Let’s Talk Increased Demand

Increased Risk

The Marshall Fire defined the modern-day risk that communities are exposed to and the Arvada Fire Protection District needs to be prepared to respond to these incidents with adequate personnel and equipment.

• Recent fires like Marshall, Lahaina, and the fires in Los Angeles have shown the effects of the climate on fire risk. Fires that start in the wildland urban interface can be quickly whipped by wind into conflagrations that threaten entire communities.
• Once a wind-driven fire enters the built environment, it becomes an entirely new challenge. Modern water infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle the extreme demands necessary to fight multiple structure fires at once. Agencies that are equipped to fight structure fires and wildland fires face difficulty adapting practices to be effective in this type of effort. Agencies are attempting to learn from the challenges documented in these large fires and adopt practices and procedures that will help mitigate them in the future.
• The District is working with its regional partners to adapt by hardening infrastructure, streamlining response coordination through shared communications systems and participating in regional training on multi-jurisdictional response and tactics specific to these events. These trainings are time and finance intensive as they involve multiple agencies.