Red Zone: Colorado’s Growing Wildfire Danger


The number of wildfires in Colorado has exploded during the past decade. So has the number of people living in high-risk fire zones. And public policies for dealing with both actually risk making the state’s fire danger even worse.

We analyzed data from the U.S. Census and the state, and found that one in four Colorado homes is located in a fire zone. A quarter million people have moved into the red zone in the past two decades – 100,000 of them since the state’s largest wildfire, the Hayman Fire, 10 years ago.


This report was made possible in part with a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Policies Put More Coloradans at Risk

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By Michael Kodas and Burt Hubbard
I-News Network

The number of wildfires in Colorado has exploded during the past decade. So has the number of people living in high-risk fire zones.

And public policies for dealing with both actually risk making the state’s fire danger even worse, an I-News Network investigation found.

Ellen Bozell

In the past two decades, a quarter million people have moved into Colorado’s red zones – the parts of the state at risk for the most dangerous wildfires. Today, one of every four Colorado homes is in a red zone.

Ellen Bozzell and her husband, Scott Roth, felt the lure of a red zone four years ago. The beautiful forest. Winds to generate power. They built their dream home in the mountainside subdivision of Buckskin Heights, overlooking Fort Collins.

But the thick trees, gusty winds and steep terrain made for a catastrophic combination when lightening sparked the High Park fire on June 9. The fire west of Fort Collins quickly became the most damaging in state history, destroying more homes than any other and killing one person.

“If our house burns down, we won’t rebuild up there,” Bozzell said the day after her evacuation, taking refuge in a friend’s barn. “We will move into town.”
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Today, 1.1 million Coloradans live in more than half a million homes in red zones across the state, an I-News analysis found. That’s one of every four homes and one of every five people in the state.

— I-News Analysis

Sidebar – Are forestry policies replacing one hazard with another?

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By Michael Kodas
I-News Network

When Tom and Sharon Scanlan began building their home in the Kuehster Road community southwest of Denver six years ago, they could see mountainsides scarred by the state’s most massive wildfire ever – the 2002 Hayman fire.

“We looked at it every single day,” Tom Scanlan says.

Those charred mountainsides helped inspire the couple to build their mountain home out of inflammable insulated concrete, bury their propane tank far from the house and cut scores of trees to create defensible spaces around the house and barn.

“We often had guys come up and talk to us from the state tree forestry,” Tom Scanlan says. “We understood the risks and we all did…more than was recommended.”

But when the Lower North Fork fire roared into their neighborhood in March, the Scanlans escaped only minutes ahead of the flames that left their home a charred ruin.

“There was no mitigation that could possibly be done to stop what happened here,” Tom Scanlan says.
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I-News Redzone amid Colorado Counties.

Red zone areas marked in red on a map with Colorado counties labeled.


Data: Homes in the Red Zone

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Social Media Map of Colorado Wildfires


Gallery – Scenes from the Red Zone


About the reporters…

Michael Kodas is author of the book “High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed.”A 20-year veteran journalist, he was a member of the Hartford Courant team that won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. He won the top prize in nonfiction from the National Best Books 2008 Awards by USA Book News, and first place for a self-illustrated story in the Lowell Thomas Awards of the Society of American Travel Writers. He formerly worked as a staff photographer, picture editor and writer at the Hartford Courant, as well as at newspapers and magazines in Kansas.
Visit: MichaelKodas.com

Carolyn Moreau is a journalist, videographer and documentary filmmaker based in Boulder, Colorad.

She grew up in New Zealand and worked there as a journalist and television producer before moving to the US, where she produced a live daily talk show and spent 15 years as a reporter in Connecticut for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper.

Carolyn’s documentary work took her to Mount Everest, where she shot and produced video for the book HIgh Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, showing how high dollar expeditions are bringing crime to the world’s tallest mountain. Most recently, she produced a documentary short for HDnet World Report on the aftermath of the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Carolyn is a co-founder of Narrative Light, a documentary and multi-media production company, and Small Camera Workshop, which teaches organizations and businesses how to tell their own stories using consumer camcorders. Visit NarrativeLight.com


  • Claudia Putnam

    Homeowners do foot the bill for high insurance and for mitigation. Much more so than people living in earthquake or hurricane or tornado zones do. Why’s it different? Why should taxpayers be more freaked out about paying for these disasters than for other kinds? Also, there really aren’t that many developments at higher than 8000 feet. At that elevation you get into the alpine/subalpine transition zone and that’s not comfortable living. You have continental divide weather at that level. So it’s simply not true that development is increasing there except as a function of there not being available land elsewhere. Which is another issue. 

  • Claudia Putnam

    Also, it’s not a matter of who actually pays for firefighting–we don’t want our houses to actually burn down, duh. So there’s no disincentive to take care of our property or whatever it was you were implying. To the extent this wasn’t done in the past, wildfire simply wasn’t that big of a threat in the past. As the threat has ramped up, the economy has ramped down and many of us don’t have the mega-thousands it suddenly costs to log our lands, replace roofs and sidings (covenants in some cases used to require shakes, if you can believe it!), haul in rocks to put all around our homes, replace the wrong kind of shrubbery, and on and on and on. Many of us bought in the mountains because it was supposed to be cheaper so we were on a tighter budget in the first place. And now our homes are have dropped in value, so we can’t do an equity loan. So it’s all very tight. We’re all trying very hard. 

  • Eric Monds

    “Those charred mountainsides helped inspire the couple to build their mountain home out of inflammable insulated concrete…. ”

    Uh, you do know what “inflammable” means — or don’t you?