Editor’s note: This is the second story in a two-part series from Aspen Journalism about how local governments are using new advanced modeling data to guide wildfire mitigation. The first story explored landscape-level work that is meant to change the trajectory of wildfire and prevent any wildfires from reaching the core of Snowmass Village, and this story looks at the challenges of incentivizing homeowners to contribute to mitigation efforts while also protecting their privacy.
Snowmass Village and Marble are two of the first communities in the world to complete the advanced modeling showing where wildfire mitigation can have the biggest impact. But those communities are still grappling with how to effectively use that data while also protecting homeowners’ privacy.
The model, called AGNI-NAR (Asynchronous Graph Nexus Infrastructure for Network Assessment of Wildland-Urban Interface Risk) and developed by Hussam Mahmoud of Vanderbilt University, is the first scientifically validated model that looks at how wildfire can affect communities. It relies on detailed information from communities and homeowners, including a survey that the town sent to each homeowner asking about 10 features of their property, including roof type, siding materials, surrounding vegetation and other factors that contribute to the home’s vulnerability to wildfire.
The Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork, which has partnered with communities from Marble to Aspen to support the modeling efforts, also sent Nick Sparling, director of community resilience with the collaborative, to do curbside assessments to ground-truth the data collected from the surveys. Besides Snowmass Village, which had a 20% response rate, surveys were sent to property owners in Carbondale and areas served by the Aspen Fire Protection District. The collaborative expects to present the results from advanced modeling in those areas this month.
The model analyzes topography, vegetation and wind data, and Mahmoud runs 1,000 ignition simulations to identify how a large fire is most likely to spread and move. Through the process, each building is given both a vulnerability rating and one showing how likely the home is to perpetuate the spread of the fire, dubbed transmissibility. This can help communities focus mitigation and home-hardening efforts on the buildings that will have the most impact.
“If I’m trying to set priorities of what I should focus on, … I would focus on the buildings that scored the highest on the vulnerability and the super-spreading ability,” Mahmoud said.
According to the wildfire collaborative website, “Hardening just 10% of ‘super spreader’ homes — those most likely to ignite neighbors, identified by building-to-building transmissibility scores — outperforms treating 30% of homes chosen at random.”
Now that the town governments in Snowmass Village and Marble have analyzed the data, the wildfire collaborative is working to incentivize home-hardening efforts and mitigation around homes. But in most cases, individual homeowners have not been notified of their homes’ ratings and do not have access to the advanced, academic modeling data, which runs using geographic information system (GIS) software. Mahmoud acknowledges that disclosing and using the data can be complicated.
“It’s a social dilemma,” Mahmoud said. “Wildfire is difficult, but that social aspect of it, of applying the mitigation, is even more difficult.”
Angie Davlyn, executive director of the Wildfire Collaborative, is working with Snowmass Village and Marble to secure funding and encourage homeowners to reduce wildfire risk to their properties, using the Wildfire Prepared Home guidelines, which were developed by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.
Davlyn said the collaborative has been contacting Marble homeowners whose properties are highly vulnerable or have high transmissibility, but the collaborative has not yet reached out to those in Snowmass Village. She said it’s a challenge to inspire action without provoking fear or shame.
“We do know that some homes are more at risk than others and some homes are more at risk of spreading fires than others. That’s not just a facet of having a home that’s in bad repair or they haven’t done their vegetation removal; it could be a factor of where it sits on the map,” Davlyn said. “It doesn’t mean that the people … have done anything wrong.”
In Snowmass Village, the town and collaborative have focused the bulk of funds — including a $850,000 grant that will pay out over three years and an annual commitment of $150,000 in matching dollars from the town — on large-scale, landscape-level mitigations that were identified from the modeling.
Davlyn said now that those efforts are underway, the collaborative is interested in starting conversations with individual homeowners, although she is approaching this work with caution.
“There’s a lot of emotions that you can ignite in this work that are actually very demotivating,” Davlyn said. “Fear is one of those. When people are too afraid, they just throw up their hands and say, ‘Well, I guess there’s nothing I can do.’ And shame is another, where if people start feeling defensive, that’s not going to motivate them to take action.”
Snowmass incentive program applies to all, regardless of risk score
Snowmass Village staff and the collaborative have presented maps showing overall vulnerability across town, but they have not notified individuals whose homes fall into the highest risk categories — which includes more than half of the village’s homes.
The collaborative said the modeling showed that, prior to any mitigation efforts, 63% of homes in the village — a total of 1,531 homes — were deemed highly or very highly vulnerable to wildfire, with 84 homes falling into the “likely destroyed” category.
The collaborative and the town have also released maps but not specific data showing how many homes fall into the highest transmissibility categories and have not notified those homeowners.
“It’s on the agenda for 2027 to figure out if there’s an appropriate way to tackle that,” said Elyse Hottell, Snowmass Village’s sustainability coordinator. “We are sensitive to the fact that some of these homes — it’s not their fault that they’re in this situation.”
But homeowner action is a key part of protecting communities from catastrophic damage. Davlyn and the collaborative say a two-pronged approach that involves targeted mitigation of about 9,000 acres of wildland near town combined with home-hardening and vegetation removal around individual homes can drop the number of “likely destroyed” homes to zero.
The town’s first attempt to encourage homeowners to clear the vegetation in the first 5 feet around their properties uses what Davlyn calls the “gold standard” of home mitigation, the Wildfire Prepared Home.
The checklist sounds simple: “Clear the ground within 5 feet of your home, trim back overhanging branches and screen your vents.”
The pilot program, adopted Aug. 3 by Snowmass Village Town Council, offers a $1,000 rebate for up to 30 homes, if they complete the checklist and are confirmed on the ground by Sparling.
The costs and logistics of such improvements can vary widely based on a home’s existing conditions. Many homes in Snowmass Village are surrounded by large evergreen trees, which can cost thousands of dollars each to remove. The rebate — which is paid out of the Snowmass Village general fund — is available only after all the work is completed.
The steep cost of these projects was not lost on Snowmass Village Town Council member Cecily DeAngelo, who pointed out at the Aug. 3 meeting that the pilot program targets only the homeowners who can pay to complete all the mitigation work.
“People who really are going to pass the certified test probably already are there or already are more affluent,” DeAngelo said at the meeting. “For certain homes, it’s extremely expensive to get this fully certified situation.”
As of the end of October, Sparling said he had completed 25 site visits, with 15 approved to receive the $1,000 rebate.
“Overhanging tree limbs and the high cost of tree removal is the most common reason folks do not pass verification,” Sparling wrote in an email to Aspen Journalism.
After a slow start — with only eight homes receiving verification in the first 2½ months and winter approaching — the town opened the rebate to include mitigation done at any point this year, rather than just for work completed after the Aug. 3 adoption. That caught the attention of Andy Fisher, who sits on the board of the Fairway Three Townhomes homeowners association and is also deputy chief at Aspen Fire. Fisher spearheaded an effort this past summer to harden the six multifamily buildings against wildfire.
The collaborative asked homeowners to voluntarily share how much the work cost. Sparling said there is a wide range, including homeowners who do all the work themselves to those spending up to $12,500.
He encouraged his neighbors to attend a town hall meeting in May, co-hosted by the town and the collaborative, that focused on preparation and mitigation efforts, and he held a follow-up meeting in a Fairway Three common area.
“I pitched the idea that we move towards a fire-free 5-foot radius [around the buildings] and that we adopt it as an HOA,” Fisher said.
Homeowners agreed and held a community workday to dig up and relocate or cut down trees and shrubs that were within 5 feet of any of the buildings — including some with tremendous sentimental value, including a lilac bush planted decades ago as a Mother’s Day gift.
He said the HOA offered to reimburse homeowners and help them plant new trees and shrubs farther from the buildings, outside the critical first 5 feet.
“We told those homeowners, … ‘We’ll help you dig the hole and then we’ll reimburse you the cost of the plant,’” Fisher said. “We helped them plant it, you know, offered a hug, because it was painful for some people.”
The association hired an arborist to remove tree limbs that were within 5 feet of the buildings and a contractor to cover the eaves and soffits and put tight wire mesh over gutters.
“Anywhere an ember could enter our buildings is now hardened with that wire mesh, and in my opinion, that’s the most important thing a homeowner can do,” Fisher said.
The Fairway Three association spent about $9,800 in total, Fisher said, and they received the Snowmass Village rebate for $6,000 ($1,000 for each building). Fisher hopes to put the rebate money toward a future phase of mitigation farther from the buildings on the property, since the HOA already covered the costs and the work was completed before the town announced the rebate program.
“We were doing it anyway,” Fisher said. “It’s just a bonus.”
The collaborative noted that the pilot rebate program may not be having the desired effect of inspiring action and is looking at ways to adjust in future years.
“I am very interested in catalyzing action, and I’m not sure that having a bar that is so high is catalyzing action in the way we want,” Davlyn said. “I think we could get more people to do more if we made it easier for them.”
Davlyn said she’s also exploring how the collaborative can reach out to the owners of the properties with the highest risk of perpetuating the spread of fire.
“We are eager to talk with individual homeowners about their risk profile in hopes of encouraging more people to take action on their private land,” she said.
It’s not yet clear how the collaborative and the town will approach such conversations. Greg LeBlanc, assistant town manager in Snowmass Village, said the council has not given direction to engage individual homeowners in understanding the risks identified in the model but rather to take larger-scale action to protect the entire community.
“The intent’s not really to say, ‘Hey, your house is at risk,’ because the assumption is also everyone’s really at risk up here,” LeBlanc said.
There are no plans for a report or individual notification at this time. Mahmoud and his team are working on using the model to help with evacuation planning and to understand how smoke is likely to move through the community as well. The entire package is aimed to give a broad understanding of how to mitigate the worst impacts of wildfire across the entire community — and Davlyn said maintaining a communitywide focus is key.
“I hope people are motivated by this at scale and not just because their house is likely to burn,” Davlyn said.
Credit: Courtesy of Ron Leach
Marble focuses on early warning, individual mitigation
In Marble, a rural community of about 150 year-round residents that is nearly surrounded by wilderness, Town Administrator Ron Leach said he was not surprised to hear that the town is vulnerable to wildfire.
“Everybody knows that. That wasn’t news,” Leach said. The town has not discussed landscape-level mitigation in the forests around Marble and does not have funding for such work.
“The discussion and the knowledge-gain — and we have gained a lot of knowledge through this exercise — has been more on a house-by-house, property-by-property level and has been focused on home-hardening,” Leach said.
In addition to showing the most probable path that a wildfire might take through a community, Mahmoud’s model can help communities focus on evacuation planning, which Leach said is particularly important in Marble. Through several presentations from Mahmoud and work with Carbondale Fire Chief Rob Goodwin, Leach said a clear focus for the town’s approach to wildfire has emerged.
“The biggest thing that we’ve learned here through this whole summer: early notification,” Leach said. “We prioritize life safety over property conservation.”
Leach said the goal is to ensure that all residents are signed up for early warnings so they can safely evacuate.
In the meantime, Leach said Town Council members have been setting a clear example for community action by clearing dead brush and downed trees from town parks and rights-of-way.
“They brought their own trailers, their own trucks and they collected material laying on the ground,” Leach said. “I’m real proud of what the town of Marble has done this year, and the reason that we’ve done it is because of the education that we’ve gotten from the collaborative and the fire district and Mahmoud.”
He said council members have also sponsored a town cleanup day, with the town footing the bill to remove all the deadfall and fuel that people have cleared.
Given the limited evacuation options in Marble — where there is only one paved road in and out of town — the wildfire collaborative is working with the town and fire district to identify and fund a place for people to take refuge if needed.
“There is no easy way to evacuate in some of the scarier fire scenarios, and so we are working to identify and fund a safe shelter in town that people can go if evacuation is not an option,” Davlyn said.
She said plans to apply for an Environmental Protection Agency grant to fund an area of refuge that would also provide smoke filtration.
A funder has donated $56,000 to support vegetation mitigation within the first 30 feet for some of the highest-risk buildings, including the Marble Charter School, according to Sparling. The collaborative is working with the town and the Carbondale Fire District to reach out to homeowners and has finalized plans for mitigation on five properties this month, with another five in the pipeline.
This work can have a big impact, even if a wildfire reaches an area, Sparling said.
“A fire reaching an area does not mean that structure will ignite, suffer damage or be destroyed,” Sparling wrote in an email to Aspen Journalism. “Ignition depends heavily on surrounding vegetation, building materials and other local factors.”
This concludes Aspen Journalism’s two-part series about the benefits and challenges of using advanced modeling to inform wildfire mitigation. Part 1 discussed landscape-level work that is meant to change the trajectory of wildfire and prevent any wildfires from reaching the core of Snowmass Village.
