By the time snow fell in Colorado on New Year's Day, the damage had been done. Viliam Klein's home in the town of Superior was one of 1,084 destroyed by the Marshall Fire.

"At this point honestly I’m just really overwhelmed and I can't really feel much anymore."

Violent wind-whipped flames moved quickly and without mercy through neighborhoods whose residents never thought their communities would be in harm's way.  
"It came out so fast. We didn’t really have time to even think," says another resident.

In some ways, experts say, this was a perfect storm.

Max Cook with the University of Colorado Boulder says a wet 2021 spring grew the lush grasses that dried out during a drought in the second half of the year. All it took was a spark. He says warming temperatures produced by climate change help make year-round wildfires more likely nowadays, even in the suburbs. 

"Our understanding of risk and exposure needs to be adapted to the situation that we're currently in which is that a lot of people are living in flammable landscapes," Cook says.

A 2018 study found that the  so-called 'wildland-urban interface' - where homes and wildland vegetation intermingle, grew by 41 percent in the U.S. between 1990 and 2010.

Virtually all that growth, due to new home construction. These former grasslands are increasingly in the wildfire crosshairs.

"This wasn't a fluke, this was a bellwether. This was a canary in the coal mine, this was a harbinger."
Keith Porter with the University of Colorado Boulder says homes built to wildland-urban interface code fare better than those, like in the Marshall Fire, that aren't. He says structures in the path of California's 2018 Camp Fire helped prove that.

"It wasn't that every newer one survived and every older one burned down, but there was a marked difference," says Porter.

He says hardening neighborhoods by clearing vegetation around homes is key, as is using less wood in construction and simply educating people about wildfire risks. Some public utilities are even burying power lines to eliminate ignition sources. Porter’s research shows fire mitigation costs far less than fires themselves.  

"Everybody suffers when they suffer. When it comes to natural disasters, there are no boundaries, everybody's benefited when we make ourselves resilient, and everybody is hurt when we don't," he adds.

The Marshall Fire is prompting new research, including into who's most at risk of wildfires.

"Having a better understanding and a more detailed understanding of where these communities exist and how they're built is really critical," says Cook.

Critical to preventing more of these calamities, more heartache, in the future. 

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