Last month, Colorado lawmakers were handed a simple, science-backed opportunity: shift a fraction of wildfire funding toward the one strategy most consistently shown to protect homes: home hardening and defensible space grants. However, they said no to House Bill 1310, what was also known as the Wildfire Resiliency Grant Money bill.
Let’s be clear about what this bill was and wasn’t. It did not defund “fuels reduction” or fire suppression strategies. It did not challenge the logging-heavy system that already receives nearly all wildfire mitigation dollars. It was a compromise that simply asked: If we know what actually determines whether a home burns, why aren’t we funding it?The science is not ambiguous. Homes do not ignite primarily from a wall of flames. They ignite from embers — wind-driven firebrands that travel ahead of the fire front — and from small ignitions within the immediate surroundings of the structure. This is the foundation of decades of undisputed wildfire research, including work by then U.S. Forest Service scientist Jack Cohen on the “home ignition zone.”
And yet, state funding tells a very different story. Roughly 99% of Colorado’s wildfire mitigation funding — about $6 million — goes toward logging, often miles away from communities. Just $60,000 goes toward home hardening and defensible space. The bill attempted to better align these numbers with science.Decades of research point to the same conclusion: Whether a home survives a wildfire is determined by conditions at and immediately around the structure — vent screens, roof materials, deck combustibility and the vegetation and debris within 100 feet. In other words, anything that can be ignited by embers.
We’ve seen this repeatedly in Colorado. In the East Troublesome fire, homes ignited from embers miles ahead of the flame front. In the Cameron Peak and Hayman fires, structure loss was driven by vulnerabilities within the home ignition zone, not distant forests. In the Marshall fire, entire neighborhoods burned without a forest in sight. These are patterns, not outliers.Meanwhile, we know that hardening homes and creating defensible space works. When these measures are in place, homes are far more likely to survive — even under extreme fire weather conditions. That is not a contested claim. It is a scientific consensus.Opponents argued that home hardening is inconsistently applied and that landscape-scale mitigation has proven value. But inconsistent participation is a reason to expand access, not to underfund the approach most directly tied to structure survival. As for mechanical “thinning,” while some research claims limited effectiveness, a large and growing body of science finds that thinning more often exacerbates wildfire behavior and rate of spread.Large-scale mechanical thinning and other logging is expensive, recurring and ineffective at the outcome we care about most: homes surviving. Home hardening, by contrast, is targeted, comparatively cost-effective and directly addresses what determines whether a structure stands or burns.
This bill was a compromise. It simply said: If multiple strategies matter, ensure that the one most directly tied to protecting homes receives meaningful investment. Instead, politicians chose to protect the logging industry status quo.It’s worth noting that the same House Agriculture, Water & Natural Resources committee, in the same hearing, also voted down a bill to ban recreational beaver hunting on public lands — a cost-free measure that would have protected wetland corridors that slow fire spread and buffer communities. Three votes in favor, 10 against. Somewhere in that chamber, though, was a different vision: that Colorado’s path forward isn’t to keep waging war on the landscape, but to learn to live within it — protecting the ecosystems that protect us, and the homes that sit among them.When the next fast fire comes — and it will — the consequences will be measured in homes lost and communities displaced. And the answer to why will be the same: We knew what worked, and we chose not to fund it.
Nicholas Scritchfield, of Estes Park, is a public communications and forest watch associate with theJohn Muir Project.
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