The answer is yes,” says Camille Stevens-Rumann, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute. Just under half of Colorado’s population, about 2.5 million people, lives in the wildland-urban interface, according to a 2023 analysis from the Colorado State Forest Service. The blaze started as a prescribed fire managed by the Colorado State Forest Service southeast of Conifer. “That put a screaming halt to prescribed fire work in the state of Colorado,” Morgan recalls. “Everyone in Colorado is affected by wildfires,” Stevens-Rumann says.