The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office has released an online Open Burning Portal. Boulder County now requires permits for slash burns — limbs, branches and stems less than six inches in diameter and free of dirt — something it didn’t require before the Marshall Fire, according to the Marshall Fire Investigative Report. It will continue to require permits for open burns — fires used intentionally for grassland or forest management. Those permits can now be obtained through the online burning portal. Even burns that don’t need permits, like agricultural burns, must be registered on the portal for community awareness, with an “intent to burn” filed before starting and a “burn completion notice” submitted after.
Perhaps the feature of interest for most Boulderites is a map that shows where burns have been approved and where burns are currently happening. By providing the public this information, the hope is that if there’s smoke in the air, a resident can check to see if that smoke is coming from an approved burn or not, reducing the burden on 911 dispatchers.
Boulder Reporting Lab covered new cameras spreading through the county that use AI to try and spot wildfire smoke as soon as possible. Seth McKinney, fire management officer for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, said this new online portal will help make those cameras more effective.
“When we put up the cameras, before we had this archive system, we were just getting inundated by legal burns that really didn’t pose any threat,” McKinney told Boulder Reporting Lab. “We need to be able to track those legal fires and then be able to cross reference that archive with what the cameras are picking up.”
McKinney said a future exists where the map of the burning portal is accessed by the AI cameras so alerts are only raised for burns not in the system.
Correction: The original version of this article stated that the county did not require permits for open burns. Open burns have long been subject to permit requirements.