What It Takes to Save a Town from Wildfire

Résumé détaillé

Catastrophic wildfires are exposing the limits of individual precautions. Can communities build a system of collective defense?

In 1991, when the city of Boulder asked Larry Donner to become its fire chief, he couldn’t believe his luck. A Denver native, Donner was forty-two and working as the fire chief of Iowa City. He and his wife, Susan Loo, missed the natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains: rolling meadows, colorful wildflowers, dense forests, rushing creeks. They also missed the outdoor adventures and the community that came with them.

The kinds of outdoor adventures that Donner would contend with as fire chief, though, were stressful and dangerous—wildfires, damaging winds, flash floods—and Loo insisted that they find a home in a relatively safe area. “I didn’t want Larry worrying about his own house when there was an emergency,” she told me in September as the two of them sat at their dining-room table in bluejeans and T-shirts, casual as weekday hikers. They settled in Louisville, a pleasant suburb about nine miles southeast of Boulder, surrounded by open grasslands.

Over the years, Donner worked hard to make his house fire-resistant. “I put in James Hardie board siding”—made of a noncombustible fibre-cement composite—“and a Class A fire-rated roof. I took a wood deck off the back, cleared out vegetation, and built a flagstone area next to the house. We had two giant spruce trees on the property that I just couldn’t cut down, but otherwise I thought I’d done everything.” In Boulder, he led a campaign in 1994 to ban wood shingles on new construction. “When you get a fire, they burn,” he said, “and in high winds they’re like Frisbees, flying torches.”

For thirty years, as Boulder endured major fires and floods, Donner’s home remained untouched. But, in 2021, the weather turned. The grasses grew four or five feet during a wet spring, and, after a dry fall, the result was “like a field of matchsticks, chest high,” Donner said. The meadows that historically buffered his home, protecting it from wildfires, had now turned into fuel.

On December 30th, a powerful windstorm swept down the Front…

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