As wildfires and other threats plague homeowners in Colorado, there is a trend that is impacting homeowners and losing their insurance, especially after the wildfires in California. It’s a 15-year-old home on a hillside in Evergreen, with a metal roof, stucco exterior, and triple pane windows. “Steel roof, steel beams on the outside. So steel columns. Then after that, we went with concrete decking and not wood decking around the house,” said homeowner Steve Hoogendoorn who closely monitored the home’s design. At the time, it exceeded standards for fire protection. The house is surrounded by concrete, with the decks changed from composite to concrete a few years ago. But still, Steve and Jen Hoogendoorn have recently been informed their insurer thinks they’re too big of a risk. …The home’s construction is not all they have done to mitigate fire risk. Every year they drop a half dozen up to 10 cords worth of trees.
SEATTLE — The termination letters that ended the careers of thousands of U.S. Forest Service employees mean fewer people and less resources will be available to help prevent and fight wildfires, raising the specter of even more destructive blazes across the American West, fired workers and officials said. The Forest Service firings …are part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide. Workers who maintained trails, removed combustible debris from forests, supported firefighters and secured funds for wildfire mitigation say staffing cuts threaten public safety, especially in the West, where drier and hotter conditions linked to climate change have increased the intensity of wildfires. …U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington state Democrat, said on the social platform X that the Forest Service layoffs are already hurting the state, “and it is only going to get worse. Fire season is coming.”
Fewer wildfires occur in North American forests today than in past centuries, but this decline has increased the risk of more intense wildfires, according to a study published in Nature Communications. While it may seem unexpected, frequent low-intensity surface fires help maintain forest health by naturally reducing fuel buildup over large areas. Researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station compared wildfire frequency across two periods: 1600 to 1880 and 1984 to 2022. Using data from 1,850 tree-ring records in historically burned areas, they assessed past fire activity and compared it with modern fire perimeter maps from Canada and the United States. The findings show modern-day fires are much less frequent than they were in past centuries, despite recent record-breaking fire years, such as 2020. 
PORTLAND, Ore. — An environmental nonprofit is sounding the alarm over the federal funding cuts and hiring freeze instituted by President Donald Trump’s administration, which it said could threaten the population of Oregon’s endangered spotted owl. The widespread layoffs and cuts instituted by the Trump administration have set off a series of protests across the country and around Portland, some of which have focused specifically on the thousands of U.S. National Parks and Forest Service workers who have been fired. The Northwest Forest Plan and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) require the endangered owl population to be monitored, but the Center for Biological Diversity said in a news release that the federal freeze means the monitoring “either won’t occur or will be greatly reduced.”