What’s left to burn in Colorado?

---

Hey there, Colorado, and welcome to another edition of The Temperature, where this week we have no — yes, ZERO — alarming news to share about infectious diseases. Now wildfires, however …

Are you in need of something to help you get through these doggiest days of summer? A bright but decidedly not hot light at the end of the tunnel? We are here to help with a couple — yes, TWO — awesome events we think you’ll like.

First up is Michael Booth’s virtual event recapping this year’s ozone season and looking ahead to how Colorado might make summer air easier to breathe. That event is at 6 p.m. Sept. 4 and it is FREE. You can get more information and register to watch the event at ColoradoSun.com/events.

We are also continuing to gear up for SunFest — it’s basically ColoradoCon, where lovers of Colorado can find their community and absolutely nerd out on all sorts of things important to us. SunFest this year is all day Sept. 27 at the University of Denver. Sun members get a steep discount on tickets, while students get in free when registering with a .edu email address (tickets limited). Go to ColoradoSun.com/SunFest for more details there.

And with those promos done, let’s get to the news.

(Ad1)$CLICKURL$IMAGEURL$

TEMP CHECK

FIRES

How much forest is left to burn in Colorado? A lot.

It started with a, frankly, naive thought.

Amid an explosion of fires late last month, just the latest in Colorado to send people fleeing from their homes and to send flames torching up pine trees, we at The Temp wondered if Colorado was getting close to a kind of fire herd immunity. Had enough forest land burned in the state in the past several decades that any new fire starts would have a hard time finding trees to burn?

The reason we wondered this, of course, is pretty clear. The 2020s in Colorado have been their own epoch in the state’s fire history, and the 2000s are the entire record book. The three largest wildfires in state history occurred in the last four years, and all 20 of the state’s top 20 largest fires have happened since 2000. Those 20 largest fires, alone, burned nearly 1.5 million acres.

On top of that, a forest that has been burned through makes for a great fire break.

As Colorado State University professor Camille Stevens-Rumann, who studies wildfires and how they affect the landscape, puts it: “Fire is absolutely our No. 1 tool to put out subsequent fires or to stop the advancement of subsequent fires.”

If enough of the state burns, it will make for smaller fires in the future — at least for a little while.

So, we began tinkering with maps. Fortunately, the National Interagency Fire Center’s open data site makes this pretty easy. We popped in some data showing where fires had burned historically, colored them gray, popped in some more data showing where fires have burned this year, colored them red, and we had our answer:

Umm, yeah, there’s a lot of Colorado left to burn. Those gray fire perimeters look like little spatters of mud on an otherwise clean map of the state. (This map doesn’t yet show the Goltra fire, which started last night west of Golden.)

But there’s one area of the state that’s particularly interesting, and it was again a, ahem, hot spot in this latest wave of fires: the northern Front Range. The forest to the west of Fort Collins has been absolutely hammered by fires over the last several decades, including the Alexander Mountain fire this year.

Look a little closer and you can really see what Stevens-Rumann is talking about.

That slightly darker gray blob to the north is the High Park fire, which destroyed 259 homes, torched 87,000 acres in 2012 and was, for a time, the state’s second-largest fire. It’s now sixth on that list, but you can see what happened when the state’s largest-ever fire, the 2020 Cameron Peak fire (which burned 209,000 acres and is the lighter gray blob in the middle) hit the High Park burn scar. It wrapped around the scar but made little progress into the area the High Park fire had already burned.

You can also see how the Alexander Mountain fire this year basically nestled into an unburned pocket of space between the Cameron Peak burn scar and the Big Thompson River, both of which blocked it from growing bigger. (There’s also an older burn scar in the area from a 2000 fire called the Bobcat fire.)

We asked Stevens-Rumann what it is about the northern Front Range in Larimer County that is so flammable. After all, other counties — like Boulder, Jefferson and Douglas — have lots of lower-elevation pine forests and lots of people living in their foothills.

Her answer was ominous.

“Essentially we’re dealing with a landscape that has not burned for 100 to 120 years that’s really ripe and ready to burn,” she said. “And that’s true across the Front Range. So in my opinion, it’s not like we’re in a unique situation here in the northern Front Range, but rather we’ve just been unlucky or we’re the first place where this has happened.”

To illustrate this, we created a map that shows not just where fires have occurred but also where tree cover exists — showing areas that could potentially burn but haven’t. Look at all that untouched green.

Help us test out these maps before we publish them at ColoradoSun.com! If you notice any glitches in them or have suggestions for how we can make them easier to use or more understandable, email us at newsletters@coloradosun.com. Thanks!

---

HEALTH NEWS

• Here are three charts that explain how Colorado’s largest abortion fund is spending its money. Colorado’s largest independent abortion fund, the Cobalt Abortion Fund, is for the first time capping the amount of financial assistance it can provide each month. That’s because the fund, which is on pace to spend $2.2 million this year, has seen demand for help skyrocket as states across the country implement abortion bans. As Jennifer Brown reports, the fund’s spending on travel for people seeking abortions has increased 10,000% since 2021, and that’s not the only surprising figure in this story.
  — The Colorado Sun
• In a time of challenge and innovation, a Colorado library card checks out more than books. Lots more. Libraries have emerged as a key piece of duct tape holding the social safety net together. They are resources for information, of course, but also places where people without computers or access to the internet can go to participate in telehealth visits. They are places where people can get referrals to services or can connect with job training. Take a trip with Kevin Simpson to Hugo to see how this looks.
  — The Colorado Sun
• No human cases of rabies so far as a second puppy from a Colorado adoption event tests positive. A second puppy from a litter at an adoption event in Sheridan that was exposed to a rabid skunk tested positive for rabies, but there have been no human cases identified so far. (That second puppy’s sample later tested negative when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention re-ran the test, but because rabies is not something to mess around with, the state is still treating the result as a positive.)
  — The Colorado Sun
• Children’s Hospital Colorado is a great place to work. But is it better than Costco? Forbes is out with its list of the best places to work in every U.S. state. Children’s Hospital Colorado comes in second in Colorado — and tops for the health care industry. The best employer in Colorado? That would be Costco.
  — Forbes, h/t Beckers

---

ENVIRONMENT

Why are Audubon workers threatening to strike?

Birds can be good business.

At least for some top nonprofit executives. The CEO of the National Audubon Society made $628,000 last year. Thirteen of the bird society’s executives made more than $200,000 in 2023, and were rewarded with ignominious spots on the group’s required IRS 990 nonprofit filing of top salaries.

Erin Hamilton also works for the National Audubon Society, remotely from Colorado, but she’s not about to show up in 990 highlights anytime soon. Like many other mid- to low-level nonprofit employees expected to work cheaply in exchange for furthering a cause they believe in, Hamilton struggles to keep up with inflated food prices and bruising housing costs.

“People need to pay rent. They need to buy groceries,” said Hamilton, a database engineer for the New York-based society. “There’s a lot of folks that are kind of getting to that point in their life where they’re like, hey, I need to start a family. My partner and I are ready to start a family, but with this uncertainty and lack of pay, we can’t do it.”

Those are just some of the reasons Hamilton has become a vocal and active force in the National Audubon Society’s employee bargaining unit, the “Bird Union” under Communication Workers of America. The Bird Union has authorized a strike with a 92% vote, just won a series of rulings against society management from the National Labor Relations Board, and is launching local demonstrations around the country to publicize their contract requests.

Audubon employees “are really fatigued,” Hamilton said. “They basically feel taken advantage of, and to a certain degree betrayed.” That well-compensated CEO, Elizabeth Gray, came in with a burst of hope about diversifying the bird world and creating more equity among employees, Hamilton said. Instead, the union-favoring employees feel insulted by losses in health care benefits, lowball salary offers and the string of alleged labor violations.

A spokesperson for the society declined to answer specific questions about the ongoing labor dispute.

“Audubon believes in ensuring a workplace where all employees are respected, valued, and empowered, as well as united in our mission to protect birds and the places they need,” according to an emailed statement. “We remain committed to our negotiation process and will continue to work constructively with the Union to achieve a mutually agreeable contract so we can further our work to halt and ultimately reverse the decline of birds across the Americas. ”

Union members say they are bewildered by management pettiness that has tainted relations at the conservation organization for two years. A CWA release about the NLRB filing said the U.S. claims Audubon “violated federal labor laws, including by refusing to bargain over minimum salaries, making unilateral changes to health care benefits, and denying union members benefits that were given to non-represented staff.”

It’s important to remember, Hamilton said, that the strike authorization and ongoing actions are in opposition to the National Audubon Society office, not regional Audubon offices like Audubon Rockies.

Hamilton said many upper level Audubon officials want a resolution, and want top management to end the strife.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for the organization, and it doesn’t make sense for the workers, and it doesn’t make sense for conservation. For the birds.”

Read more about the national Audubon dispute in coming days at ColoradoSun.com.

---

MORE ENVIRONMENT NEWS

• Sprinklers on autopilot are ruining Denver Mondays. The mysteries of Monday morning gushers across metro Denver turn out to not be so mysterious, Jerd Smith reports. Many water users’ default settings are Mon-Wed-Fri, and so Monday morning after a hot weekend is stressing Denver Water’s ability to deliver what people need. Can the biggest water agency get people to love Tues-Thurs?
• Does ice melt lift up a whole continent? Yes, but not in a good way, CSU scientists are learning. The Antarctic ice sheet is indeed melting even quicker than expected, which reduces the weight pushing down on rocky continents sitting on Earth’s molten magma core. The land rises, but not fast enough to counter worldwide sea rise. Even more reason to combat global warming, a new study shows.
• Are wind farms really killing birds? A Sun/Gigafact production finds the answer is yes. But. A lot, lot fewer birds hit the blades than are killed by traditional fossil fuel plant pollution. And most definitely fewer than cats. 
• Prospect Energy no longer welcome in Colorado. Facing millions of dollars in fines, dozens of violations, legions of complaints from homeowners as well as local governments, oil and gas operator Prospect Energy last week had its right to do business in Colorado canceled, Mark Jaffe reports. The Energy and Carbon Management Commission endorsed a settlement agreement between the commission staff and the Highlands Ranch-based company. 

(Ad2)$CLICKURL$IMAGEURL$

CHART OF THE WEEK

The West Nile season that so far (thankfully) isn’t

Remember last year, when Colorado had one of its worst West Nile virus seasons on record — the worst by far in the entire country in 2023? We had 51 people die, 386 people hospitalized and 634 people with recorded infections.

All of that was driven by an enormous mosquito boom, thanks to a wet spring and early summer. All those mosquitoes had babies, which were expected to overwinter in various mosquito hidey-holes and then pop out again this spring presumably in large numbers ready to pass on West Nile virus to people in Colorado at high rates again.

Except, that’s not what’s happened this year — at least not so far.

As of last week, Colorado had seen seven West Nile hospitalizations and no deaths this year. Total case numbers were running below the five-year average.

Compare that to last year at this time, when case numbers were literally off the chart.

Reported West Nile cases historically peak in Colorado in the 34th week of the year — which is this week. And the season can stretch into late September. So it’s no time to let your bug guard down. But, fingers crossed, maybe this year will be a big reprieve from the trend of recent years.

---

Trusted, verified news is like DEET to misinformation, so thanks for making us part of your defense system.

It’s hot again this week across much of Colorado. We’d sign off by telling you to stay cool except we at The Temp know you’re already cool. So just be sure to grab a raincoat when heading out in case of a stray thunderstorm.

See ya next week.

— John & Michael

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

(Ad3)$CLICKURL$IMAGEURL$