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Climate change is forcing Western communities to redefine what is considered the wildland-urban interface, or WUI—the area where homes are most at risk of wildfire. The Marshall Fire, which destroyed 1,091 structures and damaged 179 in Boulder County, Colorado on December 30, immediately became the most costly wildfire in state history.
The fire destroyed entire subdivisions in and around Superior and Louisville, two suburbs that had not been part of the county's wildfire planning, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Seth McKinney, fire management officer for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, told the Journal, “This fire is certainly a game changer for us. It redefines what we think of as the wildland-urban interface.”
A map of the destroyed and damaged homes created by 9News shows how strong winds carried embers for thousands of feet. Those winds, which gusted to 100 miles an hour during the fire, combined with an unprecedented warm and dry winter fueled by climate change, creating a situation that extended the Boulder County WUI into areas that had not been considered to be at serious risk of wildfire.
“The wildland urban interface extends over a far broader area than many folks realize – and it is also dynamic,” according to Climate scientist Daniel Swain, who lives in Boulder County. Swain told The Guardian “Most of the time it is true that these areas are safe from wildfire but given conditionally extreme wind conditions and extreme drought, they became part of that interface.”
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What we have really seen is that reactions to covid generated new intersectional tribes online, including anti-vaccine influencers and far-right conspiracy theorists. And now, climate change is becoming a new domain in which separate communities with their own distinct ideologies are merging and finding common cause.”
