Susan Nedell was watching black smoke billowing in the distance from the kitchen window when her cellphone buzzed with an order to evacuate. It was 30 December around 1.30pm, and the Marshall fire had by then been razing neighborhoods for a couple of hours. Yet Nedell’s house in Louisville, Colorado, was some distance away.
Expecting to be back within a few hours, she left with only her laptop, some knitting and leftovers for lunch.
But this was no ordinary fire. Gusts over 100mph and unprecedented dry conditions helped the wildfire morph into a chaotic swirling blaze that hopped and skipped over rolling hills, highways and lakes into the built-up suburbs.
Nedell’s remodelled four-bedroom detached home was burnt to the ground; only a handful of houses in the neighbourhood survived the fire which jumped over six lanes to reach them.
“It’s finally sunk in that we’ve been left with nothing, just the land the house was on. That wind took it here, there and everywhere, it was just so fast we were completely unprepared,” said Nedell, 62.
Though it burned for just six hours, the Marshall prairie fire became the most destructive in Colorado history, destroying 6,000 acres and almost 1,100 houses and businesses across the towns of Louisville, Superior and unincorporated Boulder county. One person died, 69-year-old Robert Sharpe, and tens of thousands of people were displaced.
Three months on and many are struggling to rebuild their lives amid delays and loopholes in insurance coverage and building regulations.
Nedell is among about two-thirds of Americans who are underinsured, and she will need to raise several hundred thousand dollars to be able to rebuild the house due to a sharp rise in material costs, the labour shortage and supply chain problems.
Few people get their houses valued on a regular basis or adjust the insurance, and neither do the companies, which leaves many people significantly underinsured.
Nedell wants to use the opportunity to build back better, so that the new house is sustainable and resilient to future fires and floods.
Superior and Louisville have adopted the most up-to-date green codes requiring all new builds to achieve a net zero carbon footprint, which experts estimate will increase building costs by about $20,000. But Marshall fire victims have been granted an opt-out amid concerns that the green codes are unaffordable. Some energy companies are offering incentives to subscribe to solar and energy-efficient materials and appliances, but it’s not enough to cover the shortfall.
Colorado is a local control state, so every locality sets its own rules for everything from fracking permits and transit safety to zoning and building codes, but the patchwork approach to building standards is nationwide.
“The fire was exacerbated by the changing climate – it’s been disaster after disaster, which is costing us so much more than climate action would,” said Nedell, who wants to build an ultra-low-energy passive house. “We want to do our part and build for a more sustainable future, but the system is broken. We need insurance reforms and statewide building codes, fast.”
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Boulder county is in the Front Range urban corridor located across the eastern face of the southern Rocky mountains, where 85% of Coloradans live in densely populated cities, towns and suburbs like Superior and Louisville.
Colorado has been hit by multiple climate disasters over the past decade, including historic rainfall and flash floods in 2013, drought and two large wildfires in 2020. Despite increasing renewables like wind and solar, the state’s energy grid remains highly dependent on fossil fuels, and it is America’s fifth largest oil and seventh largest gas producer.
The Marshall fire left an unusual trail of destruction as strong winds pushed the flames and embers in different directions: some neighbourhoods were completely decimated while others half a block away escaped untouched, or just one or two houses were destroyed.
It’s a mosaic of flattened streets, burnt-out shopping malls and blackened fields alongside those that got lucky or held out thanks to resilient structures. One section of the Tesla building in Superior is ruined; the rest is fine.
Amid the wreckage, tulips and grass shoots are emerging as the snow glistens on the Rocky mountains, but the smell of smoke lingers around the rubble.
In Superior, Trish Zornio left with only her cat and a bag of documents, and while her house is structurally sound, she has not been able to move back due to extensive smoke and ash damage which requires time consuming and expensive restoration work.
It’s unclear how many buildings suffered smoke and ash damage – or how many people remain displaced – but it’s probably thousands, and the long-term health implications are unknown.
“In retrospect, all the warning signs were there that up and down the Front Range is a tinderbox, but we hadn’t realized how much the wildlife urban interface [WUI] had expanded,” said Zornio, a scientist and columnist with a local paper, the Colorado Sun.
WUI refers to residential and commercial development close to wilderness areas with little clearance. According to the US Fire Administration, at least 46m houses in 70,000 communities are at risk for WUI fires, and WUI areas continue to expand by about 2m acres annually.
Lucky for Zornio it snowed on the night of the fire, the latest first snowfall on record for the area, which helped save her house, which stood 250ft from the fireline. Half a mile away, her partner’s house also survived but almost everything in between them was charred.
Unlike many renters, Zornio, 36, had insurance but reckons she has still ended up several thousand dollars out of pocket due to delays and quibbles over the coverage. She’s not alone, and the state regulator recently told companies to “step up and do better” after widespread complaints about slow and inadequate daily living reimbursements and unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.
But the impacts go way beyond those directly affected. The fire destroyed about 10% of Superior’s housing stock, which added pressure to an already strained market, causing rents to spike and triggering an investigation into price gouging by the state attorney general.
“The whole state is a fire risk and we need climate action from the top so we can build back better to improve resilience and reduce emissions to mitigate climate change,” said Zornio.
On Saturday, thousands of people were evacuated as a 200-acre wind-driven wildfire threatened neighborhoods just a few miles west of where the Marshall fire burned.
Back in Louisville, Ricardo Moreno knows that his family was one of the lucky ones.
It was around 3pm when he got the evacuation text, and they drove away as the sky lit orange with flames. The family had moved back from Mexico two weeks earlier, and had bought renters insurance just hours before the blaze.
A few hours later embers started a small fire in their neighbour’s yard, which was extinguished by 80-year-old Milos Linhart, a retired firefighter from the Czech Republic, who had slept through the evacuation alert. Linhart put out the flames with a shovel and buckets of water, patrolling the street until the danger had passed. Not a single property was lost, though most suffered ash and smoke damage.
Moreno’s house was cleaned, but ash started seeping in through the window frames, so he and his wife, Bonnie, decided to move, but there’s not a single house for rent or sale in the school district – which they don’t want to leave as their son Javi, eight, has autism and is settled in the special ed program.
The couple recently bid $75,000 over the asking price for a house, but were outbid by $85,000. Folks have put their burnt-out lots on the market for as much as $400,000, but building costs for a detached house have been estimated at $1m.
“The market has exploded – you need riot gear for an open house, people line up before it gets light,” said Moreno, 46. “We never thought there could be a wildfire here, but it was like Paradise in California. It felt dystopian, but honestly, nowhere in the Front Range is safe, so where else can we go?”
A few years back Moreno’s mother’s beach house in Mexico was swept away by the rising sea level. Climate scientists warn that unchecked global heating will lead to a rise in catastrophic and unprecedented events such as storm surges, wildfires, drought and flash floods.
Still, the cost of losing property is easier to grasp than the implications for our health and wellbeing. Moreno said: “Recently we saw some run-over ducks and my six-year-old daughter Zoé screamed ‘this is it, they kill ducks and burn everything here.’”
