Timothy Hurst
This article is extensive and paywalled so I have had to excerpt carefully. I think perhaps Jim Z. used to live in Evergreen and I know several readers (including me) are former JeffCo residents. The Gazette family incorporates the Co Springs Gazette, the Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, so shout-out to them for this story. What are your counties doing about evacuations?
All told, more than 100,000 Coloradans dotted up and down the Front Range, or about 1 in every 50 Colorado residents, lives in areas where safely evacuating could be a problem.
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Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, combined with geospatial roadway data from Open Street Maps, shows that more than 35,000 residents — not accounting for seasonal or weekend visitors — in the state’s highest exposure area, in Evergreen, have only a few possible evacuation routes, putting the number of people per lanes of egress routes near or above the number in Paradise, Calif., where residents burned in their cars trying to evacuate, depending on the particulars of a future fire’s location and behavior. Estimates that include more of the outlying areas put the possible evacuation total as high as 60,000 people for the area.
A computer program designed to simulate evacuations, called the Fast Local Emergency Evacuation Times Model (FLEET), operated by Old Dominion University in Virginia, similarly shows the Evergreen area has the longest evacuation time for wildfire-prone parts of the state.
Roxborough Park and Woodland Park are not far behind Evergreen, either for computer-simulated evacuation times or the simpler people-per-lane of evacuation rates ratio.
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The FLEET tool estimates evacuation times based on population data, roadway data and traffic simulation modeling. The Gazette’s roadway analysis looks only at population and road data.
But things could be even worse than they indicate.
What neither accounts for is the condition of roadways and the threats that could arise from roadside trees becoming a conduit for a fast-moving fire, catching fire and falling into the roads or making them impassable, or the size of roadway shoulders and how that could affect the flow of vehicles.
The threat to roadway access posed by overgrown vegetation becomes obvious on any drive through the Evergreen area. In many of the area’s neighborhoods, the narrow, winding roads are lined with dense thickets of lodgepole and ponderosa pine.
Older, larger ponderosa pine trees along the roads, if they were to catch fire or fall over, could easily stop vehicles from passing.
Some of the younger pines just feet from the roads’ shoulders, with 3- or 4-inch trunk diameters, can be found growing in tight clusters. They’re the first trees that would be cleared to prevent rapid wildfire spread or threats to road access, experts say, indicating that years have passed since serious mitigation has happened there.
The Evergreen Fire Protection District’s wildfire protection plan, updated in 2020, includes a roadway analysis that estimates “non-survivable” evacuation routes are spread throughout the area, meaning the roads risk putting drivers adjacent to 8-foot or larger flames, based on the fuels along the roads.
Bernie Weingardt, an Evergreen resident who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 37 years, said the report told him and other residents what they had long suspected.
“They ran the simulations on it, and in Evergreen, you see it will bottleneck really fast,” Weingardt said. “Just a normal day out here, with everyday traffic, you have cars backed up at the main intersections. So the small roads feeding into the main arteries, they’ll end up gridlocked, with traffic backed up into the neighborhoods.”
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This is an interesting micro-political take:
County sheriffs are tasked with managing evacuations, and elected county commissioners decide how to allocate the county’s resources. And the three Jefferson County commission districts each run east to west, like a stack of pancakes, meaning the non-metro portion of the county is split three ways, with each of the three mountain-area slices paired with a dramatically larger urban population. The three county commissioners, like 88% of the county’s population, live in the metro portion of the county.
The County Board of Commissioners launched a Wildfire Risk Reduction Task Force that met in 2019 and 2020, then produced a report in November 2020.
But Cindy Latham, of the local Rotary Club and who was appointed as a designated community leader on the task force, said she was disappointed that the group didn’t adequately address evacuation.
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Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Schrader said residents have asked him about evacuation routes more in the past couple years, but that he doesn’t support proposing evacuation routes ahead of an emergency.
“When the question comes up: ‘how do I get away from trouble?’ You have to ask questions before that. And the question is, ‘what is the trouble, and where is it?’
“To give pre-planned evacuation routes, in my view, may be irresponsible,” Schrader said. “We can’t necessarily go post signs that say ‘evacuate this way in case of a fire’. Because we don’t know if that’s going to be the best way if a fire does occur.”
To me, that’s true AND it’s also true that lots of trees along potential evacuation routes could be cleared up.. and potentially make fuel breaks.
Hal Grieb, the county’s emergency management director, said he intends to have upcoming updates to the county’s formal wildfire plans include an “evacuation annex,” modeled on San Diego County’s 2018 annex, or a document that describes how multiple agencies should cooperate during evacuations.
Residents with a close eye on the county’s wildfire preparations say they think the rest of the IWUI codes should be adopted already. Their criticisms of the county are often contrasted with how nearby Larimer, Boulder or Douglas counties have approached wildfire preparation.
In the Larimer County approach, as described by Lori Hodges, the county’s emergency management director, the county coordinates across departments in ways that other counties don’t, like having a land-use code that connects the planning and development departments with county emergency management staff to ensure that any new development meets standards for mitigation and safe emergency planning.
Justin Whitesell, the Larimer County emergency operations director, said he’s pushed not just for mitigation on public land, but that his department has had success with leading mitigation efforts on private land, using what he describes as an initial-attack module.
“The Girl Scout Ranch, the Boy Scout Ranch, some HOAs, on green belts, but we’re trying to push more into communities,” Whitesell said. “And a lot of the roads are choked out, or the vegetation has grown up against it on private land. And so we’re working with a lot of HOAs, trying to get that using our initial attack module, and using some county money to open up those roadways so that if we are doing evacuations that we can get people out.”
Once the two ThinAir Communications tower technicians reached the top of the tower, they got to work, installing a state-of-the-art, “near-infrared” video camera with the ability to swivel and capture an almost 360-degree view of the Evergreen area.
The camera provides real-time surveillance of wildfires in the area, using a camera monitoring system operated by Advanced Environmental Monitoring, a Canadian company that specializes in wildland surveillance. It can help to identify, within its field of view, where a fire is with high precision, and it can provide useful information about the fire’s behavior.
Flying insects are backlit by the sun while ThinAir Communications tower technician Ryan Heisler installs an infrared camera at the top of a 120 for tower on Thursday, June 16, 2022, at Elk Creek Fire Station 3 in Conifer, Colo. (Timothy Hurst/The Denver Gazette)
The cost of the camera and the real-time monitoring system is being picked up by Core Electric, one of the utility companies that serves electricity to the Evergreen area. Their communication tower was an optimal place to mount the camera, and as Mark Riggs, the Core Electric engineer who oversaw the camera’s installation, said the cost — a few thousand dollars for the camera, a few thousand dollars to install the equipment and a few thousand per year for the online hosting and web services for the camera — is negligible, compared to the benefit of the early detection of fires.
Colorado Springs resident Walter Lawson has urged El Paso County to put in a similar system after firefighters failed to find the Waldo Canyon fire, then left the area, allowing it to take off the following day.
“These are sentinels that watch your city,” said Lawson, a member of Westside Watch, a Colorado Springs advocacy group that works on wildfire preparedness.
Cameras are only so useful, though, others say. Quick wildfire detection can help save time and even lives in the worst-case scenario, by alerting residents earlier about potentially devastating wildfires. But if the roadways can’t handle an evacuation, then early detection can give some people a head start, but it still might not prevent people from getting stuck.
“It’s another step in the right direction,” said Bill Wysong, another Westside Watch member, but he said doesn’t think they can replace evacuation planning.
For a fire that moves fast, Wysong argued, like the Marshall fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County in December 2021, it’s unlikely infrared cameras would have made much of a difference for the firefighting effort.
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While I was trying to link to the story (I’m a subscriber) I ran across this story from yesterday in the Gazette which talks about the Ladris evacuation model.
The application is part of a growing field using AI to predict disaster scenarios like wildfire and floods. CEO Leo Zlimen said the tool can help local planners find the best routes to move populations out of the way of fast-moving natural disasters threatening urban areas.
The 26-year-old University of California, Berkeley graduate started Ladris with his college roommate in their hometown of Nevada City, Calif.
“There is a path where everyone gets out in a reasonable amount of time,” he said.
This summer, the company added the Pikes Peak Office of Emergency Management to its client list. Director Andrew Notbohm said the regional office will be incorporating the software into the newest iteration of its wildfire evacuation planning process this year.
Dozens of local fire, police and other agencies have been trained on Ladris. The goal is to help “challenge
assumptions” about the best evacuation strategies in the event of a fast-moving, wind-driven fire, Notbohm said.
The application works by creating a virtual representation of traffic patterns based on presets about population levels and vehicles on the road. When an emergency planner simulates an evacuation, the hope is the software can accurately identify possible bottlenecks and backups.
“It basically creates a digital twin,” Notbohm said.
At the beginning of the month, Palmer Lake Fire Department Chief John Vincent’s staff was using Ladris for the first time to simulate an evacuation during the small town’s Fourth of July celebration, an event that attracts thousands. With three cardinal directions to take traffic out of town and few roads, he said his options are naturally limited.
“It just help us with thought process,” Vincent said of the software.
Using technology to simulate evacuation routes is not a new idea. The Gazette in 2022 used the Fast Local Emergency Evacuation Times Model (FLEET) and its analysis to show that the community of Evergreen had some of the longest wildfire-evacuation times in the state. FLEET is operated by Old Dominion University in Virginia and is accessible to the public.
What makes Ladris different — and worth its more than $100,000 price tag for an 18-month contract — is the user interface, Notbohm said.
Absolutely bottle necked roads and one way in, same road out! Crooked, winding, steep – very steep terrain with heavy fuels on the ground and spruce/fir/lodgepole understories, with scattered patches of ponderosa pine and aspen!
We saw several homes that we would have liked to purchase, but being a student of Hayman, Wallow and Rodeo-Chedeski, we opted out of these waiting disasters. Even the Bear Cteek area, where the multi-millionaires roam is destined to an untold tragedy. The average house in Evergreen is over a million dollars, or was when we left 8 years ago; I know it’s probably doubled now!
We picked a house on a hill, so I went to logging and performing mitigation work on anything below us; prioritizing large ponderosa and aspen. Opened up a great view to Mt. Evans (no, still Evans) and points west. We did have two roads for ingress/egress as a “must have”.
I saw homes with the back decks dead even with a Douglas fir canopy, you could stick your hand out and pull needles….. I think home insurance is now next to impossible there, according to a homeowner site we are still members of….
Not if……