In 2021, a massive debris flow started in a wildfire scar and then tore through Glenwood Canyon, burying a stretch of Interstate 70 and clogging the Colorado River and downstream water systems.
Now, a new state program is paying Colorado communities to plan how to avoid similar impacts in the future.
“Anything you can do for planning makes a big difference in the long run when it (a natural disaster) actually does happen at your doorstep,” said Paula Stepp, who was on the Glenwood Springs City Council at the time and helped with the city’s response to the disaster.
The grant program, run by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, has $10 million in federal funds that it must distribute to communities by the end of 2024. The first-of-its-kind program helps Coloradans identify which local reservoirs, ditches, roads and more could be impacted by post-fire problems, like debris flows. The goal is to avoid the worst impacts by starting work before a fire even happens.
So far, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, a state water policy agency, has doled out $5.2 million to 19 communities to either create plans or start working on them. More applications are pending.
The response has been “tremendous,” said Chris Sturm, who leads the program and is confident they will be able to distribute all the money this year.
“This isn’t my first time working with federal money under tight timelines,” said Sturm, a watershed scientist for the water conservation board. “We, in the past, contracted out $50 million in under two years for a different federal program. So, feeling good about the $10 (million).”
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.
The Wildfire Ready Watersheds grant program, which launched in January 2023, is unique in that it combines elements such as restoring ecosystems, managing forests and watershed planning, to help communities plan ahead. Trying to respond after a fire is too limiting, Sturm said.
After the 2020 East Troublesome fire, Sturm and his team built a model to show how runoff was going to change because of the fire, which allowed Grand County to understand which critical facilities, like water infrastructure, homes, hospitals, town administration buildings and electricity lines, were at risk of post-wildfire impacts — hill erosion, flooding, increased gravel, sand and small particles in water, debris flows and more.
In 2021, the Colorado legislature allocated $30 million to the water conservation board to do a statewide study of similar at-risk locations around the state.
Most of the state’s mountainous areas and Western Slope are a priority. Of 3,000 small watersheds across the state, 28% were moderately or highly susceptible to post-fire impacts, Sturm said. With the wrong combination of events, their water intakes, reservoirs, aquatic ecosystems and more could be damaged or disrupted after a fire.
The at-risk hot spots, marked by deep reds on an interactive map, span Colorado Springs to Boulder, follow the Colorado River from Grand County to Grand Junction, and reach southward into Gunnison, La Plata and Las Animas counties.
The $5 million allocated to help plan so far is about 1% of the eventual cost of putting the plans into action, Sturm said.
“We’re going to have tens of millions of dollars worth of implementation needs,” he said.
“Now we have something to hold on to”
Stepp, the executive director of the Middle Colorado Watershed Council, lives and works in one of those hot spots.
In 2021, nearby communities were rebounding from COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns and economic impacts when the summer monsoon season started causing debris flows in the burn scar of the Grizzly Creek fire, which burned more than 32,000 acres the previous year.
Intense heat during a wildfire burns vegetation, making landscapes more vulnerable to erosion. It even cooks waxy compounds in soils, making them hydrophobic — repelling rather than absorbing water. After that, a small rain shower can trigger a disaster, like the massive midsummer debris flow that sent tree trunks, soil and car-sized boulders surging down Glenwood Canyon.
The flow trapped over 100 motorists in a tunnel and blocked both lanes of Interstate 70. Water treatment plants could not filter out the sediment loaded into the Colorado River. Water pumps for irrigation ditches were clogged.
Stepp and her partners across the region know there will be more wildfires in the future, so they want to do what they can, now. They received a Wildfire Ready Watershed grant of about $108,000 to start assessing vulnerable areas in communities from Glenwood Canyon to the Colorado-Utah border.
They’re focusing on the Colorado River and tributaries, like Elk Creek and Rifle Creek, and they’re working with consultants to determine where post-fire hazards could damage critical locations, like schools, electrical infrastructure and irrigation ditches.
Once they understand the dangers, they can start doing projects, like upgrading water treatment facilities, to minimize possible damage in the future, Stepp said.
“These kinds of planning documents weren’t here 20 years ago, 40 years ago. Now we have something to hold on to to give us some guidance and expertise on what to be looking for,” Stepp said.
On the Front Range, Colorado Springs Utilities is ready to start putting its plans into action.
The utility provider received a $170,000 watershed grant to create its Wildfire Ready Action Plan, and it plans to focus its initial efforts on North Catamount, South Catamount and Crystal reservoirs — all of which store water immediately before it flows into treatment facilities.
If there were an upstream wildfire burn scar, sediment could run down into the reservoirs, gathering at the bottom and cutting into the amount of space available to store water. Once there, it’s hard to get out: Denver Water spent decades and millions of dollars trying to remove debris from its Strontia Springs Reservoir, said Eric Howell, watershed planning program manager for the utility.
The sediment could also be released through a dam and flow into treatment facilities, causing water quality issues for areas of Colorado Springs. Debris flows could hit water culverts and roads, which happened after the Waldo Canyon fire in 2012.
The utility aims to spend $2.6 million on projects — with hoped-for help from additional state grant funds — to help avoid the worst impacts.
One strategy is to decrease the severity of a fire by thinning overcrowded forests and creating open areas that slow wildfires. Another strategy is to slow the speed of water, so sediment has time to fall and settle onto streambeds.
Howell’s team is identifying locations to build artificial beaver dams in river channels, which help slow water, catch sediment and restore floodplains that help catch and absorb water.
With this and other work, “we’ll be able to better protect against what we know will happen if we don’t do this,” Howell said. “With that restoration work in the riparian areas working in tandem with forest management work, I think we’ll be in a lot better situation.”