going to deter us from continuing to to work with them. Our source water comes off of those lands regardless of who owns them or what the capacity of those external partners are. And so we're committed. We're in it with them, and I just very much appreciate their continuous communication throughout this period and dedication to continuing to get work done despite all the challenges that the folks at the Forest (Service) don't necessarily have a whole lot of control over. But they've remained committed and I'm really appreciative of them for that.
Llanes: That was Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist at Denver Water. She manages the utility’s forest and wildfire programs. Madeline, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with Rocky Mountain Community Radio.
McDonald: Yeah, absolutely.
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