Air Force Academy is Firewise

The Air Force Academy has a new designation tonight – it’s a Firewise community.

The Air Force Academy covers nearly 20,000 acres and has tens of thousands of trees.

And it has been threatened by one fire – in 2012.

“Waldo (Canyon Fire) affected 147 acres on the southwest side of the installation,” said Diane Strohm from Academy Natural Resources.

But fire mitigation started here long before the Waldo Canyon Fire and didn’t stop after the flames were out.

Strohm said, “We’ve also been doing some defensible space around structures and homes and other infrastructure to try to give them more of a chance to survive.”

That other infrastructure: the historic scout huts dating to to the 1920s and until recently covered with brush and limbs.

“We actually initiated a couple of Eagle Scout projects (to clean them up),” said Strohm.

The efforts earned the Academy a Firewise community designation – the first military base to be so designated.

There are a number of ways to earn a designation. One of them is to do a community mitigation project.

Dave Root from Colorado State Forestry describes one of the events.

“A lot of communities do things like community chipping days where people bring their branches and small trees to the curb,” he said.

Now that you know what a Firewise community is and you know that the Air Force Academy has joined the ranks of Firewise communities in our area, you would be surprised how many others are in our area.

More than 50 communities are Firewise in El Paso County alone.

“When the community works together, the community as a whole is better protected and they’re safer,” said Root.

That doesn’t mean the Academy is 100 percent safe from fire.

As Root told us, it’s still possible: “anytime when it gets a little dry, a little hot and a little windy.”

But it does have a better chance of fighting off the next big fire.