New technology and lessons from recent disasters have informed the latest iteration of the Pikes Peak Regional Office of Emergency Management’s wind-driven wildfire plan.

In some ways, the strategy is the same as it ever was, just with increasing urgency.

“You can’t wait – minutes matter,” said Andrew Notbohm, director of the PPROEM, told the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners in a presentation Tuesday.

The emergency agency covers dozens of jurisdictions and municipalities in El Paso and Teller counties, helping to coordinate responses to large-scale events. While wildfires are a fact of life in Colorado, the newest plan covers a specific, deadly type: wind-driven fires in the built environment.

Recent examples include the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January 2025, Hawaii’s Lahaina fire in August 2023 and the Camp fire in Northern California in November 2018. Notbohm said the defining feature is the number of fatalities, which in recent years has exceeded 100 in a single incident.

Colorado has seen large and deadly fires in the past decade plus, including two in the jurisdiction of the PPROEM: the Waldo Canyon fire of 2012 and the Black Forest fire in the following year. This year, the Colorado Springs area has already seen the National Weather Service issue nearly 40 red flag warnings, which indicate weather conditions conducive to wildfires. The number of fire warnings in four months are close to matching a normal full-year total.

Tweaks to the evacuation strategies for the region have come from observations of previous events and from new data produced with AI software, according to Notbohm.

The AI program, called Ladris, is run by a California-based startup. It can map evacuations and provide time estimates based on population and the capacity of escape routes. Many of the PPROEM partner agencies, like local fire districts, now have access to the software to run simulated evacuations based on different conditions, including special events like a Fourth of July celebration.

Using the program has produced a few takeaways already, said Notbohm. One is that some areas of the western side of Colorado Springs may not be able to evacuate fully in the event of a fast-moving fire.

“The time required is greater than the time available,” he said.

Instead, he said planners were considering the use of temporary refuges, like parking lots, that could shelter evacuees in the area of the fire. The same strategy has been used in other recent wildfires that entered the urban landscape.

He also said that emergency planners were considering ways to prioritize protecting places that are difficult to evacuate, like hospitals and long-term care centers.

Another observation from trying different scenarios in Ladris was the importance of getting evacuees to Interstate 25 in reducing overall evacuation times. Notbohm said that the earlier people can leave, the quicker the whole process will go.

The workable portion of the updated plan is primarily a series of checklists for emergency management officials based on conditions on the ground. One of those thresholds is the “Particularly Dangerous Situation” red flag warning, which the Weather Service issued in the southern part of Colorado for the first time this year.

A PDS means even lower humidity and higher winds than in a regular red flag event. A PDS also means that fire fuels in the environment are very dry. In the new plan, emergency managers will start evaluating staffing levels and reach out to healthcare officials about their facilities when severe weather and environmental conditions are present.

The existence of a PDS warning has factored in proactive power shut-offs this year by Xcel, the state’s largest utility provider. Notbohm said that Colorado Springs Utilities does not currently have the same policy, but will be visually inspecting lines before attempting to restore power if it is lost during dangerous conditions.

El Paso County Commissioner Carrie Geitner said that power shutoffs and delays in restoring power can also have major impacts on residents.

“It’s a really difficult situation,” she said.

Moving forward, Notbohm said his office was in the application process for two grants – one from Google – to upgrade its contract with Ladris. The new program the PPROEM wants access to is called Sentinel Prime, and it would give emergency managers suggestions based on the current and predicted spread of a fire in real time.

“The tech is coming together,” he said.

The presentation was still guarded about the capacity of predictive software to accurately convey how an emergency will unfold. Even with custom inputs, a Ladris evacuation model is still a “blue sky” scenario, Notbohm said. The software cannot predict a tree or powerline falling on a road, nor can it predict human behavior in a high-stress environment.

Geitner cautioned against the public becoming overly reliant on their own evacuation estimates, since things slow down significantly in a major disaster.

“Instead of leaving early, it encourages them to leave later,” she said.

To sign up for emergency alerts, go to PeakAlerts.org. The public can also find more information on current incidents and preparedness at https://pproem.com/alerts.