a Better Bubble™
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Lying on her living room sofa, her head cradled just under her husband’s shoulder, Brooke Smith pulled out a pen and began marking up her medical records.
Paging through the documents, she read a narrative that did not match her experience, one in which she said doctors failed to heed her concerns and nurses misrepresented what she told them. In anticipation of giving birth to her first child in the spring of 2014, Brooke had twice gone to the hospital in the weeks leading up to her due date because she hadn’t felt the baby kick, her medical records show. And twice doctors had sent her back home.
Brooke, a Black singer-songwriter who has worked as a New York City elementary school teaching assistant, has kept her medical records as a reminder of all that unfolded and all that she believes could have been prevented.
After that second hospital admission, and following some testing, she was diagnosed with “false labor” and discharged, records show, though she was 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant and insisted that her baby’s movements had slowed. Research shows that after 28 weeks, changes in fetal movement, including decreased activity or bursts of excessive fetal activity, are associated with an increased risk of stillbirth. The risk of delivering a stillborn child also continues to rise at or after 40 weeks.
Six days later, she and her husband, Colin, met friends for breakfast. Brooke, then 33, had pancakes with whipped cream, the kind of sugary meal that usually prompted kicks from her baby within minutes. When the baby didn’t move, she told her husband they needed to return to the hospital for a third time.
Her due date had come and gone; this time she wasn’t leaving until doctors delivered her baby.
But at the hospital they learned their baby, a girl they had named Kennedy Grey, had died in Brooke’s womb. She would have to deliver their stillborn daughter.
The doctor, the same one who had been on call during her second hospital admission less than a week before, asked her when she last felt the baby move. Brooke said she had felt rapid, almost violent kicking two days earlier, followed by wave-like movements. The doctor, Brooke said, told her that she should have come in earlier.
“If they would have listened to me earlier, I would have delivered a living baby,” Brooke said recently. “But if you’re a Black woman, you get dismissed because it’s like, ‘What are you complaining about now?’”
For Brooke, her experiences in the last weeks of her pregnancy, along with what she later discovered in her medical records, crystallized what researchers and medical experts have found: While many pregnant people say their doctors and nurses do not listen to them and their concerns are often dismissed, pregnant Black people face an even higher burden.
One 2019 study that looked at people’s experience during their pregnancy and childbirth lamented the “disturbing” number of patients who reported a health care provider ignored them, refused their request for help or failed to respond to such requests in a reasonable amount of time. The study found pregnant people of color were more than twice as likely as white people to report such “mistreatment.”
Another study looking at stillbirths that occurred later in pregnancy highlighted the “importance of listening to mothers’ concerns and symptoms,” including “a maternal gut instinct that something was wrong.”
Content WarningWarning: This image shows a stillborn baby. The Smith family took photos of their daughter to preserve their memory of her.
Brooke Smith holds a photo of her stillborn daughter, Kennedy Grey. (Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica)Every year more than 20,000 pregnancies in the U.S. end in stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. But not all stillbirths are inevitable. This year, ProPublica has reported on the U.S. stillbirth crisis, including the botched rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant people, the proliferation of misinformation, the failure to do enough to lower a stubbornly high national stillbirth rate and the lack of study of the causes of stillbirths.
Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells the story of how the U.S. health care system has failed Black mothers in particular. Black women overall are more than twice as likely as white women to have a stillbirth, according to 2020 CDC data, the most recent available. In some states, including South Carolina, Kansas and Tennessee, they are around three times as likely to deliver a stillborn baby.
In Arkansas and Mississippi, the stillbirth rate for Black women in 2020 topped 15 per 1,000 live births and fetal deaths; it was more than 11 in New Jersey and New York. The national stillbirth rate for Black women was 10.3 and for white women 4.7.
But drawing focus to Black stillbirths is a challenge in a country where stillbirths, in general, have been understudied, underfunded and received little public attention. In addition, the community of stillbirth researchers and advocates remains relatively small and overwhelmingly white.
Academic studies and national obstetric groups have explicitly identified racism as one of the factors that contribute to persistent health disparities. In 2020, in the wake of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists joined around two dozen obstetric and gynecologic health organizations to issue a statement expressing their commitment to “eliminating racism and racial inequities” that lead to disparities.
“Systemic and institutional racism are pervasive in our country and in our country’s health care institutions, including the fields of obstetrics and gynecology,” the statement reads.
Nneka Hall, a maternal health advocate and doula trainer who recently served on Massachusetts’ Special Commission on Racial Inequities in Maternal Health, said disparities are embedded in the health care system, including unequal rates of stillbirths and dying during pregnancy or soon after.
Black women face nearly three times the risk of maternal mortality than white women, according to CDC data. Even at higher educational levels, Black people die during pregnancy or childbirth at higher rates than their white counterparts, as do their babies. Pregnant people are also more likely to deliver prematurely if they are Black.
“It’s the Black experience,” said Hall, whose daughter Annaya was stillborn. “You’re told that you have to advocate for yourself, but when you’re in a melanated body and you advocate for yourself, it’s not taken seriously. If you raise your voice, you’re being abusive or abrasive. If you say you know something, you’re automatically shown that you don’t know as much as you think you know.”
For years, Dr. Ashanda Saint Jean has heard the stories of Black patients who, before they suffered the devastating loss of delivering a stillborn baby, said they tried to tell their doctors and nurses that something was wrong.
But they said they were dismissed by their medical team. Even shut down.
With each new story, Saint Jean asked the same question: Would they have been treated differently if they had not been Black? Far too often, she concluded, the answer was yes.
“Those are the stories I hear that break my heart,” she said.
Saint Jean, chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Health Alliance Hospitals of the Hudson Valley, said those patients, the very same ones who face an increased risk of stillbirth, are left feeling powerless.
“We know that this is certainly a public health crisis, and it should be a public health priority,” said Saint Jean, a diversity, equity and inclusive excellence adviser for ACOG and associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at New York Medical College.
The risk of a stillbirth increases along with the number of “significant life events” a pregnant person faces, including job loss, an inability to pay bills or the hospitalization of a close family member. Black people who are pregnant, research shows, are more likely than their white counterparts to report multiple stressful life incidents.
In 2020, a CDC report examining racial and ethnic disparities in stillbirths identified several factors that might be at play, including the patient’s health before pregnancy, socioeconomic status and access to quality health care, as well as stress, institutional bias and racism. The report found the “disparities suggest opportunities for prevention to reduce” the stillbirth rate.
A spokesperson for ACOG said that the group has been working for years to eliminate racial inequities through policy, training, guidance and advocacy. The group has publicly acknowledged the field’s disturbing history, including the fact that James Marion Sims, who’s known as the “father of gynecology,” conducted medical experiments on enslaved Black women.
Last year, the CDC launched a racism and health web portal, and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky declared racism a serious public health threat, saying in a statement that racism isn’t just discrimination but “the structural barriers” that influence how people live and work.
Dr. Terri Major-Kincade, a neonatologist and health equity expert in Texas, said it’s misguided to highlight disparities among different racial groups without recognizing the lingering effects of racism. She said racism, not race, is responsible for the disparities.
One recent modeling analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health determined lowered levels of segregation decreased the odds of stillbirth for Black people, but had no effect on stillbirths for white people. The researchers estimated decreasing segregation could prevent about 900 stillbirths a year for expectant Black parents.
“A dedicated provider is not going to outshine a system that’s compromised by years of structural bias,” Major-Kincade said. “The system is going to win every time.”
The first and easiest step, she said, is listening to pregnant Black women.
“We can’t prevent every stillbirth,” she said, “but we can sure prevent a lot if we listen.”
Eight years after her daughter was stillborn, Brooke still has days she can’t get out of bed. She replays in her mind how she begged her medical team to listen to her concerns about the baby’s lack of movement as she neared her due date. After nurses hooked her up to a monitor and the baby moved, someone on the staff told her that children often make “liars” out of their parents. Another time, Brooke said, they told her the baby was being “lazy.”
She witnessed the same mindset reflected in her medical records. She studied each line carefully, scribbling comments in the margins. When she reached the notes from her hospital admissions, she gasped and turned to her husband. “Can you believe this?” she asked him. A nurse had written that Brooke “reports she is very bad at monitoring and feeling” fetal movement, the records show.
“I never said I was bad at monitoring,” Brooke wrote at the time. “I mentioned that she doesn’t move the way they say she should.”
As a Black woman, Brooke knew all too well that racial disparities existed. She and her friends had traded stories of their own inequities and indignities. And she had felt the sting of doctors questioning her pain and office employees asking if she would be able to pay her medical bills.
When Brooke learned she was pregnant, she thought she could find a way around those disparities by going to what she called a hospital where women from the country club went. For each appointment, she drove nearly an hour each way from her home in Queens to Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
Back at home, she and Colin prepared for their daughter’s birth. They liked the name Kennedy Grey because it was unique and gender-neutral. In her nursery, they assembled her crib and picked out a bright pink sheet to match the pink letters of her name on her toy box. Brooke, who grew up in Brooklyn and planned to pass down her impeccable style to her daughter, filled a closet with billowy tulle dresses, cozy footed pajamas and tiny Converse infant booties.
And so, when they arrived at the hospital that final time and the doctor told them she couldn’t find Kennedy’s heartbeat, Brooke told her to check again. And again.
“We were in shock,” she said. “We didn’t scream. We didn’t cry. We didn’t believe it.”
Brooke and Colin Smith got matching K tattoos for their daughter Kennedy Grey, who was stillborn. (Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica)Three separate ultrasounds did not detect a heartbeat, but Brooke and Colin held steadfast to their Christian faith. The doctor wrote in the medical records that Brooke and her family believed that “the fetus may be born alive and will require resuscitation.” Just maybe, Brooke recalled thinking, Kennedy’s heart rate was too faint for the machines to pick up.
After more than 12 hours of labor, Brooke delivered her daughter. When Kennedy was placed in her arms, Brooke gave her mouth-to-mouth. For years to come, she thought to herself, she would tell the story of how the doctor had said her baby was dead, but she was mistaken, and then Brooke would point to her beautiful daughter beside her.
An autopsy would later find signs in the baby’s lungs of deep gasps before she died, and her umbilical cord, which had a knot in it, was wrapped around her neck. The sudden burst of movement Brooke felt before her daughter died, research suggests, may have been a fetal seizure caused by the lack of oxygen.
“There’s a lot of self-blame and guilt,” said Brooke, her gentle brown eyes overshadowed by her dark-rimmed glasses. “Why didn’t I fight more? Why didn’t I say more? And then I try to come to a level of peace and say, ‘You trusted your medical providers.’ When we get medical care, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re putting our lives in these people’s hands.”
The Smiths sued the medical staff, the hospital and the hospital system, Northwell Health, making many of the allegations about her care. The medical providers denied wrongdoing. The lawsuit was dismissed after Brooke, who by then had a young son at home and was looking for new attorneys after her old ones withdrew from the case, missed a court date.
In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Northwell Health did not answer questions about Brooke’s care. The spokesperson extended the hospital system’s sympathies to Brooke and her family, adding, “We understand our responsibility to our patients who entrust their care with us.
“Northwell Health strives to provide the best possible care for each individual patient,” said the spokesperson. “At Northwell, we have ongoing performance improvement processes to continually evaluate our guidelines and treatments with the goal to provide optimal care for birthing people and their babies.”
Women of color have been fueling a growing underground movement creating maternal health programs that focus on equity and reproductive justice.
Kanika Harris is the director of maternal and child health at Black Women’s Health Imperative, a long-standing national nonprofit organization created for and by Black women focusing specifically on the health and wellness of Black women and girls.
Kanika Harris at a stillbirth prevention march in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15 (Jenn Ackerman, special to ProPublica)For years, Harris said, Black women were grateful to have been invited to discuss their ideas and explain the trauma they faced to researchers, health care leaders and government officials, but little changed. Building their own organizations not only fills a void left by the groups that have not met the needs of people of color, it also signals a commitment to celebrate and learn from a rich history of traditional and supportive practices in their communities.
Harris is separately working with another organization to establish a birth center in Detroit, which they say would become the first Black-led birth center in Michigan.
“We can’t wait for hospitals to figure it out,” said Harris, who lives in Washington, D.C. “We have to do this ourselves. My daughter can’t go through what I went through.”
In 2010, Harris delivered twins, a boy named Kodjo, who was stillborn, and a girl named Zindzi, who died a few days later. Both the fetal death report and the death certificate list Harris’ race as Black and her education as “8th grade or less.” At the time, Harris was preparing her doctoral dissertation in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan.
Sitting in the car after meeting with the pathologist who walked through Kennedy’s autopsy results, Brooke and Colin Smith decided to launch a nonprofit to raise awareness about stillbirth and help families who had experienced pregnancy or infant loss. A key part of empowering families, Brooke said, is educating them about stillbirths.
Like many parents, she and Colin didn’t know stillbirths still happened.
They both decided to go back to school to get bachelor’s degrees in social work, and they are now pursuing master’s degrees so they can continue supporting families.
Brooke’s grief has intensified as the years have passed, building from an initial shock to a feeling that rarely leaves her. It has taken her time to figure out how to resume the ordinary rhythms of life and navigate being around other children whose mothers were pregnant at the same time as her. She went to one child’s birthday party, but hasn’t been able to bring herself to attend others. On her and Colin’s wedding anniversary, they got matching “K” tattoos on their ring fingers.
In 2018, Eric Adams, then Brooklyn borough president and now mayor of New York City, officially commended the Smiths for their nonprofit work and proclaimed May 19 as Kennedy Grey Community Service Day.
As gratifying as the recognition is, she can’t help but feel disheartened that after years of advocacy to reduce stillbirths, substantial reform has yet to be achieved. It’s not enough to extend condolences for her loss, Brooke said. She wants change.
Sometimes she lies awake at night thinking about the few hours she was able to spend with Kennedy. She and Colin took pictures of their daughter, one of which is still the lock screen image on her phone. The nurses wrapped her in the leopard-print blanket they brought to take her home in and slipped her feet into her pink Converse booties. Brooke and Colin asked their family to film them with their daughter.
“It’s May 19, and this is our dear Ms. Kennedy Grey. We just wanted to have a video with our daughter,” an exhausted Brooke said into the camera. She sang a song she had composed for her. As her melodious voice carried through the room, Colin reached over and stroked Kennedy’s cheek. When it was his turn, he recited the nursery rhyme “This Little Piggy” as he squeezed Kennedy’s toes.
Brooke hadn’t shed a single tear in the hospital, not until the end, when she could no longer deny that her daughter had died. A nurse entered the room to take Kennedy away. She clutched Kennedy tighter.
“Don’t take my baby,” she wailed. “Don’t take my baby.”
It was the last time she would see her daughter.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
Sheriff’s deputies driving 45 mph couldn’t outpace the flames. Dense smoke, swirling dust and flying plywood obscured the firestorm’s growth and direction, delaying evacuations.
Within minutes, landscaped islands in a Costco parking lot in Superior, Colorado, caught fire as structures became the inferno’s primary fuel. It consumed the Element Hotel, as well as part of a Tesla service center, a Target and the entire Sagamore neighborhood. Across a six-lane freeway, in the town of Louisville, flames rocketed through parks and climbed wooden fences, setting homes ablaze. They spread from one residence to the next in a mere eight minutes, reaching temperatures as high as 1,650 degrees.
First image: Two homes in Louisville, Colorado’s Centennial Heights neighborhood burned down in the Marshall Fire on Dec. 30, 2021. Second image: A flag is seen near the remains of a home and vehicles in Superior, Colorado, on Jan. 8, 2022. (First image: Marc Piscotty/Getty Images. Second image: Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images)On Dec. 30, 2021, more than 35,000 people in Superior and Louisville, as well as unincorporated Boulder County, fled the fire — some so quickly they left barefoot and without their pets. Firefighters abandoned miles of hose in neighborhood driveways to escape.
The Marshall Fire, the most destructive in Colorado history, killed two people and incinerated 1,084 residences and seven businesses within hours. Financial losses are expected to top $2 billion.
The blaze showed that Colorado and much of the West face a fire threat unlike anything they have seen. No longer is the danger limited to homes adjacent to forests. Urban areas are threatened, too.
Yet despite previous warnings of this new threat, ProPublica found Colorado’s response hasn’t kept pace. Legislative efforts to make homes safer by requiring fire-resistant materials in their construction have been repeatedly stymied by developers and municipalities, while taxpayers shoulder the growing cost to put out the fires and rebuild in their aftermath.
The Marshall Fire Burned Grasslands to the West Before Consuming Neighborhoods and Shopping Centers in Boulder County Satellite imagery was taken in 2019, two years before the Marshall Fire, and obtained via NAIP. (Map by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)Many residents are unaware they are now at risk because federal and state wildfire forecasts and maps also haven’t kept pace with the growing danger to their communities. Indeed, some wildland fire forecasts model urban areas as “non-burnable,” even though the Marshall Fire proved otherwise.
The disaster put an exclamation point on what scientists, planners and federal officials warned for years: Communities outside the traditional wildland-urban interface, or WUI, are now vulnerable as a changing climate, overgrown forests and explosive development across the West fuel ever-unpredictable fire behavior. Fire experts define the WUI, pronounced woo-ee, as areas where plants such as trees, shrubs and grasses are near, or mixed with, homes, power lines, businesses and other human development.
They now agree that instead of a threat confined to the WUI, the entire state, including areas far from forests, may be at risk of a conflagration.
“The Marshall Fire was a horrible, tragic event that served as a wake-up call for the rest of our state,” said state Rep. Lisa Cutter, a Democrat who represents mountain and foothill areas. “I don’t think we realized how much wildfire could impact communities that aren’t deep in the forest — it’s not something any of us are immune to.”
Unheeded Warnings (Data Source: Colorado Forest Atlas. Map by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)An early warning of the growing danger to suburban communities arrived in 2001. That year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies identified scores of Colorado municipalities adjacent to public lands as being at high risk of a wildland blaze-turned-urban conflagration. Some of these areas burned in the Marshall Fire.
A decade later, in 2012, another warning came, as an unprecedented weather-driven inferno, the Waldo Canyon Fire, destroyed several Colorado Springs neighborhoods.
Afterward, fire experts urged state lawmakers to adopt a model building code that communities in high-risk areas could enact. Such codes have been scientifically proven to reduce risk for residents and rescuers and to increase the odds structures will withstand a blaze by requiring fire-resistant materials on siding, roofs, decks and fences, along with mesh-covered vents that prevent embers from entering.
But lawmakers bowed to pressure from building and real estate lobbyists as well as municipal officials who demanded local control over private property.
Meanwhile, the number of new homes built in Colorado’s WUI — as defined by researchers several years ago — more than doubled between 1990 and 2020. And nationwide, the WUI is growing by 2 million acres a year. Homes in 70,000 communities worth $1.3 trillion are now within the path of a firestorm, according to a June report from the U.S. Fire Administration that featured photos of the Marshall Fire’s destruction.
Over 40,000 Residential Structures Were Built in the Areas Now Considered Wildland-Urban Interface in Boulder County Between 1990 and 2022 The location of each dot was determined by the geographic centroid of the parcel containing it. In rural areas, the dots may not reflect the exact location of the building. The WUI boundaries are from the 2017 Colorado Wildfire Risk Assessment, which are the most recent boundaries contained in the Colorado Forest Atlas. (Data Source: Boulder County Assessor’s Office. Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)In the months that followed the Marshall Fire, there were again calls to consider a statewide building code. A last-minute amendment to a fire mitigation bill in May would have created a board to develop statewide building rules, but it was pulled after builders, real estate agents, municipalities and others opposed it.
It wasn’t the first time the state’s powerful building industry asserted its influence over policy. Whenever a wildfire bill comes to the state legislature, well-heeled lobbyists routinely represent the industry, records kept by the Colorado secretary of state show. The state’s culture of local control and the construction industry’s $25 billion annual contribution to the economy hampered lawmakers’ ability to find middle ground on a minimum statewide building code.
ProPublica’s review of legislation introduced from 2014 to 2022 found only 15 out of 77 wildfire-related bills focused primarily on helping homeowners mitigate their risk from fires. Most of the 15 proposals offered incentives to homeowners and communities through income tax deductions or grants — some of which required municipalities to raise matching funds — to clear vegetation around structures.
None called for mandatory building requirements in wildfire-prone areas, even as 15 of the 20 largest wildfires in state history have occurred since 2012.
The lack of uniform regulations has cost the Centennial State millions in federal grant money: The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied the state grants from the agency’s resilient infrastructure funds, which from fiscal 2020 to 2022 totaled $101 million.
Colorado remains one of only eight states without a minimum construction standard for homes.
Municipalities Weigh Prevention and Its Cost Cherrywood Lane in Louisville. The Marshall Fire incinerated 550 homes and businesses in the city. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)Developers have also influenced municipalities’ recent decisions, as homes decimated by the Marshall Fire are rebuilt in Boulder County, and the cities of Superior and Louisville located within it. The debate has reflected difficult tradeoffs between the cost of making homes more fire-resistant — particularly in an era of high inflation and unpredictable supply chains — and residents’ tolerance for risk.
Lawmakers in Louisville, where 550 homes and businesses burned, voted to remove a fire sprinkler requirement for homes, citing cost, despite evidence such systems reduce the risk of dying in a home fire by 80%. The City Council also voted to allow residents to choose whether to follow new energy efficiency requirements estimated to add $5,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a new home.
By contrast, in unincorporated Boulder County, which lost 157 homes to the Marshall Fire, commissioners in June voted to require fire-resistant materials on all new and renovated homes. Before the inferno, the eastern grasslands were exempt. (Mountain residents, who since 1989 have been required to follow mitigation practices, have seen the effectiveness of such codes: Eight out of 10 of their homes survived the Fourmile Canyon Fire in 2010.)
In Superior, which lost 378 structures, the Board of Trustees voted down a proposed citywide WUI building code in May. After residents of the leveled Sagamore neighborhood requested they revisit their decision, trustees reconsidered in July.
The financial pressures facing Superior officials and their constituents were evident as they considered whether to require fire-resistant materials solely for homes destroyed by the Marshall Fire or for the entire city.
“This is all a huge cost we cannot bear,” said Robert Lousberg, a resident who wants to rebuild several homes. “I understood this is a once-in-a-lifetime fire.”
Some neighbors disagreed.
“Sagamore burned down in less than an hour — one of my neighbors ended up in the hospital after trying to escape the fire on foot — that’s the main reason we need these codes, to slow the spread of fire,” Dan Cole said. “We have an opportunity to build a more fire-resistant neighborhood right now, and it would be foolish and short sighted not to take it.”
Builders estimated that costs for tempered-glass windows, fire-resistant siding and other materials could reach $5,500 to $30,000 per home. Procuring the materials and labor to install them could delay rebuilding.
Like residents, town trustees were divided about whether the cost outweighed safety benefits to residents and first responders should there be another conflagration.
“To me, it’s unconscionable to have people rebuilding in an unsafe manner,” said Trustee Laura Skladzinski, who did not seek reelection last month. “I would rather have residents pay $20,000 now. If they cannot afford it, how are they going to be able to afford it when their house burns down?”
Some noted that most residents didn’t have enough insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding their homes.
Trustee Neal Shah said the city should have adopted tougher codes after the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs, which prompted calls for a voluntary statewide building code that communities could institute requiring fire-resistant materials in homes.
“I fundamentally believe in WUI standards,” Shah said, “what I can’t solve is the math.”
The body voted 5-1 to institute the code, then added an opt-out clause for those rebuilding their residences.
Colorado Springs Fire Foreshadowed the Risks Waldo Canyon Fire burns west of Colorado Springs on June 25, 2012. The city instituted tougher building requirements following the blaze. (Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images)A decade before the Marshall Fire, a blaze was burning in the mountains above Colorado Springs on a 101-degree June day. That afternoon a thunderstorm caused a sudden shift in the wind, pushing a wall of burning debris out of the Rocky Mountain foothills into the state’s second-largest city.
Firefighters fled the 750-foot-high fire front — as tall as a 53-floor building — as it chewed through pine, pinyon and juniper dried by a record-hot spring. Sixty-mile-per-hour gusts peeled back the door on a fire truck. Fist-sized embers rained down on the city’s Mountain Shadows community. The fire incinerated 79 homes per hour, or 1.3 per minute, over 5 ½ hours, a report found.
The Waldo Canyon Fire killed two people. (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)In the aftermath of the Waldo Canyon Fire, which destroyed 347 homes and killed two people, Colorado Springs drew lessons from which residences had survived and capitalized on fresh memories of burned neighborhoods to institute tougher building requirements.
Patty Johnson (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)Standing recently in the shade of a still-scorched tree behind her home, Patty Johnson described how her house was relatively unscathed, even as eight of her neighbors lost their residences. She credited ignition-resistant materials, including stucco walls, siding, a composite deck and a concrete tile roof. Drought-resistant landscaping also helped. Her family sold the home in September to move into a smaller place in the city.
After-action reports found neighbors’ work clearing vegetation around homes helped firefighters save 82% of residences in the 28-square-mile burn area.
FEMA estimated that minimal expenditures to protect Colorado Springs neighborhoods had paid off. In Cedar Heights, $300,000 in mitigation had prevented about $77 million in losses.
“The Waldo Canyon Fire was shocking, but it could have been so much worse if the city of Colorado Springs had not spent decades getting ready,” said Molly Mowery, co-founder of the Community Wildfire Planning Center.
Even so, the fire reached 2,000 degrees and moved so fast it incinerated some homes with fire-resistant material and fire-proof safes inside.
Nevertheless, the city followed a 30-year pattern and took its lessons to heart to institute additional building requirements to fortify homes in wildfire-prone areas. Timing was everything, Mowery’s nonprofit concluded in a recently released analysis.
The city had done the same in 2002. With smoke still in the air following the Hayman Fire — which started about 35 miles northwest of the city and destroyed 600 structures — a coalition of fire officials, homeowners’ associations and local builders and roofing contractors devised rules that banned wood roofs on all new homes and repairs greater than 25% of the total roof area.
Similarly, after the Waldo Canyon Fire, as heavy machinery cleared charred neighborhoods, the city updated its code to increase the distance trees had to be from homes and require fire protection systems, ignition-resistant siding and decks, and double-paned windows for all new or reconstructed homes in hillside areas.
Fire officials used spatial technology to hone the city’s definition of the WUI. The tool identified a 32,655-acre area — one of the largest high-risk regions in the United States. The city recruited homeowners to educate neighbors in the threatened area about fire-resistant practices.
Ashley Whitworth (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)Peer pressure worked, said Ashley Whitworth, wildfire mitigation program administrator at the Colorado Springs Fire Department. If a homeowner’s property is flagged red on the city’s online risk assessment map (denoting it needs work), neighbors reach out to learn why they haven’t completed mitigation.
Colorado Springs’ voters overwhelmingly approved the allocation of $20 million in city funds toward incentives to gird wildfire-prone properties.
Days after the vote in November 2021, the Marshall Fire unfolded 90 miles to the north across communities with little history of wildfire mitigation.
Scientists, some of whom lived in Boulder County and were evacuated, proclaimed it a “climate fire.” They cited the extreme weather that preceded it: Abnormally high levels of snow and rain in spring and summer had nurtured abundant 4-foot grasses that baked to a crisp during a historically dry fall. Chinook winds blasted the region for an unusual nine-hour period and propelled the firestorm. And even though there’s growing understanding that fire season is now year-round, no one believed a December blaze could ravage entire cities.
Boulder’s Precipitation in 2021 Was Dramatically Different Than Previous YearsHeavy rain in the spring and an unusually dry fall meant there was plenty of dry fuel for the fire.
Normal precipitation is based on the National Weather Service’s average precipitation data from 1991 to 2020. (Data Source: National Weather Service Denver-Boulder Forecast Office. Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica.)While it began as a wildfire in grassland, once it reached nearby communities it transformed into an urban conflagration — the type of fire that destroyed Chicago in 1871 and San Francisco in 1906 and that until the early 20th century consumed more property than any other type of natural disaster.
“Was this a wildland fire or an urban fire?” Sterling Folden, deputy chief of the Mountain View Fire Protection District, asked during a July legislative committee meeting. “I had five fire trucks in the entire downtown of Superior — I had 20 blocks on fire — I usually have that many for one house on fire.”
Whitworth, of the Colorado Springs Fire Department, said there were more lessons to learn about the threat of wildfire.
“The Marshall Fire was a really big hit for people here because it happened in December and it happened just like that,” Whitworth said. “Everyone said to me, ‘It could happen here,’ and I said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’”
Is the Entire State Now Vulnerable to Wildfire?With the 2023 legislative session days away, fire chiefs, county commissioners, scientists and planners are once again calling on Colorado lawmakers to institute statewide rules that mandate fire-resistant materials in high-risk areas.
Cutter, who will be sworn in as a state senator in January, is developing a bill that would require the state to create a WUI code board to write minimum fire-resistant building requirements. It’s patterned in part after the amendment that failed at the Capitol this spring.
Such laws save lives, said Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control. The 36-year fire service veteran cited studies from the nonprofit Fire Safety Research Institute and the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology showing that building codes work.
“Firefighters take extraordinary risk to protect lives and property,” he added. “If we start building communities and structures out of materials more resistive to fire, we are upping our odds of success — we’ve got to do something different and do it better.”
The insurance industry is also warning that if Colorado lawmakers and communities don’t reinforce homes against wildfire, mounting claims from blazes could put premiums out of reach for many. The industry supports a statewide building code.
“Unlike other disasters, wildfire is one of those risks there is much we can do from a mitigation standpoint to put odds at least in favor of that home surviving,” said Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.
“We’ve got to get it done,” she added. “Colorado right now is at … a tipping point with concerns about keeping insurance here and keeping insurance available.”
But such rules won’t be adopted without a compromise among local control advocates, builders and fire officials.
Construction industry representatives who met with Cutter and Morgan recently said builders are wary of one-size-fits-all requirements imposed by the state. Together with the insurance industry and municipal governments, they have met the past few months seeking to influence the bill’s language.
“It’s important to make sure we match codes with risk,” said Ted Leighty, chief executive of the Colorado Association of Home Builders. His members “are not opposed to talking about what a code board might look like — if we were to adopt a model code that local governments could adopt to match their communities’ needs.”
The idea for such a board emerged after the Colorado Fire Commission received a letter from Gov. Jared Polis in July 2021.
The first-term Democrat, who was reelected in November, sent the missive following conflagrations in 2020 that exhibited unimaginable fire behavior: The 193,812-acre East Troublesome Fire traveled 25 miles overnight and incinerated 366 homes; and the 208,913-acre Cameron Peak Fire, which torched 461 structures, burned for four months despite firefighters’ efforts.
Polis wrote that legislators in 2021 had failed to “address a critical piece of the wildfire puzzle in Colorado: land use planning, development and building resiliency in the wildland-urban interface.”
Instead, lawmakers focused on fire response, restoration of burned lands and voluntary mitigation by communities.
In answer to Polis’ missive, a little-known subcommittee, which included state, county and city fire officials, met between August 2021 and April. The 51-member group agreed it’s time to rethink which communities are prone to wildfire, offering a new definition of the WUI: The group concluded “almost the entire state of Colorado falls within the WUI,” according to minutes from a Feb. 10 meeting, “which could make a strong argument for adopting a minimum code.”
Fire officials also countered the long-held belief that communities favor local control over building requirements. They pointed to a 2019 law that established a minimum energy code that local jurisdictions must adopt when they update local building codes. About 86% of the state’s 5 million residents now live in a community that mandates such measures.
“There is minimal evidence that people voluntarily regulate themselves,” committee members concluded, according to minutes of their Feb. 28 meeting.
Rebuilding Like Before Cherrywood Lane in Louisville (Chet Strange, special to ProPublica)A report on the Marshall Fire released in October by the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control noted how wooden fences abutting grasslands had accelerated the blaze’s spread, leading flames from the grass directly to homes. Firefighters also described fence pickets flying past at 80 mph and landing to start new fires.
This month, as homes were being rebuilt on Cherrywood Lane in Louisville, in one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, evidence remained of first responders’ frantic efforts to cut down fences to prevent them from spreading flames to neighboring homes.
New homes are going up across the 9-square-mile burn zone. A recent drive through the area revealed many are being rebuilt with the same kinds of fences. With no building code dictating that the fences be made of fire-resistant materials, homeowners are using flammable materials that have been standard in the past, unaware it will again put them at risk in the next blaze.
Wooden fences such as these touch homes and grasslands in communities up and down the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains.
Rebuilding without ignition-resistant barriers leaves the homes vulnerable to the next climate-driven wildfire, said Morgan, the state fire chief.
This month, with snow on the ground and temperatures in the 40s, another blaze ignited not far from where the Marshall Fire burned. Thirty-five-mile-per-hour winds spread the flames and forced evacuations before the threat subsided.
“I’ve heard people say the Marshall Fire was just a fluke,” he said. “I would disagree — there are literally thousands of communities along the Front Range of the Rockies from Canada to New Mexico subject to these Chinook winds multiple times a year, and when the conditions are right this can happen.”
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Among the tens of thousands of Coloradans who fled the state’s most destructive blaze a year ago were some of the nation’s foremost experts on fire behavior and natural disaster recovery.
Brad Wham, a disaster reconnaissance specialist, watched in horror on Dec. 30, 2021, as the Marshall Fire chewed through mulch on medians around him as he drove away from his Louisville home.
An engineer who has traveled to Japan and New Zealand to study earthquake damage to help communities prepare for future temblors, Wham returned to his own devastated city to find his home intact despite embers the size of dinner plates in his townhome’s window wells. Assured his place was safe, the University of Colorado assistant research professor jumped on his bike and pedaled into a snowstorm to start documenting the destruction.
He soon assembled a national team to discern how the region could rebuild to withstand the next conflagration. They joined a race by fire scientists to understand how global warming is changing such disasters, including how buildings themselves act as fuel during a wildfire.
The lessons have relevance beyond Colorado’s borders.
Some of America’s fastest-growing areas are in arid Western states prone to wildfires. About 1 in 3 homes are being built in areas that abut land with flammable vegetation — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. And about 60 million homes are within a kilometer of areas that have burned at some point in the past 24 years, scientists found in a 2020 analysis. The study’s authors cautioned: “We’ve been living with wildfire risk that we haven’t fully understood.”
This destruction is intensifying as the West endures its worst drought in 1,200 years. About two-thirds of the 97,196 homes destroyed by wildfire between 2005 and June 2022 burned in the last five years.
A year after the Marshall Fire, authorities have yet to determine the cause.
The team co-led by Wham chose to study the fire because the grasslands where the blaze likely ignited are separate from the communities that burned — unlike other burn zones in the West where the torched homes mixed with wildlands, said Erica Fischer, a structural engineer and assistant professor at Oregon State University who was the research team’s other co-leader.
She added another draw was that “we’ve never seen this level of housing damage due to a grassland fire.”
To understand how the blaze unfolded and how residents and policymakers can address the growing threat, the group flew drones over 14 charred neighborhoods within the 9-square-mile burn zone. The interdisciplinary team’s work was published five months later and echoed past studies that pointed to ways fast-growing Western states could build more fire-resistant communities.
“It is possible that using different materials would have given people more time to evacuate,” Wham said in May, as he lifted his voice above the sound of an excavator removing chunks of foundation from a cul-de-sac on Cherrywood Lane. The street is nestled in one of seven hard-hit neighborhoods where researchers conducted their ground surveys. “And they could have led to slower burn rates, which would have helped firefighters and reduced the spread of the fire.”
Their findings offer policymakers a stark choice: design communities so firefighters can safely defend them from fast-moving wildfires, or leave residents and firefighters vulnerable to further losses.
“There were a number of communities that were abandoned by firefighters because they could not stop the spread of the fire and it wasn’t safe for them to be there,” Fischer said.
Fischer pointed to the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code and the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise USA program as examples of what works. Both were created about 20 years ago to educate homeowners and help fortify communities.
Twenty-six counties and about 186 sites, including communities, ranches and other areas, in Colorado participate in the voluntary Firewise USA mitigation program, which teaches homeowners how to gird their property to “withstand ember attacks.”
Wham and Fischer’s conclusions mirror evidence that prompted creation of such preventive codes and programs: Wooden fences, decking and vegetation within 5 to 30 feet of homes act as conduits for fire to move from house to house and should be replaced with fire resistant materials, such as steel, or removed altogether.
“Our building codes are designed to make sure structures are safe to get people out, they are not designed for property protection,” Fischer said. “We need to rethink how we are designing our communities and our buildings across all hazards.”
Wham and Fischer’s data is unique in that it shows how a relatively affluent community chooses to rebuild, Fischer said. Many homes destroyed by the conflagration were newer than those previously studied. And the area’s household income is nearly twice the national median; 2 out of 3 residents hold a college degree.
The team is continuing its field work, together with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to figure out how to most effectively mitigate fire risk in neighborhoods with homes closely spaced together. They’re studying satellite images to see which homes first caught fire and collecting data from the wreckage to draw their conclusions. The group will soon release information showing urban homeowners how to lessen their risk, Fischer said.
Similar studies are taking place across the West, as scientists learn more about how homes located in the WUI — where plants such as trees, shrubs and grasses are near, or mixed with, homes, power lines, businesses and other human development — act as fuel during a wildfire.
“Once a home in your community catches fire, your exposure to that hazard changes,” Fischer said. “Embers can travel up to 5 miles — think about how many homes are within 5 miles of your house — that’s a lot of people you are relying on to mitigate their property.”
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