From Spokane, Wash. to Pueblo County, Colo., fast-moving fires have again wreaked havoc in neighborhoods this summer. Now, a network of scientists, fire professionals and other experts have joined forces to seek research-based solutions to the problem.
University of Colorado Boulder fire scientist Jennifer Balch argues that widespread thinking about the wildfire crisis is wrong in some basic ways. In a 2024 paper, she and co-authors argued that it isn’t the increasing size of fires that’s threatening homes and lives: it’s their speed.
In a recent two-decade period, wildfires that grew more than 4,000 acres in a day were less than 3% of the roughly 60,000 fires they analyzed. But that small portion accounted for nearly 90% of structures damaged or destroyed.
“We need to shift away from thinking that ‘big’ is the problem because it's not. It's actually the small, fast-moving fires that are the ones that are destroying most of our homes,” she told the Mountain West News Bureau this week. “They're also mostly in grassland systems, they're not in the middle of the woods.”
A paradigmatic example is Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire, a wind-driven but relatively small blaze that destroyed more than 1,000 suburban homes in an afternoon just before New Year’s.
“Fires are also getting faster, which is really compromising firefighting abilities and suppression teams,” she added.
On average, the maximum fire growth rate jumped by just shy of 250% across the West, with even sharper accelerations seen in parts of California, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, according to the 2024 paper.
To help inform policy responses, Balch and her colleagues recently launched the National Science Foundation-funded Fast Fire Network. The inaugural meeting was held this week.
“We really want to build a larger collaborative community because this is an all-hands-on-deck moment when we need everybody across sectors to be thinking about how we solve the fast fire problem,” she said.
Some 175 people representing academia, industry, nonprofits and government joined the virtual event, a level of interest Balch called “exciting.”
Moving forward, participants will work in smaller teams to develop new tools and data-driven policy responses, Balch said. At the end of the five-year effort, they’ll present the solutions they develop.
Because fast-moving blazes so often overwhelm the ability of structure and wildland firefighters to respond, Balch said that many of the most impactful solutions will focus on resilience, not emergency response.
“We need to be thinking about building and hardening homes, making communities more fire resilient, coming up with evacuation plans well in advance of any fires starting,” she said. “And, we also need to use fire to fight fire.”
“We need to deal with it before a fire even starts,” she added. “Because once you have a fast-moving fire, it's too late.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
