Colorado firefighters in grade mountain homes on wildfire survivability during training exercise

As wildfire concerns grow across Colorado’s mountains, firefighters in Summit County spent part of the week walking through a neighborhood and evaluating which homes they would be able to defend if a wildfire raced toward them.

Crews from Summit Fire & EMS and Red, White & Blue Fire Protection District worked together on a training exercise in Silverthorne, practicing everything from calling in additional resources to assessing homes for wildfire risk. The exercise centered around a reality firefighters face during major wildfires: they cannot save every structure.

“All of these homes potentially could be threatened,” said Steve Lipsher, community resource officer with Summit Fire & EMS. “So we want to spend our resources and our time and our energy in a place where we can actually make a difference.”

As firefighters moved from property to property, they completed what is known as structure triage, evaluating how defensible each home would be during a wildfire. The assessments look at factors such as defensible space, vegetation near structures, access to water, and other hazards that could make a home more difficult to protect.

“This is what we found at this home, this is how defensible it is from a fire, this is how we may be able to improve it,” Lipsher said. “Or in the worst-case scenario, this is a home that would take far too much effort and we cannot improve it in time.”

Some issues are simple to fix. During one assessment, Lipsher pointed out vegetation concerns near a home and noted that “this would be a real easy fix to dramatically improve the likelihood” of the home surviving a wildfire.

The training comes as Summit County enters the summer fire season under unusually dry conditions.

“Our soil moisture is nothing right now,” Lipsher said. “You can feel it.”

For homeowners Harold and Sherry Pearce, the wildfire threat was one of the realities they understood when purchasing a mountain home.

“The insurance rates reflect what we’ve realized is a threat commonly,” Harold Pearce said.

One challenge firefighters frequently encounter is convincing homeowners to make mitigation improvements that may change the look of their property.

“Sometimes it’s a case, ‘I bought a mountain home that I want to be a mountain home. I want it to be in the woods,’” Lipsher said. “Nobody moved to Colorado to live on a scalped lot — but there are definitely some things that we can do to make a home more likely to survive a wildfire.”

That challenge can be even greater with second homes, where owners may not be present year-round to monitor conditions or complete mitigation work.

Officials said the goal of exercises like this is not only to train firefighters, but also to help homeowners understand how small changes can dramatically improve a home’s chances during a wildfire. Summit County recently moved into a high fire danger classification, a reminder that despite recent rain, much of the moisture gained this spring has already dried out.