It's been a record-setting fire year in Colorado. The three largest wildfires in state history all erupted in 2020, including the East Troublesome fire which broke out northwest of Denver in mid-October.

"I knew once we saw the flames coming across the ridge that it was coming towards us and it was coming really rapid," said CarrieAnn Mathis, a Grand County, Colorado resident.

She and her neighbors had almost no time to evacuate.

"It’s terrifying knowing that you only have one way out," Mathis said.

Somehow, the cabin in the woods that she always wanted and has called home for four years now survived the blaze.

"We were not allowed up and we just kind of held each other and cried that our home was still standing," she said.

At least 100 homes in the area were lost. It’s been another destructive fire year. Eight and half million acres - or three and half million hectares - of land in the U.S. have burned this year, well above the 10-year average.

"It's an extraordinary year for anybody who's alive," said Jason Sibold, a fire expert at Colorado State University. "Nobody can remember anything like this, right?"

Sibold won't draw conclusions from any one particular year but said a changing climate has brought hotter, often drier conditions that are more conducive to fire and persist later in the season.

"We are warming up and we're getting extreme events much earlier than what the climate projections anticipated," he said.

"Fire is very responsive," said Jennifer Balch, Earth Lab director at the University of Colorado Boulder. "It takes just a little bit of warming to lead to a lot more burning."

Balch said people moving into fire-prone areas have created a real problem.

"That's the piece that makes me very nervous," she said. "There are a lot of homes literally built into flammable places and there are a lot of lungs in harm's way. Tens of millions of people this summer have been choking on a piece of climate change."

Both Balch and Sibold would like to see more controlled burns and better forest management but in these 'wildland-urban interfaces,' as they're called, that's very hard to do.

"When you drive through some of these landscapes there are houses everywhere," Sibold said. "Boy I'm glad I'm not a fire manager saying yeah let’s burn this."

They'd like to see more fire-resistant homes and smarter building codes.

"I can't imagine a bigger wakeup call than the fire season we've seen this year," Balch said. 

"Tens of thousands of homes have burned and dozens of lives have been lost. I mean what more do we need in order to shift our behaviors… If I had a panic button, I would push it right now."

"Climate change didn’t make the hazard but it certainly is ramping it up," Sibold said.

"Definitely when I go home I’m going to do a lot more fire mitigation than what we'd already done," Mathis said.

While she believes in climate change, she considers the East Troublesome fire the exception rather than the rule.

"I definitely think it's safe to live here," Mathis said. "This event was completely abnormal."

But many experts warn it’s a new normal that society will have to contend with and aggressively respond to in the years ahead.
 

Check out The China Report, our new weekly newsletter. Subscribe here!