Eagle County fire officials to educate residents about wildfire preparedness in month-long campaign
Local agencies launch month-long education effort
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May is Wildfire Preparedness Month. The timing seems appropriate this year.
According to the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District, the federal snow water equivalent measurement site on Vail Mountain shows only 38% of the 30-year median snowpack on Vail Mountain right now. And much of the rest of the valley is pretty dry.
“It’s pretty impressive how powdery the dirt is this time of year,” Vail wildfire specialist Paul Cada said, adding that plants up and down the valley are starting to green up a little sooner than normal.
Wildfire Preparedness Month, a joint effort between the valley’s emergency service agencies, helps provide information and action items about preparing for wildfires — a when, not if proposition — over the four weeks of May. Gypsum Fire Protection District Chief Justin Kirkland said his crews have already had to knock down a couple of small fires in recent days.
Katie Jenkins, Eagle County’s Wildfire Mitigation Specialist, said the weekly preparedness campaigns — posted on the EC Emergency website — include urging people to sign up for Eagle County Alerts and check on their insurance coverage.
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Jenkins or someone from a local fire district can come to your home to provide an evaluation of defensible space and how fire-prepared your home is. Jenkins noted that trees around a home can sometimes be mitigated rather than removed to help protect a home from wildfire.
Another action item is making sure residents are ready to evacuate if needed. That means having ready access to pets and their food, passports, prescriptions, family photos and computers or hard drives and important paperwork to grab at a moment’s notice. In the case of the 2022 Duck Pond fire in Gypsum, residents had just minutes to evacuate in advance of a fast-moving, wind-driven fire.
While Jenkins said homeowners need to take responsibility for wildfire preparedness on their property, there’s a large effort on the part of local fire agencies to help mitigate the effects of wildfires. Some of those officials Tuesday provided the Eagle County Board of Commissioners with an update of their efforts in 2024.
Those efforts over the years have treated thousands of acres of land around the valley in an effort to ease the potential effects of wildfires. Partners now include a 20-agency consortium of local fire districts, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, local utilities and others.
That group over several years has spent roughly $10 million in its efforts, from wildfire assessments to fuel reduction and thinning projects and prescribed fires.
A more recent countywide project has been a spring and early-fall chipping project in communities. That project has removed hundreds of tons of potentially flammable material from communities. The material was first supposed to go to the biomass plant in Gypsum. But that facility closed abruptly in April of 2024, meaning chipped material now goes to the county’s landfill, where it’s used for compost and other uses.
Commissioner Tom Boyd noted there’s a lot of value in paying for mitigation versus firefighting, saying that a dollar spent on mitigation saves $4 later.
Hugh Fairfield-Smith, the fire management officer for Eagle Valley Wildland, said that ratio can be even higher — perhaps $1,800 to $1 — in resort areas.
