AURORA | Just days after a wind-driven grass fire devastated communities on the west side of the metroplex, Aurora lawmakers reviewed city plans for confronting similar catastrophes here.
The city’s Hazard Mitigation Plan includes analyses of natural disasters that have some likelihood of afflicting Aurora in the coming years, including fires, floods, drought, winter storms, tornadoes, earthquakes and more.
On Monday, council members said that after last week’s wildfire in north Boulder County, they’ve received questions from the public asking about such risks in Aurora.
“I think we all got some of those emails from constituents who are concerned about what happened in Boulder County,” Councilmember Francoise Bergan said.
Most of the council questions concerned city management of fire risk. According to the plan, between 2016 and 2020, Aurora Fire Rescue responded to 239 fires that could be characterized as wildland fires, out of 770 fire responses in total.
Wildfires were deemed “likely” to occur in the future, which in the context of the plan means there is a 10%-100% chance of the disaster occurring in the next year, or there is at least one chance for it to occur within the next 10 years.
At the same time, the wildfire threat was qualified as being “limited” in potential severity, meaning it is capable of causing “some injuries” and the “complete shutdown of critical facilities for more than one week” while more than 10% of property in the city would be severely damaged. The hazard was also ranked “low” in terms of overall significance.
The plan also identified as threats some of the conditions which fueled the explosive growth of the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, such as severe winds, which were ranked as “extremely likely.”
City officials said a separate presentation focusing on the wildland-urban interface and the city’s capability to fight wildfires is planned for Feb. 7.
While the creators of the plan opted not to assess human-caused hazards, they did account for climate change, noting that recent “warming in the southwest region is among the most rapid in the nation” and that “the period since 1950 has been hotter than any comparable long period in at least 600 years.”
The plan warns that trends such as rising global temperatures, less snow and more rain falling, and more precipitation in general falling during extreme weather events are specifically increasing the risk of heat waves, drought, flooding and fires.
Detailing the plan to the council, the city’s emergency manager, Matt Chapman, said the list of associated projects includes coordinating the city’s emergency messaging, evacuations and clearing vegetation.
Chapman said the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency had approved the plan.
When asked whether that presentation would include more information about the city’s system for notifying residents of a wildfire threat, Chapman told Bergan that the fire service had “yet to finalize it completely” but that the city has multiple, interlocking plans for alert and evacuation.
“From start, to finish, to recovery, we have plans,” Chapman said.
He also told Bergan that firefighters had “talked through scenarios” of how evacuations would be carried out in specific areas of the city, what roadways would primarily be used and that they would work with the Public Works Department if they needed to clear away debris.
Councilmember Alison Coombs praised the quick response of firefighters to a brush fire in Cherry Creek State Park in 2021, but she said it prompted a conversation about how landscaping and fencing could impact the risk of fire.
She asked whether there was any outreach being done to help residents in high-risk areas make their properties less vulnerable. Chapman said public education targeted at homeowner’s associations and citizen groups was part of the plan and that education “could always increase.”