Prescribed Burn: How Helping Prevent Wildfires Saves our Rivers
Our water supply in Northern Colorado is always an issue. One of the main reasons for that is our wildfires. Wildfires pose a huge danger not only to the areas they’re burning but to the entire water ecosystem up in the mountains. One organization trying to reduce the damage done by wildfires and other ecological harm to our waterways is the local non-profit Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed.
Megan Maiolo-Heath is the communications, outreach, and marketing manager for the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed (CPRW). They are a local non-profit whose work is to preserve the Poudre River, and they employ a variety of methods to help the river upstream and downstream.
Question: What is the goal of the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed?
Maiolo-Heath: our mission is to improve and maintain the ecological health of the Poudre River watersheds through community collaboration. We do that through a number of different projects and like it says in our mission, we do everything within the community. So, collaboration is really important to our work.
Could you give me an example of collaboration with the community?
A good example is wildfires. So, in the wake of the High Park fire, which happened about 10 years ago, and most recently the Cameron Peak fire, which was the largest fire in Colorado history to date. We work with all sorts of agencies within the community, different nonprofits, different funding sources to get the work done on the ground to help the watershed recover from large wildfires. These wildfires have a huge impact on the hydrological processes within the watershed that affects water quality and can cause dangerous flooding and debris flows. This type of recovery work after a wildfire takes an incredible amount of coordination, money, time, energy, and it requires a lot of people working together to get the work done.
To give you an example, within 10 days of the Cameron Peak fires starting in August 2020, we were already convening meetings with all different stakeholders involved, including the cities of Greeley and Fort Collins, nonprofit organizations that we knew would be completing work on the grounds such as ourselves and Larimer County Conservation Corps, and wildland restoration volunteers. All of these people came together to start organizing and working together to see how we could get the work done.
Why is it important to preserve the ecological health of the river?
In Colorado alone, 80% of our water comes from forested watersheds like the Poudre Watershed. The water falls up high in the mountains, it’s held as snowpack until spring comes, then runoff begins and it flows into our streams and rivers to become our drinking water. So it’s incredibly important that we protect our forests to protect our water supply. The Poudre Watershed alone supplies water to over 300,000 people here in Fort Collins and Greeley, and other cities have water rights from within our watershed as well. It’s supplying large numbers of people that eventually use water from the Poudre.
We also rely on water from the Western Slope through the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project, which is where all the water for Horsetooth Reservoir comes from. So not only is it important that we protect our watersheds, but that people around the state are protecting their forested watershed because we rely on Western Slope water as well.
Recreation is also incredibly important to our way of life here. A lot of people use the Poudre River for hiking, fishing, and rafting. People love to ski in the upper watersheds. And let’s not forget about wildlife which also depends on a healthy watershed. So all aspects of our lives are affected by how we take care of our natural resources.
What steps are being taken right now to improve river health?
The biggest threat to our water supply is wildfire. We know the impacts are tremendous after a wildfire, and they can last for 10 plus years. The steps we’re taking before a wildfire is what we call wildfire mitigation or forest restoration. We live in forests that are dependent on fire and always have been to maintain a healthy forest, so you don’t want to remove fire from that landscape. We suppressed fire for 100 years here, and now we see that we have overgrown forests. They’re diseased, and then you add drought and climate change to that and you have a recipe for disaster.
Forest restoration is all about trying to restore the forest to historical conditions, to pre Euro-American settler’s conditions. We know that long before we were here, there was a long history of cultural burning and indigenous burning practices. Wildfire was also part of the landscape, and we have many different plants and species that are adapted to wildfires. So fire suppression has been a huge issue and it’s caused our forests to become overcrowded and diseased.
The techniques we use to restore are dependent on the landscape, it can involve hand sanding, mechanical whole tree removal. These methods decrease the density of the forests which decreases the severity of wildfires and make for a better habitat, possibly even better recreation.
One of the best tools is prescribed fire. This is when firefighters use what they call a prescription, which is based on a lot of factors. They burn the landscape at a low severity to help clear overgrown forests. Pile burning is another tool and is more common in the winter when there’s snow on the ground and you can burn safely without the piles spreading into a larger, uncontrolled fire.
What does success look like?
Success for us is having what we call a resilient watershed, which is a watershed that can recover quickly from events like wildfire or flooding. We work towards this with projects like forest restoration and river restoration. Using more natural processes when we can to increase resilience is important for us.
What steps can citizens of areas like Fort Collins take to help?
First and foremost, people need to become educated about where their water comes from. It’s incredible how the snow that fell in the mountains is now coming out of your tap, and we have to understand that to want to protect it. Water is a finite resource, especially in Colorado, and climate change is going to have a huge impact on the amount of water available to us. Colorado is also a headwater state, which means that the snowfall here feeds 40 million other people in the Western US alone.
There are many ways to get involved with the efforts to preserve our watersheds. CPRW offers volunteer opportunities to clean up the riverbed, other organizations such as Save the Poudre are also working to save our waterways, and there are lots of other ways to get involved. Reducing your water use and learning where your water comes from are easy ways to make a difference.
