Western Colorado is facing down another long hot summer already. The Roaring Fork Valley is beginning to experience small fires, possible harbingers of another long and destructive wildfire season. Angie Davlyn is the Executive Director of the Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley. She tells KDNK the outlook is tricky.
"Everyone who's in the field is certainly preparing earlier than usual, and with as many additional staff as, as resources allow for because we know that it's going to be a long fire season, and certainly one that is going to keep everyone on their toes. We're also continuing the exceptional drought in many areas that started last season and is continuing to keep fuels at a moisture content that is alarming for wildfire."
In response to the drought, the town of Carbondale, the Carbondale and Rural Fire Protection District, and the Wildfire Collaborative have enlisted the help of Dr. Hussam Mahmoud of Vanderbilt University and his wildfire modeling program. Carbondale residents are being asked to fill out a survey on basic information about their homes, such as 'what is your roof made of, are there plants next to your house, what kind of windows do you have?'
This data, collected by either a survey or an in-person data collector, goes into Dr. Mahmoud's program, which then depicts what will happen if somehow a fire does sweep through town.
"We're sending him and his team that home-level data, which he's pairing with a number of different data sources. Everything from wind, historic fire strikes, slope, terrain, topography, vegetation models that he is pulling from databases and satellite imagery. So he's layering hundreds of different data points on top of each other to essentially create a 3D model of the town. And then he's running simulations within that model of fires at different ignition points, at different wind speeds and directions, and different humidity.
And from that, he's creating a most likely model of fire spread. But we also have models of fire spread from different wind directions. We're not just looking at one specific ignition point; we're looking at thousands of ignition points, multiple different wind speeds and directions, and using all of that data together to figure out the most likely scenario, but simultaneously planning for many different scenarios."
The more residents fill out the survey, the clearer the picture becomes, and the more prepared officials will be. Davlyn said she's heard from other fire districts that used modeling that it's been very helpful in real life. The town and the Carbondale and Rural Fire Protection District are also funding a data collector to visit residences and fill in any blanks, both inside and outside town boundaries.
The survey closes at the end of the month and can be taken in both English and Spanish. It can be found here.
