25-03-2025
Douglas County community builds around wildfire prevention
DOUGLAS COUNTY, Colo. (KDVR) — Dry, windy weather is just one reason a new community near Chatfield State Park is being built around wildfire prevention.
The Sterling Ranch community sits about a half hour away from Denver in Douglas County.
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'It was originally a cattle ranch,' Sterling Ranch Founder Harold Smethills said. 'It was the Sterling family Ranch that started in the 1860s.'
Today, Harold and his wife Diane are developing a community that's three and a half miles long, two miles wide, with a focus on Western lifestyle and fire prevention.
'Our family is third-generation Coloradans, Colorado has wildfires,' Smethills said. 'The best way to prevent a fire wildfire isn't to fight. It is to prevent it in the first place.'
Cattle are one part of fire prevention for the community.
'We have about 150 head out here right now, and these cows will move around,' Sterling Ranch Community Authority Board General Manager Gary Debus said. 'They've got several ways that they process the feed and the forage, including their hoof prints in the soil, that they catch little droplets of water, you know, instead of having a runoff.'
Next, more than three million gallons of water are stored in water tanks on the Sterling Ranch property.
Hot spring weather raises concerns about Colorado's fire danger
'So over here you see a tank, there's 1.2 million gallons in that tank and there's a bigger one twice that size,' Smethills pointed out. 'So, if there were a fire, we can deliver at least a million gallons immediately to fight it.'
Jessica Gottschalk, director of resident support for Sterling Ranch, told FOX31 that walking trails and paths have six-foot beauty bands designed to help prevent fire spread. She says they hold landscape classes for those who build in the community to educate residents on fire-preventative landscaping options.
'It's the plant material, it's the fencing,' Gottschalk said. 'We require concrete split rail-fencing on the perimeters of the houses so you don't have that match stick fire effect.'
Sterling Ranch residents are also told to prepare, in part, by knowing what to take with them if they ever had to evacuate their homes. They call it the six Ps of evacuation:
People and pets
Prescriptions, vitamins and eyeglasses
Papers, phone numbers and important documents
Personal computers, hard drives and disks
Priceless items, pictures, keepsakes
'Plastic' (credit card, ATM card) and cash
All Colorado homeowners need to be fire-ready and fire-weather-aware.
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