Boulder County Wildfire Fund sets deadline for Marshall Fire grants

BOULDER — Locals whose homes were affected by the 2021 Marshall Fire have until the end of June to apply for Boulder County Wildfire Fund grant money from the Community Foundation Boulder County.

The program closes on June 30, 2025.

“The foundation allocated $20 million from the Boulder County Wildfire Fund to support rebuilding efforts. Currently, 60% of affected households have completed their rebuilds and moved into new homes, with an additional 20% in the process of rebuilding,” CFBC said in a news release. “Nearly 650 households have received $15.1 million in support from the rebuild program, with an average grant size of $23,510 per household. In total, the foundation has distributed $36 million to provide financial support, fund programs and resources and support our community’s recovery.”

The Dec. 30, 2021, Marshall Fire burned 1,084 buildings in densely populated areas in Louisville, Superior and unincorporated Boulder County, took two lives and forced 37,000 people to evacuate.

The Community Foundation Boulder County will continue accepting donations for the Wildfire Fund through next June.

“While we’re excited by the number of Marshall Fire-affected families and community members who have rebuilt and moved into their new homes, we recognize that there are others who — for a variety of legitimate reasons — aren’t quite there yet,” CFBC CEO Tatiana Hernandez said in the release.

A study published Monday by the University of Colorado Boulder showed that six months after the fire, more than half of residents of the surviving homes reported physical symptoms including headaches, sore throats or a strange taste in their mouths that they attributed to poor air quality. A companion study showed that the air quality inside one home after the fire equaled that of downtown Los Angeles in the 1990s on a high pollution day, with hazardous gases lingering for weeks.

“Our research suggests that there could be important health impacts for people returning to smoke- or ash-damaged homes after a fire and that we need to have systems in place to protect them,” Colleen Reid, associate professor of geography and co-author of the studies, said in a prepared statement.

The papers are the first to explore air quality inside smoke- and ash-damaged homes and to assess the health impacts on people who live in them. They come as fires in the Wildland-Urban Interface, such as in Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023 grow more common.

“A lot of time has been spent studying wildfire smoke — what you get when you burn vegetation. But what do you get when you burn a home, with all its furniture and electronics and cars? Until now, there has been very little known,” said co-author Joost de Gouw, a professor of chemistry and fellow with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Ten days after the fire, de Gouw’s team erected field instruments in an intact home. Over five weeks, they measured the presence of 50 gases. Meanwhile, Reid developed a survey to send to residents within the burn perimeter, as well as a random sample of those within two miles.

At six months, 642 people responded to the survey; 413 had responded at the one-year mark. Some 55% of respondents reported symptoms that they attributed to the fire at the six-month mark.

Those who found ash inside were three times as likely to report headaches compared with those who didn’t find ash; those who reported an odd odor were four times as likely to report headaches compared with those who did not.

People with the same symptoms tended to cluster together, according to computer mapping analyses. For example, those living near destroyed homes were far more likely to report a strange taste in their mouth.

“These findings are consistent with chemical exposures and suggest that residents of smoke- and ash-damaged homes may have experienced lingering air quality and physical health challenges months after the fire,” Reid said.

The authors cannot say which chemicals caused the reported health impacts. But measurements in one home found high levels of volatile organic compounds such as benzene, a carcinogen found in gasoline and diesel exhaust. Dust samples also showed high levels of copper, zinc, arsenic and industrial pollutants.

“If your home survives, and the neighbor two doors down burns,” Reid said, “all those melted things can get into the air and find their way into your home.”

The authors stressed that volatile organic compounds are only considered carcinogenic at levels much higher than what they found. Until more studies are done, they cannot say whether such exposures can lead to long-term health problems.

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