There is no way around it: Eagle County is at risk of experiencing a large-scale wildfire.

“We’ve always been and we probably always will be,” said Hugh Fairfield-Smith, fire management officer for Eagle Valley Wildland.

As the fires burned around Los Angeles County, California, in January, the lack of water resources repeatedly made the news. If a Los Angeles-style wildfire comes to Eagle County, there is not enough water to fight it. But that’s not part of local fire districts’ plans, anyway.

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“There is not a domestic water system in the country that could withstand what the Marshall Fire (in Boulder County) saw, or what California, Los Angeles, is seeing now,” said Dick Cleveland, Eagle River Water & Sanitation District board chair during the district’s Jan. 23 meeting. “In a major catastrophe like that, it’s not there. It won’t be there.”

This is due to the way water systems are built. They prioritize providing clean, safe drinking water to their customers, rather than overbuilding their systems to fight large-scale wildfires.

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Eagle County’s firefighters do not expect to use treated water as their main resource when fighting wildfires.

“We know we’re not going to have the ability to have endless water supply,” Fairfield-Smith said. “If we’re fortunate enough to have a fire hydrant, we’re going to use it. But we are prepared and understand that we might not have any water.”

“The water system is not designed to fight dozens of structure fires simultaneously,” said Mark Novak, Vail Fire chief. “It’s designed to provide water for larger target hazards. And when you have many homes burned, all those water mains are now basically just pouring their water out in the ground because they’re going to burn through when the house burns down.”

How the water district’s water storage system works

The Eagle River Water & Sanitation District — the county’s largest public water system, which provides water service for Vail through Edwards — has different water storage tanks for people living at different elevations.

In the lower zones (think: Edwards, West Vail), the system pulls from both groundwater wells and surface water sources like Gore Creek and the Eagle River. Higher in elevation, the system uses pumps to move water up to smaller storage tanks.

When a firefighter connects their hose to a fire hydrant, it causes a massive increase in demand on the water system. For reference, a sprinkler head uses about 12 gallons per minute of water. A fire truck can use 5,000 gallons per minute.

Water district operators might respond to the increased demand by turning on one or more groundwater wells and/or treatment facilities. They might also download water from the upper zones, like moving water from Vail’s core into West Vail.

If fire breaks out in a higher elevation zone, an operator has fewer tools because they are limited in the amount of water that can be pumped up to the higher tank, and they lack direct access to the groundwater wells. This does not mean that homes at higher elevations are at higher risk when fires do break out.

“I would say that our system is more challenged to get water to those homes,” said Brad Zachman, the district’s director of operations.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s water storage tank design criteria requires that water systems’ tanks “meet domestic demands,” without containing “excessive storage capacity,” to avoid causing water quality issues.

Tanks also have to meet the state Insurance Services Office’s fire flow requirements. The Insurance Services Office takes into account factors including nearby building size and material makeup and assumes the demand on the water system is one structure fire within a 24-hour period.

For the district, the Insurance Services Office fire supply requirements range between a minimum of 1,500 gallons per minute for two hours, and a maximum of 6,000 gallons per minute for four hours depending on the structures in the area.

“When you look at the volumes and times right here, that won’t keep up with what was experienced in California, or during the Marshall Fire, for very long,” Zachman said. “No drinking water system’s water design will do that, so you have to plan to provide wildfire protection in different ways.”

If the water system is designed to put out just one structure fire per day, what happens when there is a large-scale wildfire?

In Los Angeles, the fires were stoked by “extreme winds, extreme dry conditions, and structure to structure ignitability,” Fairfield-Smith said.

Eagle County has many of the same conditions. “Red flag conditions, drought conditions, extreme dry fuels are some of the things that can cause a catastrophic wildfire,” Fairfield-Smith said.

“Once structures become involved in 90 mile an hour winds, there’s not a lot water can do to put that out,” Fairfield-Smith said.

Due to Eagle County’s numerous open spaces, a wildfire could start anywhere. “It’s not just always going to be this fire that comes from the outside and impacts us coming from the forest boundary,” Fairfield-Smith said. “It could come from the park. It could come from the interstate. It could come from a grill tipping over.”

The movement of fires is unpredictable, so planning for a fire is an in-the-moment, constantly adapting process. “As soon as we make a definitive plan, the fire will do something different,” Fairfield-Smith said.

On top of this, houses that completely burn down often see melted or otherwise damaged pipes, causing constant water flooding. That further reduces the water system’s pressure if the water is not redirected. This type of structure flooding occurred in Los Angeles, and also happened during the Marshall Fire, Fairfield-Smith said.

Though fire is inevitable, there are ways to prepare for it. “What we can do is be proactive in lessening the severity and the intensity of that fire through proper land management, land treatment, and mitigation that creates a tactical advantage for our firefighters to work from. And that’s what we’ve been doing,” Fairfield-Smith said.

Eagle Valley Wildland, the wildfire-focused team formed through a collaboration between multiple Eagle County agencies, was created in response to the 2020 fire season, “one of the worst fire seasons that we’ve had in Colorado,” Fairfield-Smith said.

Since Eagle Valley Wildland’s inception, it has treated about 8,000 acres of land in Eagle County that is immediately adjacent to homes inside of communities, including creating fuel breaks around homes on ridge systems, like Wildridge in Avon and Bachelor Gulch in Beaver Creek.

“We are not necessarily planning to use water that much in terms of wildland firefighting,” Fairfield-Smith said. “The fuel breaks that we put in, the tactical advantage that we create, those have been designed for backfire operations where we can put retardant from aviation in, the airplanes, the red stuff that they drop out of the planes.”

Firefighters might also take steps including intentionally lighting fires to remove fuel sources before the fire arrives, clearing fuel sources to create fuel breaks, and putting out the burning embers that precede fires by a quarter mile to a mile using either short blasts of water or firefighting tools.

In the case of a large-scale wildfire, there would be an incident management team that would call for national resources.

“No matter what, we’re going to protect people first,” Fairfield-Smith said, followed by property.

‘A proposition of shared risk:’ Individuals need to harden their homes against fire

While many people trust that Eagle County’s fire departments will protect them in case of a wildfire, if a fire is moving quickly or spreads without warning, “it’s a numbers game,” Novak said. “There are going to be way more homes and structures that are threatened than there’s firefighters available to defend them.”

On any given day, there are 10 staffed fire engines available to fight fires in Eagle County. In Los Angeles, in a similar radius, there might be more than 100 engines.

“Everybody should approach wildfires with the concept that there’s not going to be a firefighter in their yard, in their driveway, and they need to take the actions now to make sure that their home can survive a wildfire without a firefighter being there to protect it,” Novak said. “That survival is based upon the concept that their home is going to be threatened way before the wildfire.”

Individuals need to be responsible for making proactive fire mitigation efforts around their own homes. Novak recommends that people call their local fire district to schedule a defensible space at home evaluation.

“The most important area around your home as far as defending it, it’s that first five feet,” Novak said. “From the wall of the building and then measure out five feet or about the distance of a broom handle. everything within there should be non-combustible. If there’s anything in there that could be ignited by a number, that’s an area of extreme vulnerability for your home.”

If one home catches fire, it becomes a threat to the entire community, Novak said. “It’s a proposition of shared risk. If you do everything and you have a very fire-resistant home and a very fire-resistant yard, your house can still be threatened by your neighbor or your neighbor’s neighbor who doesn’t do their mitigation work.”

“We really need to think about this as a shared problem and addressing that shared problem begins with individual responsibility. Everybody owes it to their neighbor to make their home resilient to wildfire,” Novak said.

“Water is not what is going to make or break the difference in a successful wildland fire effort,” Fairfield-Smith said. “It’s wildland fire mitigation. It’s community preparedness. It’s (people) hardening their homes and creating defensible space.”

Individuals should also be on the lookout for red flag warnings and evacuation orders, which often come through Eagle County’s Everbridge alert system.

Sign up for EC Alerts at ECAlert.org.