Please join Fire Adapted Bailey in helping to crowd fund the mitigation of our roadways for a safe wildfire evacuation.
Leader
Fire Adapted Bailey Van Doren
Location
Critical Bailey Emergency Evacuation Routes Bailey, CO 80421
When the Park County Sherriff calls for a mandatory wildfire evacuation there will be some level of chaos. There may be limited visibility due to smoke. There may be flying embers in the air. The call could happen with little warning and at any time of the day or night. School buses may be in route. Hundreds of vehicles may be attempting to evacuate. Working parents may be rushing back from Metro Denver to evacuate their family. First responders and heavy equipment will be rushing in toward the fire.
In the midst of this chaos, it is absolutely essential that our major evacuation routes are not in flames.
The weakest link in this scenario will be any choke point on our major emergency evacuation routes. Choke points are sections of road that have heavy fuel loads on one or both sides of the right-of-way that could become blocked by wildfire, trapping evacuees.
Fire Adapted Bailey is a non-profit umbrella organization for Firewise Communities in the Bailey area. We are unpaid volunteers working to educate the public about the risks of a wildfire and what we can do as individual property owners, business owners, subdivisions, and as a broader community to mitigate those risks. As we assess our level of readiness before, during, and after a wildfire event; mitigation our major evacuation roadways is the most critical and urgent priority.
The Bailey area forests where once a Ponderosa savanna. These trees were widely spaced and 4 to 5 feet in diameter. In the mid to late 1800's we cut them down and used the lumber to build Denver. At about the same time we began to cattle ranch and processed the beef to feed Denver. Starting in 1960's we started to subdivide the ranches and build homes to house a growing Metro Denver. In 1910, we established a national policy of extinguishing every forest fire by 10AM the next morning. The unintended consequence of taking fire out of the forest ecosystem is that we've added millions of additional trees to the fire adapted forest we inherited from Ann and Bill Bailey. In short, we have created the conditions for a catastrophic wildfire.
It took 150 years to create this imbalance, and it will take 2 or 3 generations restore the forest to it's original state. Given the scale of the challenge, the first order of business must be to mitigate our major county road rights-of-way and create the conditions for a safer emergency evacuation.
That is our WHY.