Volatile Growth
Program script for Tuesday, January 08, 2002
By Ted Snyder
Out West, people are moving into places where wildfire is a fact of life. For some, disaster might be a matter of time.
Just to the west of Denver, Colorado, between the Mile-High City and the 14,000-foot peaks of the Rocky Mountains, stands a series of hills and ridges known as the ponderosa pine belt. For many people, building a house there represents the American Dream. But an expert on growth in the West says there's a drawback.
David Theobald studies land use at Colorado State University. He says building homes in the ponderosa pine belt is like moving into a flood plain -- but the cause for concern is not rising water, it's wildfire.
"I like to try to use the analogy of a flood plain -- well, in a sense there's a 'fire plain.'"
Theobald says the region is loaded with natural fuel because of government policy to fight wildfires. That has allowed debris to build up in the forests and valleys. Eventually a fire will break out, burning through the fuel and threatening those new hilltop homes.
But living with this risk doesn't seem to worry people. Theobald says the fastest growth in Colorado over the past decade has occurred in the fire plain.
"The state as a whole is growing at about a rate of three percent per year. Right along the forest fringe it's growing at a rate of about four percent per year. It's only one percent more, but that, in fact, represents a 25 percent increase. So it's growing at a much faster rate, right along the forest fringe."
Last year the U.S. Forest Service spent more than a billion dollars
fighting wildfires in the West, often to protect homes recently built in
fire-prone areas.
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