Colorado is a wildfire state.

There are the notable ones — the Cameron Peak fire, a 208,000-acre inferno, and the Marshall fire, which burned about 6,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of houses and businesses. And there are the smaller ones, such as the Devil’s Thumb fire that burned 81 acres in 2023. 

As fires explode around the Front Range, we wanted to map out where they were in relation to each other. But taking it further, we stepped away from the minute-by-minute updates to take a historical view of fires and where they burn. 

We looked through the National Interagency Fire Center’s records on fires since 2009 and plotted them on a map — all 10,849 of them. What resulted was a galaxy of blazes, but one with a clear message: Reported fires tend to happen most often where people live. 

Take a look for yourself. You can search this map by fire name or by year. Fires from this year are shown in red.

Facing nearly 300 lawsuits over a wildfire that destroyed 1,084 homes and killed two people, Xcel Energy on Thursday filed a $1.9 billion wildfire mitigation plan aimed at preventing future blazes.

Among the initiatives in the three-year plan are adding hundreds of weather stations and cameras, adding technology to more precisely target planned outages, replacing outdated equipment and increasing line inspections by radar drones.

“These investments are designed to mitigate a risk,” Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel’s Colorado subsidiary, said in an interview. “We are trying to do everything we can do to tackle this problem and keep our customers safe.”

The plan, which must be approved by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, would increase the average residential customer’s bill by 9% or $8.88 a month.

Utility-sparked wildfires are becoming more common as power lines are vulnerable to high temperatures and extreme weather, particularly in the West, where recent fires in Texas, California, Oregon and Colorado have caused billions of dollars in damage.

The Marshall fire, driven by high winds on Dec. 30, 2021, swept through unincorporated Boulder County, Superior and Louisville, destroying homes and businesses and causing $2 billion in property damage.

Boulder County officials determined that sparks from an “‘unmoored’ Xcel Energy power line” was one source of the fire. The utility disputes that finding.

In February, Xcel Energy acknowledged that its equipment likely started the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas Panhandle. The 1.2 million-acre fire was the largest in the state’s history.

By the end of 2023, about 280 Marshall fire lawsuits had been filed against Xcel Energy, including ones by Target Corp., the Boulder Valley School District, the governments of Superior and Louisville, and 150 insurance companies covering affected homeowners.

Utility companies are making hard decisions without precedent

The challenge for utilities developing wildfire mitigation plans is that this is a new exercise, said Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of systems engineering at the University of Colorado.

“There are a lot of hard decisions to be made without precedent,” Baker said. “There is no roadmap for wildfire mitigation. It is going to be different for every utility in every state.”

“Colorado is unique, our situation is unique, we are a bit more sensitive to wildfire and we have a lot of infrastructure around nature,” she said. 

Looking at Xcel Energy’s brief outline of initiatives, Baker said, “some of these upgrades are necessary. I don’t know about $1.9 billion, it sounds like a lot.”

But a utility faces the problem of balancing risk and capital expenditures. “What if you miss one line, and that one downed line causes a fire that destroys a thousand homes?” Baker asked. “It would be a PR nightmare.”

“It is hard to put a price on reliability and resiliency,” she said.

Xcel Energy ranks its wildfire risk areas in three tiers. About 235,000 customers live in Tier 3, the areas with the most fire risk. Another 320,000 live in Tier 2, places with the next highest fire risk. The utility has a total of 1.6 million electricity customers.

The 2025-27 plan expands on an earlier company wildfire mitigation plan and has six key components:

• Installing weather stations and wildfire detection cameras for greater situational awareness. 
• Increasing the frequency of technology-enabled inspections of our poles and equipment. 
• Implementing infrastructure improvements such as targeted undergrounding of power lines, equipment upgrades and major transmission line rebuilds. 
• Accelerating and expanding vegetation management near our infrastructure.
• Adding new equipment and technology to expand the use of our Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings Program and improve the ability of our facilities to react to wildfire risk events.
• A comprehensive Public Safety Power Shutoff Program, including backup energy rebate programs, improved interactive outage maps and active work to educate, prepare and support customers for potential outage events.

The last two elements will help the utility to be effective and “more surgical” in shutting down power lines during extreme weather events, such as high winds or storms, to reduce fire risk, said Anne Sherwood, the area vice president for wildfire mitigation.

In April, Xcel Energy shutdown part of its grid to reduce fire risk in the face of high winds. It was the first time the utility used such a planned outage. But with inadequate notice and information available, the shutdown caused chaos and prompted a PUC investigation.

Xcel Energy said it may use planned shut-offs in the future.

“A starting point has to be trust between the utility and the consumer,” Baker said, adding that better information has to be available.

The proposed $1.9 billion wildfire mitigation plan comes after the PUC greenlighted a $440 million Xcel Energy Clean Heat Plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions; a $264 million Transportation Electrification Plan; and a $12 billion Clean Energy Plan to build renewable energy generation.

All those plans will be paid for by customers through their bills.

As for the $1.9 billion for wildfire mitigation, Kenney said that over three years it comes to less than 30 cents a day on a customer’s bill “and that is adding some pretty sophisticated equipment that is going to make it safer … and more reliant and more resilient.

“We are extracting a lot of value for that $1.9 billion,” he said.

An inquiry by state regulators into Xcel Energy’s April “public safety” electricity outage — which created chaos in parts of the Front Range — has yielded a list of potential steps utilities and communities might take to limit future problems.

Faced with high winds April 6, Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, preemptively shut down parts of its electric grid to reduce wildfire risk. The shut-offs lasted through April 7.

Local emergency management officials complained there was inadequate notice of the shut-offs and in Boulder County the wastewater treatment plant was close to dumping raw sewage into Boulder Creek before power was restored.

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission, at the direction of Gov. Jared Polis, opened an information inquiry into the event, which left about 55,000 people without power. Another 45,000 lost electricity due to downed power lines.

“This is sort of the new normal,” Commissioner Tom Plant said. “We’re seeing, you know, increased events like this and also heightened wildfire risks.”

The PUC met with the company to discuss Xcel’s “need and commitments to improve communications,” according to Paul Gomez, an attorney for the PUC.

The commission also met with emergency management officials from Boulder, Jefferson and Larimer counties and a representative of the Downtown Boulder Partnership and held a hearing soliciting public testimony.

About 700 people either testified at the April 17 hearing or submitted written comments.  They painted a picture of people bundled up in chilly homes, jails and emergency services in the dark, and restaurants scrambling to save perishable ingredients.

The commission reviewed the findings at their May 15 weekly meeting.

“This is obviously a very important issue for the commission,” Plant said. “It’s going to be a component in the upcoming wildfire mitigation plan that’s going to be submitted by the company.”

Xcel Energy must file an update of its 2021 wildfire mitigation plan with the PUC in June. So far, the company said it has spent more than $375 million on wildfire mitigation, including using helicopters and lidar to survey lines and high-resolution cameras and artificial intelligence analysis to quickly locate fires.

Still, an official investigation, by the Boulder County Sheriff and the district attorney’s office, concluded that an Xcel Energy wire blown loose by high winds was one source of the Marshall Fire on Dec. 30, 2021. The utility disputes the findings.

The company is facing nearly 300 lawsuits from homeowners, local governments and Target in connection with the Marshall fire, which killed two people and destroyed 1,084 homes, as well as commercial properties, for a total of more than $2 billion in property damage.

The commissioners were cautioned by Gomez not to discuss issues related to Xcel Energy’s wildfire plan in advance of its submission to the commission.

To avoid that, Commissioner Chairman Eric Blank identified eight areas of concern that he said utilities should consider in developing plans for public safety power shut offs. He framed them in the form of questions. 

• How can businesses associations, chambers of commerce and emergency management centers in areas that are likely to be impacted by high winds be engaged to help issue messages?
• Can detailed maps be created and updated to indicate high-wind areas and likely outage areas?
• Should there be regular meetings between utility personnel and state emergency operations to discuss how, who and under what circumstances utilities would embed people in the centers during a planned outage?
• Can backup power plans be developed for critical local facilities and infrastructure, such as hospitals and sewage treatment plants, along with information on backup power capacity, batteries and generators at each facility?
• Can a similar list be created for residential customers with critical needs, including the potential for developing backup options through rebates or other mechanisms?
• Should power outage coordination meetings be held among adjacent utilities in high-wind areas?
• Should local governments in high-wind areas be provided with a single point of contact with a utility during such events?
• Are there sensors or other technological approaches that can help restore power more quickly without official inspections of every line after a power plant shut-off or other outages?

“For me, these are some of the core questions that need to be answered by the utilities and other stakeholders,” Blank said.

Xcel Energy’s “public safety outage,” which began April 6, left people bundled up in chilly homes, jails and emergency services in the dark, restaurants scrambling to save perishable ingredients, a pharmaceutical-maker losing millions of dollars and a whole lot of chaos and confusion.

That is the picture that emerged from testimony Wednesday at a Colorado Public Utilities Commission hearing on the decision by Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, to shut down part of its grid to reduce wildfire risk in the face of high winds.

At Gov. Jared Polis’ direction, the PUC has opened an investigation into Xcel Energy’s decision and its execution of powering down the lines serving 55,000 people, including the city of Boulder, from April 6 through April 7.

“It’s clear there were some real difficult repercussions from the weekend,” PUC Commissioner Megan Gilman said. “It is clear we had some potentially catastrophic near misses.”

More than 160 people signed up to testify and while the majority were from Boulder County, people from Douglas, Arapahoe and Larimer counties and Denver also addressed the commission.

“The next steps forward to make things better is to understand what happened,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank told the meeting. “We can’t do that without your experiences.”

Xcel Energy, in a statement, said: “We acknowledge there are ways to improve executing these safety measures in the future and are listening closely to what our customers are sharing with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.”

The company is facing nearly 300 lawsuits from homeowners, local governments and Target in connection with the Marshall fire, on Dec. 30, 2021, which killed two people and destroyed 1,084 homes along  with commercial properties for more than $2 billion in total property damage.

An official investigation, by the Boulder County Sheriff and the district attorney’s office, concluded that an Xcel Energy wire blown loose by high winds was one source of the fire. The utility disputes the findings.

In February, a fallen Xcel Energy powerline in Texas set off the record-setting Smokehouse Creek Fire, which burned more than 1.2 million acres in the state’s Panhandle

One pervasive complaint voiced at the PUC hearing was that for a planned event, local agencies and governments and residential and business customers received little warning.

“We only had five hours to prepare,” Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett said. The loss of electricity impacted the emergency operations center, the jail, the homeless shelter, the drinking water treatment plant, which had to run on auxiliary power for three days, and several fire stations.

The wastewater treatment plant lost power, creating the risk of raw sewage spilling into Boulder Creek and prompting emergency calls to the utility. “There was less than 10 minutes to spare when the power was turned back on,” Brockett said.

We only had five hours to prepare.

— Aaron Brockett, Boulder mayor

Businesses got even less notice. Agilent Technologies, which has a Boulder facility making pharmaceuticals, got a recorded phone call Saturday, two-and-a-half hours before the shutdown. “It will result in product loss of several million dollars,” Lorri Brovsky, the company director of facilities, environmental, health and safety, told the commission.

“We never did receive any updates on when the power would be restored,” Brovsky said. The power was restored after 26 hours.

Hosea Rosenberg, owner of Blackbelly Market and Restaurant in Boulder, said he got a text from Xcel Energy 30 minutes after the power went out.

There was $50,000 to $60,000 of food inventory in the restaurant, Rosenberg said. “We were lucky enough to borrow a refrigerator truck and save most of our food.”

There was also much confusion as to who was blacked out and who wasn’t and who was purposely cut and those who were out because of actual weather-related outages. About 100,000 people lost power  in because of the storm.

Bettina Swigger, CEO of the Downtown Boulder Partnership, called the communications “chaotic” and pointed out that while the power was out at the east end of the city’s busy pedestrian zone, it was on along the west end.

“One side of the Pearl Street Mall was dark and the other was not,” Swigger said.

An initial partnership survey put downtown business losses at about $1.3 million with $242,000 in lost wages for workers.

“We recognize that being without this essential service brings challenges to our customers and using a public safety power shutoff is a last resort,” the Xcel statement said. “We stand by our decision to protect the public from wildfire risk and firmly believe our actions contributed to preventing a wildfire during the most recent extreme wind event.”

Amy Petre Hill, assistant director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, and Nick Torres, advocacy director for the American Lung Association, voiced concerns about inadequate planning for at-risk communities.

Two of Hill’s friends, one with a spinal injury and another with ALS disease, survived the outage on backup batteries, she said.

If public safety outages become more frequent, posing challenges to those on supplemental oxygen and oxygen concentrators, Torres said, outreach to this community should be a priority. During the outage, he said, some people were forced to go to hospital emergency rooms for oxygen.

The Fullen household passed the outage in the chilly dark, George Fullen recounted in written testimony, one of about 700 comments filed with the PUC.

“During this 24-hour period, we gradually put on more clothes as the house cooled,” Fullen said. “When it started getting dark, we rounded up all of our flashlights and lanterns, and had a cold supper. Good that my wife did not need her oxygen.”

When the power did come back on it blew out two appliances in Scott Glick’s home in Larimer County.

“I’m a Marshall fire survivor,” Eileen Berry told the commission. “ I understand having had my house completely burned down, possibly by Xcel power lines, why they chose to shut off the power.”

“Perhaps this is the new normal,” Berry said. “However, I do think there needs to be much better notice.

The PUC’s Blank said that Xcel Energy will be submitting an updated wildfire mitigation plan in the coming weeks or months with a power shutoff program that sets in place rules and other guardrails surrounding planned outages.

Perhaps this is the new normal.

— Eileen Berry, Marshall fire survivor

While all this turmoil swept across the region, Paul Culnan, a south Boulder resident, told the commission he was “blissfully unaware of what was going on.”  

Culnan’s home is outfitted with photovoltaic solar panels, solar thermal heating and hot water and he has a backup battery. “My home was fine other than shaking in the wind,” he said.

The bliss was reenforced by the fact it was two days before Culnan got a text about the outage.

“Xcel’s got a lot of smart people,” Culnan said. “It is inconceivable they could bungle this bad just by accident. It is hard to imagine.”

Soil sampled from the yards of homes burned in the Marshall fire does not contain high levels of toxins that would threaten human health for those rebuilding there, according to the first major study of soil hazards after the devastating fire in late 2021. 

The study led by the Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado did find slightly elevated levels of some metals such as zinc, chromium and copper, but “well below the estimated thresholds of concern.” The study appeared in the February edition of the academic journal “Environmental Science and Technology.” 

The researchers, from CU and Colorado State University, felt personally compelled to carry out helpful science where they live, answering urgent questions from neighbors, said CU soil ecology professor Noah Fierer. 

The impetus for the detailed study “was actually pretty simple,” Fierer said. “People were worried. Obviously, the Marshall fire was devastating. Could their kids and pets run around in their backyard? Could they grow gardens in their backyard? There was clearly a need.” 

Frankly, Fierer said, the researchers were prepared to find worse, knowing how many potential toxins are contained in batteries, car engines, household paint and cleaning fluids, insulation and more. The results should be reassuring, said Fierer, who lives just a few miles from the Marshall burn area that killed two people, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and damaged $2 billion in property.

“I’m confident in saying that people living in burnt areas shouldn’t be worried about metal contamination in their backyards,” he said. 

Soil results from the Marshall fire can’t be universally applied to other wildland urban interface areas, such as Maui or other high-profile catastrophes, because of differences in materials burned and the speed and duration of flames, the researchers said. But the CIRES study does point the way on how soil samples can be taken. It also provides new information on wildfire impact on suburban open space, since Marshall fire homesite samples were compared with unburned residential areas and surrounding public lands, Fierer said. 

How the research was conducted

The researchers found Marshall-area homeowners eager to cooperate and gathered multiple samples from each of 58 sites. The sites included fully burned homes, unburned residential areas and natural grasslands in the surrounding open space, to help determine background levels of any metals. 

About four soil samples were taken from any one site, Fierer said. 

In addition to looking for toxic metals, the study said “the authors expected to find elevated levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a group of often toxic chemicals as observed following wildland fires.” No such elevated levels were found. 

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable using the results from this study to make any claims about potential soil contamination at another site,” Fierer said. “But now we at least have a protocol in place for investigating that and answering this question and next time.”

And with climate change and the growth of suburbs into more wildland urban interface areas across the United States, more fires are sure to come, researchers said. 

Results from the open space soil samples should also prove interesting to researchers studying the impact of wildfires, Fierer added. No surprising levels of toxins were found in burned open space areas, but samples did include elevated levels of potassium, for example. 

“So we do see changes in the soils with burning versus not burning in the open space, but what we don’t see is the elevated metals,” Fierer said. Heavy metals can bind to organ cells and block their proper functions. 

In assessing the potential health impacts, the researchers assumed humans would be exposed primarily on their skin, through children playing in yards or wind-blown dust. The researchers call for more study of how the sampled levels of toxins would impact humans if ingested, for example, by eating garden vegetables grown in affected soil. 

Also, the study concludes, “we sampled soils four months after the fire event, making it possible that contaminants were transported away from surface soils by wind, surface water runoff, postfire debris removal, or movement of contaminants deeper into the soil profile with melting snow or rainfall.”

“Every fire,” Fierer said, “is quite different.” 

The Marshall fire swept into Louisville and Superior, killing two people, forcing mass evacuations and causing $2 billion in damage not just because of the intense flames, but also because it raged amid an all-day hurricane, the nation’s top weather analysts said Tuesday. 

While Boulder and Jefferson counties see a handful of wild downslope winds each year, the storms almost always gust their dangerous blasts and then offer relief by falling into periodic lulls, according to a new study by Boulder researchers from NOAA and the National Weather Service. But the Marshall fire on Dec. 30, 2021, blasted well over 100 mph and stayed at hurricane force for 11 straight hours, they said.

The scientists call it “nothing short of miraculous” that only two people died as winds pushed a wall of flame dozens of miles east into packed suburbs, in a study published in December in Weather and Forecasting, a journal of the American Meteorological Society. 

A western Boulder County sensor at noon that day, about a half-hour after the fire ignited in two places, detected gusts at 57 meters per second, or 128 miles per hour. Peak gusts near the heart of the fire hit 115 mph.

The study does not claim better research could have made a difference that long day. The investigation showed the fire sparking at two spots from separate causes, and the hurricane winds overwhelming even the best preparation. Evacuation communication was imperfect, but people managed to get out of the way.

Illustrating the unicorn nature of the day, the researchers’ slideshow included snapshots of residents holding fist-size embers carried miles east of burned homes and landing in Boulder County yards and streets. 

But the NOAA-led group said fire reviews have led to an easing of rules for when to call an official red flag warning that can broaden emergency alerts and media coverage ahead of a possible spark. While a high wind warning was issued before the Marshall fire, the higher-profile red flag threshold at the time was not reached because relative humidity stayed well above the 15% trigger levels, researchers said. 

A new warning protocol allows weather analysts to put up red flags based on unusually high winds, even if humidity is not a factor, they said. 

The researchers also said new modeling and geographic targeting tools can let weather analysts draw a precise “polygon” around the cellphone towers that can then issue emergency alerts directly to all cellphones within the temporary boundary, just as in an Amber Alert. 

Marshall was “an unbelievable event,” said NOAA Global Systems Laboratory researcher Eric James. “Even without the fire, the wind would have been a major story.”

“Once the fire started, we knew it was going to be awful,” another researcher said. The junction at Colorado highways 93 and 72 south of Boulder is the windiest site of all NOAA’s sensors. 

Downslope wind waves “crash together” there, they said. “Then, we got two fires.” 

The researchers studied whether climate change, which has raised average Colorado temperatures 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1980, might have factored into the Marshall fire. 

Records in fact indicate there are slightly fewer dangerous high-wind events coming down from the Continental Divide to Front Range counties in recent years, they said. Climate change in many cases is said to make off-the-charts weather events more likely, from drought to torrential rain to deadly urban heat waves.

There are actually two fewer Front Range wind event days a year recently, though useful records don’t go back as far as researchers would like, said Paul Schlatter of the National Weather Service Boulder office. 

More relevant for the Marshall fire was “not having any snow cover in the previous month,” researchers said. That December had been extremely dry for many Front Range counties. Moreover, the drought desiccated grasses and shrubs that had shot up during a relatively west spring of 2021.

Continual improvement in forecasting power should make future warnings more precise, for all kinds of storms, the researchers said. One noted that forecasts hours before Marshall showed typical downslope threats centered farther north, in Larimer County. 

The biggest danger turned out to be “only half a county farther south,” NOAA’s Stan Benjamin said. “But it’s a big county.” 

Almost two years after the Marshall fire erupted, and only a fraction of Boulder County residents were warned to flee their homes in the face of an inferno fueled by 100 mph wind gusts, a new report by the University of Colorado lists recommendations to improve the state’s alert system to better warn Coloradans of imminent danger. 

Researchers say the state needs to hire staff to directly address how to better alert residents who speak a language other than English and have disabilities in order to create a more inclusive state warning system, according to the draft report released Tuesday. Before the Marshall fire devastated parts of Boulder County in December 2021 and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and displaced thousands of residents, less than a quarter of the county’s population had opted in to receive emergency alerts. 

According to the report, about 900,000 people living in Colorado primarily speak a language other than English and more than a million people identify as having a disability. Many might not receive adequate emergency notifications because of the channels available to send them messages or system limitations. 

“Our survey results showed that alert authorities rely heavily on services and channels that require users to opt-in — and less than 40% do,” Mary Angelica Painter, a Natural Hazards Center research associate who worked on the report said in statement. “That indicates that opt-in messaging is likely a barrier for everyone, but especially for those with limited English proficiency and disabilities.”

Researchers recommended staff work with the Colorado Office of Emergency Management and focus on tracking the metrics of alerts, promoting inclusive practices across the state and seeking funds for training. 

The report also said more could be done to build trust between emergency response agencies and community groups before emergencies. 

There is also a need for more guidance, training and resources for county officials on cultural competency, community needs and technology options, researchers said. 

The report was mandated under a bill signed into law in May, which appropriated funds to complete a study to identify areas of improvement for the state’s warning systems and how to improve access for those who speak languages other than English and have disabilities.

The public is able to provide feedback on the draft until Dec. 20. Spanish and sign language interpreters will be available at two virtual meetings Dec. 14 hosted by the Natural Hazards Center to discuss the report.

A final report will be presented to legislators next year.

More than 150 insurance companies and two survivors of the catastrophic Marshall fire are suing Xcel Energy for the utility company’s role in Colorado’s costliest and most destructive fire.

The lawsuits come a month after the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office and sheriff’s office announced the findings of their 18-month probe into the cause of the 2021 fire. The report found the fire had two ignition points, including an Xcel Energy power line that arced after it disconnected amid high winds and sent hot particles into dry grass. 

The utility company has denied that its power lines played a role in triggering a fire. The company declined to comment Tuesday.

The pair of lawsuits, filed in Boulder County District Court in the last several days, are the latest legal actions against the utility company. Both seek damages for the fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Superior, Louisville and unincorporated Boulder County and caused more than $2 billion in property damage. 

Two people were killed in the fire: 91-year-old Nadine Turnbull and Robert Sharpe, who was 69. 

The lawsuit filed Thursday comes from more than 150 insurance companies that insured owners of property that was burned in the Marshall fire. The companies are seeking an unspecified amount of money for damages, accusing Xcel of negligence. 

“The inherent danger in electricity and Xcel Energy’s design of its electrical equipment materialized in an arcing event that was a substantial factor in causing and contributing to the spread of the Marshall Fire,” the lawsuit said.

The damage caused by the property “was the inescapable and unavoidable consequence” of Xcel Energy’s electrical equipment, it said.

The lawsuit did not name Twelve Tribes, a religious group with property in unincorporated Boulder County where investigators identified the first ignition point of the Marshall fire. High winds on Dec. 30 resurfaced still-burning embers from a debris fire on their property a week earlier, but investigators said property owners responsibly extinguished the fire and had no way of predicting the weather in the days to come. 

A separate lawsuit was filed Monday on behalf of two Marshall fire survivors, John and Julia Uridil. It claims Xcel Energy knew Boulder County faced a high risk of fire Dec. 30, citing the overgrowth of dry wildland grasses and a warning from the National Weather Service about high winds that had the potential to knock over power lines.

While some utility companies in the West deliberately shut off power when high fire danger exists, known as public safety power shutoffs, Xcel did not shut off power, according to the lawsuit filed by Edelson PC, a law firm that has has represented property owners in some of the country’s largest fires and received a $13.5 billion settlement with PG&E over the losses from the 2018 Camp fire in California.

“Had Xcel Energy de-energized its power lines, implemented a PSPS, buried its power lines or taken other necessary steps to prevent a power line ignition before or as high winds whipped through the region, the devastation caused by the Marshall Fire would have been prevented,” the lawsuit said.

The Uridils, whose home was partially destroyed, are seeking an unspecified amount in damages.

Todd Logan, an attorney with Edelson PC, said the firm plans to file hundreds of lawsuits against Xcel, including dozens in the coming weeks, primarily representing owners whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the fire. 

BOULDER — Embers buried for six days on a residential property reignited and together with sparks from an “unmoored” Xcel Energy power line started the 2021 Marshall fire in Boulder County, the sheriff said Thursday morning.

A residential fire Dec. 24 to burn scrap wood and tree branches resurfaced because of the winds Dec. 30, Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson said. The sheriff said the fire was put out “responsibly” Dec. 24 when it was buried. But around 11 a.m. on Dec. 30, high winds, pushing 100 mph, resurfaced embers and blew them into dry brush at 5325 Eldorado Springs Road.

A second fire was likely started an hour later that day by Xcel Energy power lines and also quickly spread, Johnson said. At some point the two fires combined, though the investigation did not focus on what time or where they merged.

The district attorney’s office determined there was “insufficient or no evidence of a crime” and no reason to file charges, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.

“If we were to tell you today that we were filing charges it would be wrong and unethical,” Dougherty said. “We can only file charges if there’s evidence of a crime being committed.”

Dougherty said investigators found no evidence of negligence or recklessness by Xcel. Rather, high wind caused a power line to disconnect from its mooring and contact other lines, leading to electrical arcing and hot particles showering onto dry grass. 

There were no known problems with the power line prior to the fire, Dougherty said. 

“This is a different discussion and a different decision, if that wire was worn or shoddy or they had maintenance issues in the past. There was no such record of that, no indication of that.”

An Xcel Energy spokesman said Thursday that the company disputes that its power lines caused the second ignition. He said the utility has reviewed its maintenance records and believes the system was properly maintained.

“We strongly disagree with any suggestion that Xcel Energy’s powerlines caused the second ignition, which according to the report started 80 to 110 feet away from Xcel Energy’s powerlines in an area with underground coal fire activity,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Xcel Energy did not have the opportunity to review and comment on the analyses relied on by the Sheriff’s Office and believes those analyses are flawed and their conclusions are incorrect.”

A group of more than 20 victims of the fire filed a new lawsuit Thursday against Xcel. They lawsuit says Xcel “was negligent in its operation of its power lines and equipment in that (the company) unreasonably failed to maintain, monitor and/or supervise its property in a manner so as to prevent an arcing event from causing a fire.”

The new legal action is separate from a lawsuit filed against Xcel in April 2022 by two business owners and a couple. That legal action, before the investigation into the Marshall fire was complete, alleged Xcel’s power lines and equipment were a “substantial factor” in the cause, origin and continuation of the wildfire, which was fanned by intense winds. In November a judge denied Xcel’s motion to dismiss that lawsuit.

New details on the investigation come nearly 18 months after the fire exploded and raced across 6,000 acres, pushed by gale-force winds across parched grassland into subdivisions bordering open space. Two people died in the fire and more than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed in Louisville, Superior and unincorporated Boulder County. Johnson estimated the losses at $2 billion. An estimated 1,000 pets also died as homes burned to the ground.

In addressing the disastrous toll, Johnson, who lost his own home to the fire, choked up and thanked the community for its patience as the investigation played out. 

“I know personally the last 18 months have been hard and not having answers creates stress and challenges that we don’t need,” he said, his voice quavering. “And I hope that now we can focus on rebuilding our lives and getting back to our homes and our community.”

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said the fire likely started near Marshall Road and Colorado 93, but federal agencies aided in its investigation to try to pinpoint the cause of the fire. 

The sheriff’s office consulted with outside labs, fire investigators with the Forest Service and a private electrical engineer throughout the investigation. It also reviewed 146 reports of missing people, conducted two death investigations, reviewed 200 tips from the community, executed several search warrants and interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses. 

Conditions were cool and damp when the property owners at 5325 Eldorado Springs Road, the Twelve Tribes religious group, started burning a pile of debris on Dec. 24, investigators said. There was no significant wind and by 5 p.m. they had the fire covered with dirt.

Firefighters who were at the compound that day felt they were burning responsibly, noting a swimming pool on the property. 

Investigators and trained forensic child examiners interviewed the 40 people who lived on the property. They determined that there was not enough evidence to prove that anyone on the property disregarded substantial and unjustifiable risk — a requirement for criminal charges — when they started the Dec. 24 burn. Nor did they set new fires on Dec. 30.

Buried embers can smolder for weeks, even months, after they are buried, Dougherty said, and the property owners “had no idea” that the wind would reach hurricane force days later. 

“They had no idea that this could spread and destroy over 1,000 homes,” he said. Once they realized the fire was burning on Dec. 30, they tried to put the flames out but the fire quickly spread.

The shed on the property was not on fire when firefighters arrived, despite early rumors the fire started there.

A representative of Twelve Tribes couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

The second fire started near the Marshall Mesa trailhead, about 2,000 feet southwest of the first fire. Investigators said it was unlikely that embers from the first fire could have traveled that far, against wind blowing west to east at sustained speeds of 50 mph. 

A trail camera captured footage of an unmoored powerline in the area, authorities said. 

A separate report of a downed line near Colorado 93 and Eldorado Springs Drive turned out to be a communication line, which did not have enough electrical current to start a fire, according to the investigation. 

Experts ruled out coal seams as a likely cause of the fire, Johnson said, because significant mitigation work was done after a surface vent from an underground coal fire ignited a small grass fire in 2005.  

After 275 tons of material was dumped into the area, the temperature of the air from the coal vents was below 90 degrees, compared with 373 degrees prior to the mitigation. After the Marshall fire, experts tested the temperatures again and said there was no indication that temperatures coming out of the vents were high enough to cause a fire. 

Boulder County strengthened its ordinances last year to provide specific guidelines on how to fully extinguish fires.

Documents detailing the Marshall fire investigation were posted on Boulder County’s website Thursday afternoon.

Johnson said he expected the lack of criminal charges to bring mixed reactions from members of the community, some who are on a path moving forward and others who are “still struggling to make it to tomorrow.”

“I know that ultimately sometimes really bad things happen and I was caught up in that. My home was lost, but I’m moving forward, because, for me, it’s very important to reclaim my life after the fire,” he said. “And the only way I feel that I can do that is to rebuild my home, plant my flag, and get back in my neighborhood.”

Colorado Sun reporter Parker Yamasaki contributed to this story

Boulder County officials have completed their investigation into the Marshall fire — the most destructive in Colorado history.

Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson and 20th Judicial District Attorney Michael Dougherty will address the outcome of the nearly 18-month probe into the cause and origin of the fire during a news conference scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday. 

The update is likely to draw national and international attention. 

The fire, which broke out Dec. 30, 2021, burned more than 1,000 homes and businesses as wind-fueled flames raced across Superior and Louisville after sparking near Marshall Road and Colorado 93. 

Open burning was banned the day of the fire, which saw winds gusts upward of 100 mph. 

Federal agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, quickly joined forces with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office in an attempt to pinpoint what caused the fire. Investigators followed up on more than 200 tips and reviewed footage from 266 body camera recordings and 400 photos that were captured by first responders during the initial response to the fire, the sheriff’s office said. The sheriff’s office also collected 49 physical items and 137 pieces of digital evidence, including drone footage and video recorded by witnesses. 

Officials have so far remained tight-lipped on details of the investigation. 

A search warrant was executed days after the fire on private property to determine the fire’s cause, but then-Sheriff Joe Pelle declined to release details on the location or name the property owner. Pelle, who was term-limited, left office in January after serving 20 years as the county sheriff. 

In April 2022, a lawsuit filed against Xcel Energy said its power lines were a “substantial factor” in the cause, origin and continuation of the fire. It said witnesses saw a fire igniting near a power line in the area where authorities say the fires started. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for July 11. 

During fire investigations, authorities consider a range of potential causes including lightning, cigarettes thrown from cars, campfires, underground coal mine fires and debris burning, the sheriff’s office said. 

It took just over an hour for flames to make their way from Colorado 93 east of Eldorado Springs to Louisville. People in the fire’s path were caught off guard and some barely escaped. Two died. 

Flames, fanned by wind gusts up to 110 mph, forced about 37,500 people to flee the area in about three to four hours, according to an after-action report, which called the effort “unprecedented.”