In the wake of devastating fires in Los Angeles and Southern California, communities in the Mountain West are considering fire resilience in their own areas.
Few states have building codes that address wildfire. California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Utah all have statewide wildfire codes, and Oregon’s new wildfire rules recently went into effect.
In many places, local communities can adopt their own building codes and wildfire building requirements. For example, Wyoming has a statewide building code, but not all jurisdictions have adopted building codes of their own. Teton County and the town of Jackson have adopted versions of the International Wildland Urban Interface Code.
In 2023, Colorado lawmakers approved a bill, signed into law by Governor Jared Polis, to create a Wildfire Resilience Code Board (WRCB), which would develop a statewide wildfire code. It will create maps of high, medium, and low wildfire risk zones, define what the “wildland urban interface,” or WUI, means in Colorado, and create standards for building materials and vegetation management depending on risk zones. The bill says the board must approve and adopt a model code by July 1, 2025.
With that deadline coming up, the board and its committees have been in full swing, hammering out details of the specific language that will make it into the code and which materials and vegetation types will be allowed in different areas. A very important and time-consuming piece of the work has been drafting the maps that will determine an area’s risk level. The WRCB has been working with the Colorado State Forest Service (which has its own risk assessment map) on a new map that will serve as the basis for the code.
Rick Balentine, chief of the Aspen Fire Protection District, has been serving on the WRCB. He’s one of the board members representing fire professionals, but members come from all over the state, and represent insurance professionals, architects and builders, land use planners, forestry and fire scientists, and urban and rural communities.
In an interview with Rocky Mountain Community Radio, Balentine said the work on the board has been difficult but rewarding. He’s been fire chief since 2014, and was a firefighter for more than twenty years before that, and says his work has informed his perspective.
“Having been out in the field, having been one of the boots on the ground that have been deployed to fires, and having to make decisions on which house we may try to save and which house we may not try to save — it really drives me to really give a lot of thought through this,” he said.
Balentine recalls multiple fires he’s been on that involved assessing structures on whether they would likely burn or not.
“My job was to go inspect, do rounds through the neighborhood, see which ones had vegetation management, or at least try to get some sort of mitigation around the home before the fire came, and being able to mark off the houses that we think we can, and then we can’t save,” he recounted.
Balentine says he’s anticipating pushback from communities and people about how the state defines low, medium, and high risk areas — and he says, the maps are still a work in progress.
“There will be areas of the state that have no wildfire risk rating at all because the wildfire severity map is based on vegetation,” he said. “For instance, downtown Aspen may not have any severity rating at all, because the state map is entirely based on vegetation.”
Balentine also wants to assure people that the board is only creating statewide minimums — communities are allowed and even encouraged to go beyond what the state requires, and can craft local codes that suit their needs.
One example, he says, is allowing jurisdictions to draft their own wildfire risk maps.
“And if it's better and more accurate than what the state has done, then they're welcome to use it with approval by the board,” he said.
He says the code won’t be a silver bullet to protect everyone in Colorado from wildfires — but it will address the things we can control, like how and where we build.
This month, the WRCB will be hosting a series of virtual open houses to share the work they’ve done so far with the public, and get feedback. The first public virtual open house will be over Zoom, and will start at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, January 17, and is geared towards local government officials, but anyone is welcome to attend. Later meetings this month will focus on structure and building-related industries and the insurance industry.
The links for all of those meetings are available on the WRCB’s website.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio.
This story was shared with KSUT via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSUT.