Westerners have begun looking at their homes differently these days. Are those trees too close? Should I move all that firewood stacked up next to the deck?

Meanwhile, in California, some fire insurers have lost so much money they’ve pulled out of the state. Overall, fire insurance is becoming as expensive and unpredictable as the natural disasters — not just wildfires but also hail and windstorms — that are driving up rate increases. In some places, increases are as much as 1,000% for houses and condos nestled close to trees.

In Colorado, Tiffany Lockwood said she was dropped twice by fire insurance carriers over the 10 years she’s lived in Evergreen, a heavily forested exurb of Denver.

A former Florida resident, Lockwood, 59, only has one way out in case of a wildfire — and even then she’ll have little warning.

“When I lived in Florida,” she said, “we knew four days ahead when a hurricane was coming. Here we get 40 minutes.”

Lockwood thinks insurance companies are running scared and giving impossible directives. One insurer asked her to remove all the shrubs and trees within 30 feet of the house. But the plan meant taking down a lot of her neighbor’s trees, too.

Evergreen’s attraction is that residents live amid towering conifer trees. But red zones on fire maps are being expanded all over Colorado after several large forest fires and the wind-driven Marshall grassfire outside of Boulder in December 2021. It destroyed more than 1,000 suburban homes and was the state’s most expensive fire yet. Formerly “safe” places are now described as at-risk.

Jeff Geslin lives in high and dry La Plata County in southwestern Colorado, surrounded by 35 acres of piñon and juniper trees. He and his wife, Lorna, are used to remediation plans, he said, and when their insurance increases, “I just pay it, no questions asked.”

But they were shocked when their condo association in Summit County, governing their second home, lost its insurance policy.

“It might be because we’re close to Forest Service land,” Geslin said, “which must be more risk.” Geslin was assessed $6,772 extra for the new policy the Homeowners Association managed to find — an increase of 1,000%.

Colorado state Sen. Dylan Roberts is working on legislation to insure larger structures.

“I’ve gotten calls about insurance for the last year if not two years,” he said. “The single-family upset has quieted down, but the big thing I hear about is HOA and condo buildings.”

The state already has what is called the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan in place for smaller buildings when insurance companies refuse to underwrite traditional coverage. It’s backed by private insurers and administered by an appointed board of insurance professionals.

“We hope to insure no one,” said FAIR Plan board member Carole Walker. She’s the executive director of an insurance trade group covering New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

“This is insurance of last resort,” she said, “as we don’t want to compete with private insurers. They’re  struggling after 10 straight years of unprofitability in property insurance.”

The FAIR Plan board, which plans to sell policies late next year, hired industry veteran Kelly Campbell as executive director this May. It will offer bare-bones coverage with high deductibles and low maximum amounts. The plan would offer coverage of $5 million per commercial structure and $750,000 per house.

“Everything has escalated,” said Walker. “Colorado is in that perfect storm of catastrophes. The number of claims and the cost to pay those claims is at a record pace. Add in the escalating number of events like hail and wildfire, and it’s the hardest insurance market in a generation.”

Walker said Colorado established a resiliency code board via state law in 2023, with a mandate of hardening structures with fire-resistant siding, metal roofs and landscaping.

“We need confidence back in the marketplace,” she said about the board. “Ultimately, this is a life-safety issue because wildfire knows no boundaries. You’re dependent on your neighbor.”

Kevin Parks, a State Farm insurer in Western Colorado, has some advice for Western homeowners: “Widen your driveway and road to 20 feet, install a turnaround big enough for fire vehicles, remove shrubs and trees close to your house, and add a perimeter of gravel all around your structure. Finally, hope you live where two roads lead to your house.”

In this new age of longer and meaner fire seasons, Parks added, “the fire is coming — now it’s a question of being ready.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

The post Writers on the Range: A perfect storm for fire insurance appeared first on Park Record.

Moab, Utah, gets just eight inches of rain per year, yet rainwater flooded John Weisheit’s basement last summer. Extremes are common in a desert: Rain and snow are rare, and a deluge can cause flooding.

Weisheit, 68, co-director of Living Rivers and a former Colorado River guide, has long warned the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that its two biggest dams on the Colorado River could become useless because of prolonged drought. Although recently, at a BuRec conference, he also warned that “atmospheric rivers” could overtop both dams, demolishing them and causing widespread flooding.

Weisheit points to BuRec research by Robert Swain in 2004, showing an 1884 spring runoff that delivered two years’ worth of Colorado River flows in just four months.

California well knows the damage that long, narrow corridors of water vapor — atmospheric rivers — can do. Starting in December, one atmospheric storm followed another over the state, dumping water and snow on already saturated ground.

The multiple storms moved fast, sometimes over 60 miles per hour, and they quickly dropped their load. Atmospheric rivers can carry water vapor equal to 27 Mississippi Rivers.

These storms happen every year, but what makes them feel new is their ferocity, which some scientists blame on climate change warming the oceans and heating the air to make more powerful storms.

In California, overwhelmed storm drains sent polluted water to the sea. Roads became waterways, sinkholes opened up to capture cars and their drivers, and houses flooded. At least 22 people died.

Where do these fast-moving storms come from? Mostly north and south of Hawaii, then they barrel directly towards California and into the central West, says F. Martin Ralph, who directs the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

“Forty percent of the snowpack in the upper Colorado in the winter is from atmospheric river storms penetrating that far inland,” he adds.

The real risk is when storms stack up as they did in California. That happened in spades during the winter of 1861-1862, in the middle of a decade-long drought, when the West endured 44 days of rain and wet snow. California Governor-elect Leland Stanford rowed to a soggy oath-of-office ceremony in flooded Sacramento, just before fleeing with state leaders to San Francisco.

Water covered California’s inland valley for three months, and paddle wheel steamers navigated over submerged farmlands and inland towns. The state went bankrupt, and its economy collapsed as mining and farming operations were bogged down, one quarter of livestock drowned or starved, and 4,000 people died.

In Utah that winter, John Doyle Lee chronicled the washing away of the town of Santa Clara along the tiny Santa Clara River near St. George. Buildings and farms floated away leaving only a single wall of a rock fort that townspeople had built on high ground.

Weisheit knows this history well because he’s been part of a team of “paleoflood” investigators, a group of scientists and river experts. To document just how high floodwaters rose in the past, researchers climb valley walls. The Journal of Hydrology says they seek “fine grained sediments, mainly sand.”

It’s a peculiar science, searching for sand bars and driftwood perched 60 feet above the river.

The Green River contributes roughly half the water that’s in the Lower Colorado River, and in 2005, Weisheit and other investigators found six flood sites along the Green River near Moab. Weisheit says several sites showed the river running at 275,000 cubic feet per second (cfs).

If the Green River merged with the Colorado River, also at flood, the Colorado River would carry almost five times more water than the 120,000 cfs that barreled into Glen Canyon Dam, some 160 miles below Moab, in 1984. That epic runoff nearly wiped out Glen Canyon Dam.

Now that we’ve remembered the damage that atmospheric river storms can do, Weisheit believes that Bureau of Reclamation must tear down Glen Canyon — now.

He likes to quote Western historian Patty Limerick, who told the Bureau of Reclamation, at a University of Utah conference in 2007, what she really thought: “The Bureau can only handle little droughts and little floods. When the big ones arrive, the system will fail.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

The post Writers on the Range: Atmospheric rivers endanger the West appeared first on Park Record.

Many Western states have declared they will achieve all-renewable electrical goals in just two decades. Call me naïve, but haven’t energy experts predicted that wind, sun and other alternative energy sources aren’t up to the job?

Alice Jackson, former CEO of Xcel energy’s Colorado operation, was blunt at a renewable energy conference in February 2020: “We can reliably run our grid with up to 70% renewables. Add batteries to the mix and that number goes up to just 72%.”

Grid experts now say that Jackson’s number is 80%, but still, how will that utility and others produce that missing power?

Bill Gates and a raft of other entrepreneurs see the answer in small, modular nuclear reactors, pointing to the small nuclear engines that have safely run America’s nuclear submarines for decades.

Here’s what we know about these efficient reactors: They’re built in factories, and once in operation they’re cheap to keep going. Each module is typically 50 megawatts, self-contained, and installed underground after being transported to its site. The modular design means that when more power is needed, another reactor can be slotted in.

Breakthrough features include safety valves that automatically send coolant to the reactor if heat spikes. This feature alone could have eliminated disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl, where water pumps failed and cores started melting down.

If small nuclear modules don’t fill the renewables gap, where else to find the “firm power” that Jackson says is needed? The Sierra Club calls on pumped hydro and geothermal as sources of reliable electricity you can just flip on when renewables slow down. But the best geothermal spots have been taken, and pumped hydro has geographic limits, and environmental resistance.

Another proposal is linking grids across the country for more efficiency. The idea is that excess wind blowing in Texas could be tapped after the sun goes down on California’s solar farms. This holds incremental promise but progress has been routinely blocked by conservative lawmakers.

There’s also the cost argument — that renewables are cheaper. In a fossil-fuel-dominated grid that’s true. However, MIT points out that as renewables dominate the grid, on-demand forms of power rise in value.

The extreme danger to the grid is the dreaded “dunkelflaute,” a German word for cloudy, windless weather that slashes solar and wind power generation for weeks.

So the problem remains: To avoid rolling blackouts, we need reliable power at the right times, which are usually from 5-8 p.m. That’s when people come home and fire up their gadgets and appliances.

The increasing demand for electricity only adds to the problem: A 2020 Washington Post article predicted that electrification of the economy by 2050 would result in a usage bump of 38%, mostly from vehicles. Consider Ford’s all-electric F150 Lightning, cousin to the bestselling gasoline F150. The $39,000 entry-level truck was designed to replace gasoline generators at job sites, meaning vehicle recharge happens when workers go home, just as renewables flag.

This calls into question what many experts hope car batteries can provide — doing double duty by furnishing peak power for homes at night.

Longer-lasting storage batteries have long been touted as a savior, though Tara Righetti, co-director of the Nuclear Energy Research Center at the University of Wyoming, has reservations. “There are high hopes that better batteries will be developed. But in terms of what is technically accessible right now? I think nuclear provides an appealing option.”

Meanwhile, small nuclear reactors are underway, with Bill Gates’ TerraPower building a sodium-cooled fast reactor in the coal town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. One 345-megawatt reactor, which generates enough electricity for 400,000 homes, will be paired with a molten-salt, heat storage facility.

Think of it as a constantly recharging battery in the form of stored heat. In the evening as renewable power flags, it would pump out 500 megawatts of power for up to five hours.

These reactors also tackle the little-known problem of cold-starting the electrical grid after an outage. In 2003, suffering a blackout, the Eastern grid could not have restarted with renewables alone.

However we choose to close the energy gap, there’s no time to lose. Wild temperature swings have grid operators increasingly nervous. California has come close to rolling blackouts, and temperatures in the West now break record after record.

As our climate becomes more erratic, reliable electricity is becoming a matter of life and death.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Colorado.

The post Writers on the Range: The ‘energy gap’ nobody wants to tussle with appeared first on Park Record.