Colorado & Denver News

FLORISSANT, Colo. (AP) ― Margaret Clark has a healthy fear of fire.

Hence, the neatly pruned yard and pile of pine branches stacked near her driveway, ready to cart away. Her property is only one amid hundreds of acres in the thickly forested Colorado Mountain Estates, much of it choked with dead trees and brown pine needles.

"See how dense it's getting now?" said another resident, George Naanes, pointing out a canyon thick with underbrush. "It would be hard to fight fires in here."

That's exactly the point.

This subdivision is one of scores of neighborhoods identified by Teller County officials as places where conditions are ripe for a fire, like the ferocious Hayman burn in 2002.

Now the county is appealing to residents to do their part before another Hayman comes along.

The effort is part of the county's plan to prevent a disastrous fire by pushing for tree-thinning on public lands and urging private landowners to take action.

In 2003, Congress passed a law that would streamline the process for approving federal wildfire mitigation projects.

The law provided that local communities should play a role in deciding which areas need the most attention. To do that, communities first had to write a protection plan.

Last year, Teller became the first county in Colorado to write a wildfire protection plan, according to the Colorado State Forest Service.

A county-appointed commission of residents and fire professionals spent a year gathering information about fuel loads, terrain and other factors that affect fire risk.

One conclusion, said chairman Curt Grina, was that 61 percent of the county's homes are in threatened zones.

Their review also pinpointed the two most vulnerable areas of public land one directly west of Woodland Park.

Armed with that information, Teller officials have asked the U.S. Forest Service to make thinning a priority in those areas. The agency has committed to a 990-acre mitigation project, Grina said.

Dealing with private landowners is another matter.

"We can't force them to do anything," Grina said. Instead, the commission is contacting residents in various subdivisions, urging them to take action.

The situation is urgent, Teller County Commissioner Jim Ignatius said.

While a healthy forest has about 45 trees per acre, "in the Pike National Forest and the private lands surrounding the public lands, we're at about 200 trees per acre," he said.

The Forest Service is doing its part to thin trees on public land and should have the same effort from residents, he said.

The commission can show homeowners how to apply for grants to help pay for mitigation work. It can provide advice on evacuation plans and creating "defensible space" around their homes.

The group already has mailed letters to some neighborhoods in high-risk areas. When Naanes who serves as president of the property owners association for Colorado Mountain Estates got his, he paid attention. So did resident Jerry Jones.

Many who live there are interested; one problem is that about 75 percent of the 1,600 lots in the subdivision belong to people who live elsewhere, Jones said.

One of the lots near Jones' home belongs to a man he's never seen. "It's getting to be a mess," he said.

he uncared-for land creates a threat for them all.

"How can we get them interested when they live in Chicago or Florida?" Naanes said. He and Jones believe the county ought to require residents to perform mitigation. The county has no such requirement and isn't considering one because officials believe they're making headway with the current approach. One success story, Ignatius said, is the Ridgewood subdivision, where residents have done a lot of work to reduce fuels.

Meanwhile, Naanes said residents in his subdivision plan to do what they can. They're drawing up an evacuation plan and figuring out ways to help residents clean up their land.

Naanes, who moved from Phoenix five years ago, said he didn't realize what he was dealing with at first.

"Hayman woke a lot of us up," he said. "I thought I could go out with my little hose and protect my house. Then I saw a whole mountain peak go up in flames."

(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)