Prevention & Preparedness: How Mountain Communities Are Getting Ahead of Wildfire

Wildfire risk keeps climbing across the West, but so does the sophistication of the response.

That was the takeaway from “Stage Setting: Prevention & Preparedness,” the first partof Mountain Towns 2030‘s three-part Mountain Wildfire Action Series.

Moderated by Jason Brooks, co-founder of Fire Aside, a wildfire resilience platform, the conversation brought together Rick Balentine, recently retired Aspen Fire Chief and founder of Aspen Wildfire Strategies; Amy Berry, Executive Director of the Tahoe Fund; and Hilary Franz, President & CEO of American Forests.

Together they traced how mountain towns are shifting from reacting to wildfire toward proactively preventing it — through new technology, unlikely partnerships, and hard-won lessons about what actually moves communities to act.

From Response to Resilience

Balentine has watched wildfire strategy evolve over 36 years with the Aspen Fire Department. The biggest shift, he said, has been a move from a response mindset to a resilience mindset: success is no longer measured only by how fast crews reach a fire, but by whether it can be stopped before it starts. That lesson was hard-earned. Not far from Aspen, the 1994 Storm King fire killed 14 firefighters — a reminder, Balentine said, that “fire is faster than we are,” no matter how quickly departments respond.

Early detection technology is closing that gap. AI-enabled cameras from companies like Pano AI already flag fires within minutes, giving departments the location data and lead time to knock down a blaze before it spreads.

Risk modeling has matured just as fast, Berry added. Older models treated entire communities as uniformly “unburnable.” Today’s tools score individual homes — a score of 75 and above signals a home is likely to burn, while getting below that threshold through targeted work can be tracked and financed. That precision lets communities focus limited dollars where they matter most, rather than treating mitigation as all-or-nothing.

Collaboration Beats Jurisdiction

Wildfire doesn’t respect boundaries, and neither do the most effective mitigation efforts. In the Tahoe Basin, Berry described a landscape split among two states, five counties, a city, and a federal government that owns 80 percent of the land — yet the Tahoe Fire & Fuels Team now coordinates roughly 21 fire entities to reduce fuel loads consistently across all of it.

In Colorado, Balentine helped launch the Roaring Fork Valley Wildfire Collaborative, which has pulled in more than $8 million in state and federal grants for landscape-scale mitigation across communities with very different resources. He also pointed to Colorado’s wildland-urban-interface building code mandates — among the first in the country — as a model other states should adopt.

Insurance Is the Motivator, Not the Solution

All three panelists agreed insurance has become the single biggest lever for getting homeowners to act — dropped coverage or spiking premiums succeed where decades of fire-department outreach couldn’t.

Berry noted the effect compounds: a homeowner who does the mitigation work and gets insurance back tells every neighbor, while one who complies and still gets dropped warns everyone else off.

Franz offered the sharpest caution, though: waiting on insurance markets to fix the problem is already too late for many communities. Homeowners typically hear from their insurer only after the risk — or the damage — is already done.

Philanthropy as the Risk-Taker

If insurers move slowly, fire agencies move even more cautiously — which is where nonprofits have stepped in. Berry described the Tahoe Fund’s role as absorbing risk that public fire districts can’t.

For example, when the fund wanted local agencies to try Burnbot’s remote masticating robots, fire districts balked, so the fund ran and paid for a 22-acre demonstration itself. It cleared land in three days that would have taken a hand crew two to three weeks — and it worked so well that neighboring districts signed on, with community members hosting “worm-watching parties” to see the machines clear defensible space. That demonstration led directly to the Fires Smart Community Pilots, now running in six locations with utilities and insurers at the table.

New financing tools are extending the model: low-interest resilience loans paid back over three to four years through insurance savings, and dedicated local funds like Truckee’s Measure T, a self-imposed tax funding fuels reduction work.

Invest Locally, Don’t Wait

Asked what one action mayors and local leaders should prioritize, Franz distilled it to three things:

1. Early detection
2. Landscape-scale risk modeling to prioritize where treatment dollars go
3. Sustained, repeated community outreach — a single mailer or knock on the door rarely changes behavior.

Washington state’s own $500 million wildfire and forest-health investment, she noted, only happened after catastrophic losses forced the issue, a lesson for towns weighing whether to act before or after their own crisis. Balentine added that building a coalition doesn’t require Aspen-level resources, just leaders willing to convene early and often.

Key Takeaways for Mountain Towns

• Shift the goal from faster response to preventing ignitions altogether — early-detection cameras and sensors are now a cost-effective first step.
• Use modern risk modeling to prioritize mitigation dollars at the individual-home and neighborhood level rather than treating a community as all-or-nothing.
• Build cross-jurisdictional coalitions early; fire doesn’t respect city, county, or agency lines, and neither should mitigation planning.
• Treat insurance as the strongest available motivator for homeowner action, but don’t wait for insurers to drive the timeline.
• Look to local nonprofits, foundations, and dedicated funding mechanisms (like Truckee’s Measure T) to pilot new technology and de-risk it for public agencies.
• Sustained, repeated community outreach — not a single campaign — is what actually moves homeowners to complete mitigation work.

This was Part 1 of the three-part Mountain Wildfire Action Series. We will post a recap soon of Session 2 which took place on July 14th, and please join us for the final session next week:

• Session 3 — July 28th, 11:00am MT: The Role of Ski Resorts & Utilities. How resort operators and utility leaders are advancing resilience through forest management, land stewardship, infrastructure investments, and regional partnerships.