Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council.

Thanks for joining us for the discussion.

The governance and intergovernmental relations committee starts now.

Good morning, everyone.

It is Tuesday, December 16th.

Happy holidays.

I'm Amanda Sawyer.

I have the honor of representing the residents of District 5 and also chairing this committee.

We have a briefing today from our Office of Emergency Management, followed by an executive session.

So before we get started, why don't we do a round of introductions, Council First How?

Let me start with you.

Wonderful.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Good morning, Garrett Watson, Flying District 9.

Good morning.

Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Good morning, Serena Gonzalez Cutis, one of your council members at large.

Good morning, Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Alright, thank you.

So Matt, you are, are you doing our presentation for us?

I believe so.

Then come on up to the table.

And we can get you all set up.

The computer at the end there, you can, it should have your presentation pulled up.

So you can just come and sit at the end, introduce yourself, run your slides, and you're good to go.

I will say this is really good timing.

Along the front range tomorrow, Wednesday the 17th.

Okay, thank you.

And so what we're going to talk about today is catastrophic risk overview with OEM, which is really interesting.

Thanks for being here.

Uh happy to be here.

Uh nice to see all of you.

I think I know some of you more than others.

I suspect I am probably the ED you see the least across city agencies or one of them.

Uh maybe that's for good reason.

Um I was asked uh to come and give an overview and a presentation for you all, which I actually really appreciate because we don't often get on the radar, and there are some things that uh tend to get lost in the weeds, but I think it's important for all of you to know.

So I want to run through some of those today.

Um, so why are we thinking about catastrophic risks?

And a lot of that comes down to that we focus a lot on the day-to-day for good reason and the concerns that we have of extreme cold weather and snowstorms and even things like uh flooding, cybersecurity, all of those things are very critical, but there are some low probability, high consequence hazards that we need to consider, and they tend to get pushed aside, and we tend to think that those things are just not going to happen.

And if I were to ask any of you in 2019 if we'd have the largest pandemic in a hundred years, the greatest social unrest since the late 1960s, and the greatest flow of migrant newcomers into Denver that maybe we have seen 44,000 over a two-year period, you probably would not have believed me, and yet all of those things occurred.

And so I think it's important that we talk about some other potentialities.

We have seen specifically urban conflagration, so a large fire that takes off in an urban area, often wildfire induced, dam failure, and hazardous materials releases.

These are all not only possible, but would be severe if not catastrophic.

And some recent examples that were all over the news in the last few years that you may remember.

Um, so we want to just highlight these.

One of the things also that I'll I'll point to is uh some of you may remember um Councilmember Orteger, former council member Ortega.

Uh, before her uh tenure ended, one of the things that she pushed was a rail hazmat bill.

And it commissioned a study that was done through some other city agencies, and there were some recommendations in there, and many of those recommendations were extremely costly on the order of hundreds of millions, even into the billions of dollars to try to implement.

And one of the things that I said when this was up was that not my decision whether to make those investments, they don't seem economically feasible.

However, there are other things we can do that are much more cost effective.

And in the years since then, we have worked on some of those things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.

So I'll pause there.

Any questions before we dive in?

I'll keep a list of questions, so you dive in and then council members will ask at the end.

Alright, so let's start with the first one the wildfire urban conflagration risk.

Uh I'm sure everybody is aware of the Marshall Fire that took place about four years ago that was uh pretty close to the urban core, not not right up on the Denver border, but but close to it.

One of the things that is with climate change, um, and as we build out more closer in particular to open spaces, we have an increased risk uh here in Denver.

This map that you see here pulls on some of the burn probability, the wildfire risk from the state that they have provided to us.

And you can see the darker colored reds on there mean the greater burn probability.

And so the greatest risk from that perspective is out at the airport where we have a lot of open space in grassland into Green Valley Ranch, Montbello, and parts of Central Park.