REALTOR® PARTICIPATION IN COMMUNITY WILDFIRE PREPAREDNESS How Can You and Your Business Help Protect Homeowners From Wildfires?
As most of us know, Colorado is home to a huge Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), the U.S. Fire Administration’s name for a zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development. Where these two areas meet is where there is a great risk of wildfire and in Colorado, more than 50% of our state’s six million residents live in what can be defined as a wildfire prone area. Staggeringly, each year, this area grows about two million acres across the United States and, as we all witnessed in the final few days of 2021 with the catastrophic destruction caused by the Marshall Fire in Boulder County and Superior, these types of wildfires can occur anywhere at any time of the year.
help homeowners learn about these ideas and resources in their own communities. A good start could include hosting a community meeting with fire and government officials and of course, members of the public.
A significant element of CAR’s Colorado Project Wildfire’s (CPW) mission is to provide resources and programming to REALTORS® around the state, so that they may work with local wildfire and public safety officials to offer wildfire risk and mitigation education in their own areas of the state.
About 75 community members and stakeholders attended the first day, and another 150 members of the public attended the second day of the conference. The event was sponsored by 13 different organizations, including the local REALTOR® Association, CAR, and governmental, education and community partners. The two-day event provided unique content for the different target audiences.
CPW hopes that in sharing an example of a successful program with REALTOR® members, that they can then
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For example, the 2022 Routt County Wildfire Conference was held in late April and consisted of two half-day sessions at Colorado Mountain College. Now in its fourth year, this event is an effort of the Routt County Wildfire Mitigation Council to promote public awareness and understanding of wildfire risk to foster community-driven action to reduce risk and the impacts of wildfire in Routt County.
