Colorado Warns of Severe Fire Risk in Southwestern States. It May be Difficult to Share Resources.

BROOMFIELD, Colo.—Colorado’s top wildfire officials said they expect a significantly increased risk of wildfire this summer—and while they’ll partner with neighboring states as much as they can, resources for fighting the blazes will be tested. 

A dismal snowpack this winter is likely to leave a parched landscape and tinderbox conditions from Colorado’s thickly forested ski mountains to its grassy eastern plains. Officials here are anticipating an exceptionally dire next few months in their state and beyond. 

“The increased fire risk extends to the multi-state region,” Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, said during the state’s annual wildfire outlook briefing in Broomfield on April 30, where officials laid out Colorado’s 2026 Wildfire Preparedness Plan. 

The upcoming summer will be challenging across the West, he said, with an “elevated fire risk” threatening Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, alongside Colorado. 

Strained Resources Across the West

Surrounded by the state’s top fire managers on Thursday, Polis said Colorado has state-of-the-art assets to fight and prevent fires from the air and ground. 

Such resources have increased in the two terms since he took office, said the outgoing, term-limited governor in his final fire briefing. Three of the largest fires in the state’s history raged during his eight years in office, he said, including the late-December grass-fueled Marshall Fire in 2021 that burned more than 1,000 homes in a Boulder suburb. 

“We have two state-owned multimission aircraft,” Polis said. “We have single-engine tankers, we have leased large air tankers, we own type 1 and type 2 helicopters for rapid response, multiple engines, multiple hand crews and more intelligence—both satellite-based and aerial-based—than ever before. While the risks have increased, our preparedness has grown exponentially.” 

As for helping other Western states with its unique backbone of resources, Polis said he would consider it on a case-by-case basis, but the priority will be within Colorado’s own borders. 

“The advantage of being able to control the resources is that we want to be able to have rapid response here,” he said. “And we don’t want to sacrifice that.”

The state’s increased wildfire risk stems from the impacts of climate change, drought and a growing population, which has led people to move further into the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI, where homes and communities abut flammable wild landscapes, Polis said. 

Matt McCombs, who leads Colorado’s State Forest Service, said more than half of Colorado residents live in the WUI. “Ultimately, Coloradans know—we all understand—we have to learn to live with wildland fire,” he said. 

So far this year, 24,222 fires have burned nearly two million acres across the country, significantly surpassing the 10-year average for acreage burned by this time of year. In an average year, Colorado sees between 6,000 and 7,000 wildfires. Its largest fires are human-caused and the origins of many of them are unknown.

In Colorado, during the first 117 days of 2026, the state dropped more than 200,000 gallons of water and fire retardant from the air on over 50 days of flight missions, said Stan Hilkey, the director of the state’s Department of Public Safety. 

“We are facing a very challenging fire year where our resources will be tested across not only Colorado but across the West,” said Michael Morgan, director of the state’s Division of Fire Prevention & Control. 

Federal Friction

At the federal level, the Departments of Interior and Agriculture have announced a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. 

Inside Climate News has previously reported that layoffs, confusion and budget cuts have sparked doubts about the agency. 

Paul Hohn, the geographic area fire chief for the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, said on Thursday that the agency has the same amount of staffing that it had last year in what he called the “legacy” bureaus.

“I know that some federal agencies went through some deferred resignation programs and there were some positions that were not allowed to be rehired over the last couple years,” he said. “That has not applied to firefighters and fire support personnel.”

As Colorado prepares and coordinates its response for a potentially devastating summer, state officials have dealt with friction with the federal government under the new administration of Republican President Donald Trump. 

Earlier this month, Polis criticized the feds for denying his appeals to declare two wildfires as major disasters. He said such actions make the recovery process harder, slower and more difficult. 

“We hope that that federal partnership comes back with disasters that we’ve counted on for years,” he said. “If that’s going away, as it seems to be with the denial—not just of Colorado’s but a number of disaster declarations—that would fundamentally change the nature of the federal relationship with the states. And it would hurt fire preparedness and recovery across all fifty states.”

Last week, Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, introduced legislation, the “Disaster Declaration Transparency Act of 2026,” that would allow Congress to override the president’s denial of disaster declarations.

The FEMA press office declined to comment on the bill. 

“Rapid, Aggressive Initial Attack”

Days before Colorado’s annual fire briefing, two of the state’s former governors authored a provocative guest column in The Denver Post.

In it, Democrat Bill Ritter and Republican Bill Owens castigated unnamed “loud voices” opposed to forest management, such as strategic thinning, fuel reduction, clearing and prescribed burns when appropriate. 

“Colorado needs a more mature conversation, especially as we deal with prolonged drought, warming temperatures, pine and Ponderosa beetles, and other threats to forest health,” they wrote. “Stewardship is not abuse. Forest management is not the enemy of healthy ecosystems. If anything, refusing to use proven tools in fire-prone landscapes is its own kind of recklessness.” 

Coloradans, the former governors said, “deserve better than another season of hand-wringing followed by disaster. They deserve leaders willing to act before the emergency, not just speak solemnly after it.” 

Polis said in an interview on Thursday that he had not yet read the column, but stressed that his state is “light years” ahead of where it was a decade ago. “I’m very confident in saying we are better prepared with more resources than Colorado has ever had before for fires,” he said.

In recent decades, the U.S. Forest Service has backed away from the aggressive suppression tactics of its 1935 “10 a.m. policy,” which aimed to prevent catastrophes by putting out fires as quickly as possible. 

That policy continued until the early 1970s, when scientific research increasingly demonstrated the positive effects of fire in forest ecology and suggested that suppression makes wildfires that survive initial attack more severe. Allowing wildfires to burn safely has been a critical tool to address the growing crisis. 

At Thursday’s briefing, Morgan, Colorado’s fire czar, said most of the state’s strategies this year will focus on “rapid, aggressive initial attack” to keep fires from growing. 

“Every ignition we can stop, that’s one less stressed-out, overworked firefighter,” Morgan said.

Polis has declared May as Wildfire Awareness Month and urged Coloradans to do their part. 

With a demanding fire season on the horizon, officials emphasized the need to reduce pressure on firefighters where possible. Hilkey, the public safety director, asked citizens to step up by making fire awareness a part of their everyday life. 

“We want to make sure everybody starts thinking like a firefighter,” he said. 

In the meantime, McCombs, of Colorado’s State Forest Service, stressed the importance of mitigation work that reduces burnable fuel to stop fires from turning into the kinds of devastating out-of-control blazes that have turned large areas into hellscapes and burned thousands of homes.

That and other investments, such as home-hardening, might not make headlines, he said, but they pay off in prevention.

On Thursday, Polis acknowledged that in Colorado, the process of prescribed burning for mitigation can require extensive documentation, preparation and assessment of various environmental conditions. And he signaled an appetite for potentially lessening some of the bureaucracy involved, saying it “sounds like an awful lot of paperwork.”

While Colorado’s top fire officials predicted a doozie of a year, they said there is only so much the state can do in response. The real work begins at the individual level. 

“Doing your part to protect your home, protect your community, prevent fires from starting in the form of fuels treatments, resiliency of your own home, and any place you can,” Morgan said. “That’s what’s going to make the difference in the short term and the long haul for the future of Colorado and across our West.” 

Nolan Diffley, Aeva Dye, Anna Hay, Shaden Higgs, Corey Hutchins, Rowan Keller, Sol Lorio, Rachel Phillips, Josefina Rodriguez-Poggio and Amelia Vinton contributed to this report as students and staff in the Colorado College Career Catalyst Block “Burning Questions: Wildfire Journalism & Ecology at Colorado Firecamp.”