State and federal data say Wasatch County’s wildfire risk is higher than 94 percent of counties in the entire United States. Summit County is already in extreme fire danger. Fire hazard on hundreds of thousands of acres of the Wasatch is rated high or very high, threatening our watersheds, wildlife, homes and roads.
Yet our laws, our utilities and too often our local decision-makers are still behaving like this is optional homework they will get around to someday.
Let us be clear. Almost half of Utah’s population now lives in the wildland-urban interface — the exact edge where neighborhoods, power lines and dry hillsides collide.
A big share of those people are right here on the Wasatch Back. We are the front line, and we are being treated like the acceptable loss. Homeowners from Park City to Midway are already struggling to find or keep insurance as wildfire risk climbs, with premiums spiking or policies being dropped because companies see the danger more clearly than our policymakers do.
At the same time, Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp are still stringing and operating aging lines through our most vulnerable canyons and WUI neighborhoods.
They roll out press releases saying they are “preparing for an elevated wildfire season” and “taking proactive steps.” Their own Park City documents admit that some of their system-strengthening projects are now suspended after regulators questioned the quality of their wildfire plan. They have planned line rebuilds and undergrounding from Park City to Judge, and Judge to Midway, held meetings and shown pretty maps, but they have not finished the work along the full high-risk corridor.
Our state has not just let them off the hook. It has codified the escape route. Utah passed laws that cap utility wildfire liability and built ratepayer-funded wildfire pools so that when their equipment sparks a catastrophic fire, they can tap a pot of other people’s money after paying a deductible.
The message to Wasatch Back families is brutal: “We will limit what the utility pays when something goes wrong and then send you the bill through your power rates and insurance premiums.”
That is backwards.
In a place where major wildfires are now the new normal, every foot of exposed line in our canyons, every stalled fuels-reduction project, every weak HOA standard, and very watered-down state law is a deliberate choice to gamble with people’s homes and lives.
Shared responsibility does not mean shared excuses. It means utilities doing the hard, expensive upgrades now. It means HOAs enforcing real defensible-space rules. It means lawmakers rewriting the liability and funding system so the companies that profit from our grid carry their fair share of the risk.
Until that happens, the Wasatch Back is being left, quite literally, to burn on purpose.
As the Forward Party candidate for Utah Senate District 20, I am not willing to accept that. If you live in Park City, Heber, Midway, Oakley, Hideout or anywhere along this corridor, you deserve more than warnings and press releases. You deserve a grid, a set of laws and a wildfire plan that puts your family and your home first.
Annette McRae
Forward Party Candidate, Utah State Senate District 20