One community in Douglas County is preparing to break ground on a new fire station.

Castle Rock Fire and Rescue Department’s Station 156 will be located in the northeast portion of town. 

The new station will serve Cobblestone Ranch and Terrain, two growing subdivisions. It will include a 13,000-square-foot fire station and a 13,000-square-foot logistics center.

“When I started 1986, we had two fire stations,” Fire Chief Norris Croom told CBS Colorado. “We were an all-volunteer department.”

In the 40 years Croom has been with the fire department, a lot has changed.

“7,500 people were in town,” Croom said. “Right now, we’re at about 87,000 people, and this will be our sixth fire station.”

Croom is presently the chief of a fire department that’s four times bigger and serves a much larger community.

“Just mind boggling that it’s grown so fast,” said Judy Barnett, who lives in the Castle Oaks community.

For 30 years, Barnett has also watched the town grow from her backyard.

“Just overnight, you look out, and there’s another house,” Barnett said.

Her rural home in northeast Castle Rock is getting more suburban, with the addition of communities like Cobblestone Ranch and Terrain.

“The Terrain pretty much surrounds us on the west side,” Barnett said.

Croom says his department is being stretched thin in those areas.

“We’re seeing response times as long as 14 to 15 minutes,” Croom explained.

But, soon, Castle Rock Fire and Rescue will break ground on a solution, a new fire station on Castle Oaks Drive.

“We believe that we’ll be able to cut those response times in more than half,” Croom said.

Fleet maintenance work is done at Castle Rock’s public safety training facility, but that work will soon have a new home. A logistics center will be built along with the new fire station.

Croom says the logistics center will provide a centralized location for equipment and space for maintenance work.

“As far as our equipment is concerned, we’ve got it stored throughout all of our different stations,” Croom said. “So, if you need hazmat equipment, you might have to go to Station 5. If you need wildland equipment, you might have to go to this station. We’ll be able to take all of that out of those stations and consolidate it into one central location.”

The total cost of the facility is $21.5 million. It’s being paid for with TABOR timeout dollars, a general fund loan, capital impact fees and certificates of participation. Twelve firefighters will be needed to staff the new station. Croom says the money to hire more firefighters comes from a ballot measure passed by Castle Rock voters in 2024.

“We do worry about fires as of lately. We’re surrounded by scrub oak,” Barnett said. “As dry as it is, it, you know, and it wouldn’t take much.”

The new Station 156 is just minutes from Barnett’s home, and will serve her community, as well as Terrain and Cobblestone Ranch.

“I think that’s great because, of course with all the growth around here, there’s a lot more chance of having a fire,” Barnett said. “The hard thing about growth is all the people, but then that good thing is that we get those kind of amenities.”

The station will break ground next week, and it’s expected to be operational in 2027.

“As the town continues to grow and as the community continues to grow, us being able to keep up with that growth is significant,” Croom said.

(COLORADO) — The Colorado National Guard will be deployed to the Middle East in support of an international peacekeeping force with a departure ceremony scheduled for Friday, April 3.

According to the Colorado National Guard, the deployment is in support of Multinational Force and Observers, an international peacekeeping force that supervises the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty and enforces its terms.

More than 200 soldiers of the Colorado Army National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment will be at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, 7711 East Academy Boulevard in Denver, for the departure ceremony.

“The Soldiers of this battalion are highly trained, motivated, and ready to assume the mission of the Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai,” said 1-157th Commander U.S. Army Lt. Col. Adam W. Rhum. “We are proud to be part of this long-standing and successful peacekeeping operation, and we are committed to upholding the legacy of those who have served before us in support of the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel.”

The treaty was a result of the Camp David Accords and ended the state of war that had existed between the two countries. The MFO is an independent international organization created by agreement between Egypt and Israel to oversee the peace and is supported by 14 nations, according to the Colorado National Guard.

“The 1-157th has a lineage dating back to the Colorado Gold Rush, officially becoming the ‘First Colorado’ Infantry Regiment in 1883. The regiment served with distinction in World War I and World War II, where it was attached to the 45th Infantry Division and fought in major campaigns including Sicily, Anzio, Italy, and southern France,” said the Colorado National Guard.

The unit is headquartered at Fort Carson.

A new study out of Western Colorado University has implications for the wildfire season ahead as nearly the entire West faces record-low snowpack conditions.

The paper, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal “Environmental Research Letters,” found that not only is an early-snow melt associated with earlier fire seasons and a more acreage being burned, it’s also linked to more severe wildfires.

“When we have a low-snow winter, those high elevation forests will have lower live fuel moisture and ultimately more flammable conditions during the summer,” said Jared Balik, the lead author of the study. “That in turn, promotes greater burn severity, greater fire severity, that increases the risk of forest loss or conversion of forest to shrubland or grassland.”

The study used satellites that measure pre- and post-fire conditions to estimate burn severity of fires across 11 Western states — including Colorado — from 1985 to 2021, Balik said. Using that 36-year dataset and regional snowpack metrics, he said researchers were able to create models to explore the interactions between snowpack levels and wildfire seasons.

Balik said the study’s results confirmed what fire ecology scientists have long known: That the earlier the snow melts, the sooner the fire season can begin and that an earlier meltout typically creates drier conditions that make landscapes more susceptible to fires starting and spreading.

“Together, those two factors provide both more time and opportunity for fires to ignite and spread,” Balik said. “But we were curious, knowing that, what the implications of a low-snow year were for the severity of wildfires. What does snowpack mean for the effects of fire on our landscapes?”

Snowpack acts like a ‘savings account’ for forests

The impact of the snowpack on fire intensity — or how much of a forest’s trees and vegetation a wildfire consumes — had not previously been well studied, Balik said. Fire severity is important because while forests can survive low intensity fires, he said forests tend to have a more difficult time regenerating after high intensity fires that can kill adult trees and damage the next year’s seed source.

“These high severity fires can really change ecosystems,” Balik said. “They can cascade into other impacts on how those ecosystems store carbon, how they hold water in subsequent seasons and changes to the quality of habitat they provide for wildlife.”

Across the entire West, the study found that higher snowpacks were associated with less severe wildfires during the subsequent fire season, while lower snowpacks were linked to more severe wildfires.

Low snow reduces the soil moisture during the growing season, which results in trees and other plants drying out, Balik said. That increases how much of the forest will burn if a fire starts and how likely trees are to die as a result of the fire.

“Winter snowpack really acts as a kind of a seasonal water savings account for these western forests,” he said. “When that account runs low, the soils and vegetation dry out earlier, and those forests become more vulnerable to more severe fire.”

Colorado’s fire season has already begun

Balik said the study’s findings are made all the more noteworthy as Colorado and the West face some of the worst snowpack conditions on record.

Colorado’s snowpack has trended near all-time lows for much of the season and, as of the start of April, is likely worse than it’s ever been for this time of year, according to the state climatologist’s office.

“We’ve already seen a fire south of Colorado Springs. There’s already huge fires in Nebraska,” Balik said. “Sure enough, we’ve had a low-snow winter and the fire season has effectively begun.”

With climate change, which is caused by burning fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, he noted that scientists predict the West will see warmer temperatures and lower snowpacks.

Looking at long-term snow patterns across the West, Balik noted that the four corners states, including Colorado, have seen the strongest evidence of long-term snowpack declines. While the snowpack in recent years has trended lower, he noted “there’s a lot of interannual variation,” due to climate patterns like the El Nino and La Nina.

Balik said the study shows that as climate change drives snowpack declines throughout the West, the region should anticipate longer fire seasons with fires that are not only larger but are more severe.

“This work really suggests that we need to start thinking about fire season as less of a summer phenomenon and more of a phenomenon that kicks off once the snow is gone,” he said.

The research also highlights that communities should make the most of winters with good snowpacks by focusing on prescribed burning and other wildfire mitigation measures when there is the opportunity, Balik said.

While the snowpack this winter suggests that the West could be heading into a dangerous fire season, he noted that weather patterns could still change for the better and people can reduce the risk of wildfires by acting responsibly.

“If we get a wet summer or a really wet spring, that could still make a difference,” Balik said. “And of course, it also very much depends on what people do. A lot of the most damaging fires are started by people. If we act responsibly when we’re out recreating, maybe we can start one fewer fire.”