Why Colorado Springs homes need fire mitigation
Colorado Springs sits above 6,000 feet in El Paso County, where the city's western edge presses directly into the Front Range foothills. Neighborhoods like Mountain Shadows, Cedar Heights, Rockrimmon and the Broadmoor bluffs are beautiful precisely because they back up to the hills, but those same hills are blanketed in gambel oak and scrub oak that cure into volatile, fast-burning fuel through the dry summer and fall. On steep, drought-prone slopes, fire climbs and accelerates, and embers can travel well ahead of the flame front into yards and onto roofs.
No one in this city needs a reminder of what that risk looks like. In June 2012 the Waldo Canyon Fire burned out of the foothills and into Mountain Shadows, destroying 346 homes in a matter of hours and becoming, at the time, the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. The following year, the Black Forest Fire destroyed 489 homes northeast of the city. It showed how quickly a wildland fire can become an urban one when continuous brush carries flame straight to the home ignition zone.
That's exactly the chain we work to break. Wildfire mitigation in Colorado Springs is about thinning and separating the oak brush, clearing the first five feet around the structure, limbing up trees and hardening the home so an approaching fire loses energy before it reaches the walls. The Colorado Springs Fire Department runs an active wildfire mitigation program and inspects defensible space across the city's interface zones, and the certified crews in our statewide network build to those standards and to NFPA 1144, with photo documentation for every property.
Fire Mitigation ExpertsColorado Wildfire Defense
