News Article

Taking the ‘wild’ out of wildfires

Denver Water forestry work protects water supplies and, by extension, Colorado communities.

Denver Water’s business is water. But it’s not messing around when it comes to fire, either.

The utility and several partners, through a program called From Forests to Faucets, have spent 15 years reducing the threat that wildfire poses to water supplies, and — by extension — to homes and communities.

Smoke fills the air on the other side of a reservoir. — The Buffalo Mountain fire in Summit County burned north of Denver Water's Dillon Reservoir in 2018. Forest treatments conducted through the From Forests to Faucets partnership are credited with preventing the fire from spreading. Photo credit: Denver Water.

During the summer of 2025, and for the fifth time, forest restoration projects conducted under the partnership helped keep a budding wildfire contained, by giving firefighters a leg up in stopping its spread.

The White Hawk fire, near Conifer, started with a lightning strike on July 22.

But thanks to forest management work conducted in 2014 as part of the From Forests to Faucets program, as well as quick work by local firefighting agencies, the fire never got a foothold, sputtering out at just an acre in size, to the great relief of nearby homeowners.

That July day was windy, and the spark occurred on steep terrain, conditions that spelled trouble.

“This was a disaster averted,” Garrett Stephens, executive director of the Jefferson Conservation District, a Denver Water partner, told the Canyon Courier newspaper.

Eleven years ago, the From Forests to Faucets partners had pooled their resources to reduce wildfire risks on 235 acres near Conifer by thinning overgrown forest. That decade-old work slowed the spread of the lightning-sparked fire that July day, giving fast-responding firefighters a better chance to contain the blaze.

Three firefighters hose down a charred tree in the forest. — Firefighters from the Elk Creek Fire Protection District work to put out the White Hawk fire, sparked by lighting, in July 2025. The firefighters’ work was made easier because of work done a decade before to protect the watershed by the From Forest to Faucets Partnership. Photo credit: Elk Creek Fire Protection District.

The work, funded in part by Denver Water, serves as another example of just how effective the partnership has been in reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire, and the impacts major fires have on water quality and water supplies.

Big fires create landscape burn scars that increase erosion and pour sediment and debris into waterways and reservoirs.

“From Forests to Faucets is focused first and foremost on protecting water supplies. But risk reduction work on the ground that keeps wildfires from raging across large areas can also stop the destruction of homes, businesses and communities, and all the cost and devastation that comes with it,” said Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist who leads Denver Water’s forestry work.

Red circles marked on a photo of a forest hillside that has fewer trees. — The Pine Country Lane Project area, circled in red, which was the focus of forest management work in 2014, amid the surrounding, untreated, dense forestland. The circle with the arrow is where the White Hawk fire burned in July 2025. Photo credit: Jefferson Conservation District.

In addition to the White Hawk fire near Conifer last July, the From Forests to Faucets partners have documented four other instances when the partnership’s work has protected nearby communities and water sources by reducing the spread of wildfire.

In 2018, the Buffalo Mountain fire, near Silverthorne, was burning straight for homes and infrastructure when it hit a fuel break that was part of earlier forest management work, causing the fire to drop to the ground and giving crews the upper hand to stop the spread. Experts estimated this fire would have caused about $1 billion in damage if the fuel break had not stopped the fire.
In 2019, the 64A fire near Bailey, sparked by recreational shooting, was contained after burning 12 acres. Previous forestry work in the area slowed fire movement and aided firefighters. The 12 acres burned at a lower intensity and now serve as a forest treatment.
In 2020, the North Fork Complex fire burned some 37 acres of steep terrain along Platte River Road and led to evacuations before containment aided by forest management work in the area.
In 2024, the Wellington fire near a neighborhood of nearly 300 homes in Breckenridge never grew beyond one-fourth of an acre. The multiple agencies that descended on the fire were able to contain it in a matter of hours thanks to mitigation work conducted 18 months earlier.

A pile of trees in a forest. — Piles of downed trees mark the site of a forest thinning project in the Wellington area of Breckenridge. The work is credited with slowing the spread of a wildfire in 2024. Photo credit: Denver Water.

All told, Denver Water and its primary partners, including the U.S. Forest Service, the Colorado State Forest Service, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, have reduced wildfire risk across more than 120,000 acres over the last 15 years, the bulk of that within the South Platte Basin.

Local organizations involved in the South Platte Basin work include Jefferson County Open Space, Jefferson Conservation District, Conifer Wildland Fire Division, Platte Canyon Fire Protection District and local nonprofits.

“Collaboration is a buzzword these days, but it played a big role in averting the disaster that might have been the White Hawk fire,” Stephens said. “It really took courage on all fronts to get this forest restoration project off the ground in 2014, starting with the landowners who were willing to allow forestry work on their property."

“Creating opportunities in this landscape for success stories like this is far too challenging to go it alone. If we want to overcome the challenges of terrain, land ownership, and low-value trees (just to name a few) partners have to work together — we did that on this project,” he said.

An evergreen tree dangles from a helicopter with blue sky and mountains in the background. — A helicopter lowers a huge tree onto a pile at Staunton State Park in Jefferson County in October 2025. Crews were thinning 73 acres inside the park, which is in Denver Water’s collection area. From Forests to Faucets is helping fund the project. Photo credit: Denver Water.

From Forests to Faucets grew out of the staggering impacts of two big wildfires around the turn of the century, the Buffalo Creek fire in 1996 and the Hayman in 2002.

Both fires created thousands of acres of charred landscapes, with no vegetation to hold down dirt and debris. Ensuing downpours scoured the land of sediment, depositing its freight into streams and reservoirs, creating havoc for water treatment specialists.

“After the Hayman fire, Denver Water realized it was far more expensive to be reactive than proactive, and over time that led to the From Forests to Faucets partnership,” McDonald said.

“Doing what we can to keep wildfires from growing to catastrophic size and intensity can prevent years, even decades, of expensive recovery work and impacts to water quality.”

Even today, Denver Water is studying the best way to clear tons of sediment from Strontia Springs Reservoir southwest of Denver. Debris flows from land damaged by fires dating back nearly 30 years still cramp the reservoir’s storage capacity.

The forestry work is labor-intensive, and a significant investment. The From Forests to Faucets partnership has spent $96 million to date, with half that coming from Denver Water, and the other half from its partners.

Brown woody debris floats in the reservoir. — Strontia Springs Reservoir flooded with debris after the 1996 Buffalo Creek fire, which burned 12,000 acres immediately upstream the reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Even so, the intensity of the work and size of Denver Water’s collection systems means partners can only treat a small percentage of the fire-prone landscapes a year. So a lot of effort goes into assessing how to maximize the impact of those dollars by bringing in other partners and by pinpointing the area’s most critical to the protection of water supplies.

The proactive investment continues to pay off.

If any of these five fires escalated into a high-intensity, catastrophic wildfire, the watershed damage would be far more expensive than the combined cost of the From Forests to Faucets program.

The East Troublesome Fire, an October 2020 fire that started in Grand County and burned nearly 200,000 acres as wind pushed it up and over the Continental Divide, is projected to cost over $700 million in recovery and rehabilitation.

Recent research indicates that every $1 spent on mitigation saves around $7 in recovery costs.

Giant plumes of smoke fill the sky at sunset behind a mountain range. — The smoke plume of the 2020 East Troublesome fire that burned nearly 200,000 acres in Grand and Larimer counties. Photo credit: Bureau of Land Management via Wikimedia Commons.

Denver Water’s approach is pragmatic, McDonald said.

“At Denver Water, we recognize our water supply originates from landscapes where fire has always been part of the natural process, and we are not trying to change that,” she said.

“Instead, the From Forests to Faucets program aims to restore forests to their historic, fire-resilient conditions, so that when a wildfire ignites, the forest will burn at a more natural lower intensity. Those lower-intensity fires cause far less impacts to our water quality, our communities and critical infrastructure than the high-intensity, catastrophic fires we have seen hit Colorado more frequently in recent years,” McDonald said.

As it happens, this work to reduce fire intensity in critical watersheds also benefits neighbors and neighborhoods, as it did this summer near Conifer.

John Mandl, wildland captain with the Conifer Fire Protection District, said firefighters responding to the White Hawk fire quickly noticed the fire was burning in an area that had been the site of forest management work, giving them a chance to tackle the fire more directly than they could have otherwise.

“Heavy fuel loading in the surrounding area would have led to more extreme fire behavior,” Mandl said.

A thicker forest would have changed his team’s approach and led to a larger fire posing a greater threat to communities.

“While every fire situation is different, I can say that the weather during the incident and prior fuels treatment of this area, by Jefferson Conservation District and its partners, supported our success in quickly containing this fire and keeping the amount of acreage burned to a minimum,” Mandl said.