Boulder, CO

The September 2013 Boulder floods produced 17 inches of rain in under a week, killed nine people, and destroyed hundreds of homes across Boulder County—an event that reshaped local diligence requirements for creek and canyon-adjacent properties in ways that the city's high community resilience score of 79 does not fully explain. Boulder's wildfire score of 71 sits at the 81st national percentile—high band—reflecting foothill and open-space adjacency that the Marshall Fire, which burned more than 6,000 acres in Boulder County in December 2021, made viscerally concrete: suburban properties adjacent to grassland can burn in winter, under dry conditions, without seasonal warning. We checked twice: West Boulder's 80302 zip code marks where wildfire exposure rises sharply toward open space. Properties in that corridor carry different insurance assumptions from Central Boulder's 80301—FAIR Plan dependence is real for some foothill-adjacent parcels, and evacuation route review is not optional. Creek corridors in South Boulder's 80305 deserve the same flood scrutiny they received before 2013, because the underlying hydrology has not changed. Annual premiums range from $1,500 to $3,400, with greater friction near foothills and open space. Foothill adjacency increases both wildfire exposure and evacuation logistics in a market where strong community planning norms can create a false sense of engineered safety. Smoke from regional fires affected air quality and daily life in ways that standard risk metrics do not capture as insurance events. Heat at the 39th national percentile is genuinely low. The Boulder diligence case is not heat—it is where the property sits relative to creek corridors and the wildland edge, and whether those two exposures have been modeled separately.

— Open Data Collective