Wildfires

Colorado, like the rest of the country, is experiencing more, and worse, climate disasters, wreaking havoc on people’s homes and their homeowner’s insurance rates.

President Donald Trump’s administration has continued to maintain that it has adequate resources and staffing to manage wildfire preparedness and response on federal lands.

A group of mostly Western U.S. Senators is demanding answers on why the U.S. Forest Service has fallen behind on efforts to reduce hazardous wildfire fuels. The 12 senators – all Democrats – are from Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and other wildfire-impacted states.

As blazes expand to higher elevations, the impacts cascade downstream.

The Healthy Lungs for Heroes Act was introduced by Democratic California Senator Adam Schiff and Republican Utah Senator John Curtis. If passed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal officials would have one year to develop a plan to make “commercially available appropriate respiratory personal protective equipment for wildland firefighters and supporting staff in settings in which smoke exposure surpasses covered permissible exposure limits.”

Data analyzed by the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters shows that prescribed fires and other hazardous fuel reduction efforts have fallen by nearly 40% across the West this year.

The tragic Los Angeles fires were a historically destructive disaster, but they also presented a unique opportunity to study the toxic exposures faced by firefighters. New findings point to a heightened risk for serious diseases like lupus.

In January, the world watched in horror as fires marched through multiple Los Angeles neighborhoods, leaving behind blocks of smoldering foundations. A recent report tried to calculate how much it would cost to rebuild the structures lost to better withstand the next blaze.

Wildfires have grown substantially in size in recent decades, but they’re also burning much more intensely, with high severity areas growing much faster than fires overall. New research projects additional significant jumps in the scale of wildfires that kill most trees unless major management measures - like prescribed fire - are carried out.

Every summer, thousands of wildland firefighters endure months of heavy exposure to smoke and other toxins without respiratory protection. As a troubling picture of the health implications emerges, policies are beginning to change.