wildfire

Xcel Energy announced a second wave of power outages that affected thousands of customers, and officials closed highways around Boulder.

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.

This week a trial was scheduled to begin to determine if Xcel Energy was at fault for igniting the Marshal Fire. But Wednesday, the energy company agreed to terms to settle the more than 4,000 homeowners, businesses and insurers. The Colorado Sun's Michael Booth discusses the settlement with KUNC's Desmond O'Boyle.

The federal government currently spends significantly more on suppressing fires than preventing them.

Michael Conway highlights the challenges of passing legislation aimed at improving homeowners' insurance access.

For millennia, Indigenous peoples have intentionally set fires to care for the land. Colonization and fire exclusion largely put an end to those practices, though the tradition endured. Now, California tribes have opened the door to a new era of cultural burning - a potential model for the rest of the West.

Researchers say that during a wildfire, aspen groves in Colorado’s forests help slow the progress of the blaze. So should more mountain communities plant aspen groves on the outskirts of town?

A new bill co-sponsored by Sen. John Hickenlooper is designed to speed up wildfire prevention efforts across the country. But a few measures in the bill have some environmental groups concerned.

A 0.5% fee would be imposed under House Bill 1302 on every home insurance policy in Colorado, unless a house meets certain wildfire mitigation standards

The federal wildland firefighting force is currently split between five land management agencies – the Forest Service (under the U.S. Department of Agriculture), the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (under the Department of the Interior).