Colorado Springs city leaders talk about fire danger ahead of the warmer months

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - The Colorado Springs Fire Department (CSFD) is holding a town hall series called Living with Wildfire. This year they will be hosting three community meetings for those living in the City's Wildland Urban Interface. These meetings aim to empower the community to be ready if a wildfire happens.

Tuesday night was their first meeting this year.

As many Coloradans know, fire season is all year around. But at the meeting, emergency planners said they are keeping a close eye on some key areas of the city as vegetation starts to sprout this Spring.

"I think we're going to probably start to monsoon a little bit earlier this year, but possibly the middle to the end of June. But with the moisture comes added vegetation because it's going to grow," said Bret Lacy, Fire Marshal for the Colorado Springs Fire Department.

Lacy said it's not just a single neighborhood that is most at risk, but the entire wildland-urban interface, meaning the communities closest to the foothills. The wildland-urban interface in the Colorado Springs area extends from the Air Force Academy in the north, all the way down to NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain.

Firefighters are asking homeowners to make sure they're mitigating their properties to help decrease the risk.

"We only have 24 fire stations in the city of Colorado Springs. We cover 200 square miles. And so with 24 fire stations, that equates to 24 fire trucks. When we have 35,000 addresses, you can do the math and figure out how significant the risk is, which is why we need the public to participate in reducing the fuel load and helping mitigate the biomass that's around their property," Lacy said.

If you want to see if your home is in the wildland-urban interfacearea, click here.

The CSFD plans to have more meetings like this. To find out when the next one is, click here.