Colorado’s three largest wildfires this year have burned through about 300,000 acres and about $130 million.

The Cameron Peak, Grizzly Creek and Pine Gulch fires also took a toll on tourism, transportation, and air quality — all carrying costs that are hard to quantify.

Bill Mart has borne those costs since the Cameron Peak fire broke out on Aug. 13 northwest of Fort Collins, ending what had been a good tourism season for his small general store in the unincorporated community of Red Feather Lakes, about a mile and a half from the fire.

The community was evacuated for the second time on Sept. 20 and Mart was among those who packed up, leaving his home and his shop, Red Feather Super Market.

“It’s probably one of the hardest things I have ever done,” he said.

The shop reopened Sept. 27, but solely to serve firefighters camped out in the area.

Mart and his wife wanted to serve the firefighters, but before they could open the doors they had to throw away thousands of dollars of food that spoiled while the electricity was shut off because of the fire.

“It’s been a very stressful time, not only personally, but businesswise,” he said.

Mart’s home is in a subdivision of about 30 to 40 cabins where proper fire mitigation had not been done on most of the properties. If the fire had swept through, his house would have been at serious risk, he said.

“There is so much fuel on their property, it was going to keep the fire going,” he said.

Cameron Peak had consumed 125,271 acres, damaged power lines and destroyed or damaged about 95 structures as of Friday morning — the most damage to structures caused by any fire in the state this year.

About 50% of the trees that the Cameron Peak fire is burning through were killed by beetles, making them much drier and more susceptible, said Brett Smith, a fire behavior analyst assigned to the fire. Weather, including high wind, has driven the fire’s growth, with most of it happening during 10 explosive days in the more than six weeks that it’s been burning. Low humidity both day and night has also made the fire more difficult to control, he said.

“Those opportunities for the fuels to recover moisture have been few and far between,” he said. The 9 inches of snow the fire received in early September simply was not enough. The fire needs precipitation for a week or two to fully extinguish it.

“Long-range forecasts don’t show that kind of precipitation until the end of October,” he said.

As the Cameron Peak fire has dragged on, its cost has steadily risen, reaching $61 million Friday, a bill that will be divided between the U.S. Forest Service, state of Colorado, and National Park Service. The costs of wildfires tend to fall on the agencies which own the land, said Caley Fisher, spokeswoman for the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control.

The Grizzly Creek fire, a 34,431-acre fire, has a $34 million price tag and Pine Gulch, a 139,000-acre fire, was estimated to cost $35 million as of late September, according to the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center, which coordinates wildland fire response across five states.

No one factor, such as air support, drives the cost of the fires, said Larry Helmerick, spokesman with the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination center. Rather, it’s the combination of the aircraft, equipment, hundreds of staff members and support costs, such as supplying food and showers, he said.

“It’s a tremendous financial outlay and aircraft are part of it, of course,” he said.

If a fire can be stopped in the first few days after it breaks out, the cost can be held down to about $100,000. But when they blow up and last for weeks, that’s when costs really start to add up, he said.

Fire mitigation such as thinning vegetation, clearing dead trees, and removing other fuels is key to slowing a fire down, stopping it earlier and saving homes. Mitigation can also ensure a healthier burn through the forest.

On the Cameron Peak fire some unmitigated areas saw close to 100% tree mortality. But, where mitigation was done, far more trees were left alive, Smith said.

The return on investment for mitigation can also be impressive. In Cedar Heights on the west side of Colorado Springs, $300,000 was spent on fire mitigation avoiding $77 million in losses from the Waldo Canyon fire, according to a report by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

But nationally and in Colorado, there are far more acres that need fire mitigation work than the federal government and other agencies can complete.

Five federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Parks Service, estimated in 2019 that nationally 100 million acres are at high risk for wildfire and they cannot complete all the work annually that needs to get done, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In 2018, the agencies treated 3 million acres.

Fire mitigation is also expensive. The federal government spent $5 billion on it between 2009 and 2019.

But when the federal funding is doled out across the country it doesn’t come close to meeting the needs.

In the Forest Service’s Dillon Ranger District, home to Breckenridge, Copper Mountain and Keystone ski resorts, the fire mitigation budget allows for fire mitigation across 1,000 acres annually within the 312,000 acre district that’s been hit hard by the mountain pine beetle, said Bill Jackson district ranger.

Jackson and other fire officials say they prioritize areas near communities and watersheds.

To help protect communities, the Dillon District has been putting 300 to 500 foot buffers between subdivisions and the forest, he said.

“We are looking at opportunities to move the forest back,” he said.

In 2018, one of the big fire breaks successfully protected 3,000 homes from the Buffalo fire, a wind driven blaze with 20-foot flames running through the treetops, he said.

“You could see it from all over Summit County,” he said.

Once it hit the fire break near the homes it slowed down, allowing firefighters to fight it directly, he said. Ultimately, the fire stayed fairly small consuming 91 acres total and costing $2.1 million to suppress. The homes saved were worth $913 million.

To increase fire mitigation, voters in Summit County approved a property tax to raise an additional $1 million a year to help pay for fire mitigation, Jackson said. The work can cost up to $3,000 an acre when it has to be done by hand with chainsaws.

Prescribed burning is a far more cost effective way to remove dead and downed forest litter, but this fall it’s been too hot and too dry to light the small controlled burns, he said.

“We are just not in a place where we can put fire on the ground,” he said.

Private industry can help shoulder some of the costs when it can log or harvest some of the wood, Jackson said.

Within the Dillon District, Gypsum Biomass removes about 1,000 acres of lodgepole pine a year to burn for electricity, he said. The company can take live or dead wood, but they must be clear-cut because if they are just thinned the remaining trees will blow down later.

“It looks pretty raw the season it’s cut,” he said.

The clear-cut acres will regenerate with time and sometimes clearing the lodgepole pine can allow aspens in the area to flourish, he said.

In El Paso County, where hundreds of homes were lost in the Waldo Canyon and Black Forest fires, the community has not adopted the large fire breaks used in Summit County. But significant progress has been made, particularly on the west side.

A detailed map of the fire risk on each individual property within the wildland-urban interface shows hundreds of homes at low fire risk, an accomplishment that’s taken decades, Colorado Springs Fire Marshal Brett Lacey said.

Although that does not mean the community will never see fire again, he said.

“What we’re doing is changing the way the fire will behave to stack the deck in our favor,” he said.

This year has been a particularly good year for mitigation on private property within the city.

The pandemic kept more people at home and they spent more time working on their yards generating material for the department to chip and haul, he said.

“This year with COVID, it’s about killed us,” he said of the load.

The department has chipped wood from 976 acres this year and handled 412 tons of biomass , he said.

Colorado Springs residents can look up the fire risk on their property at coloradosprings.gov/fire-department.