Colorado Wildfire, Measured: 86 FEMA Fire Declarations, County by County
Part three of three. Part one covers the largest fires; part two covers when Colorado burns.
A fire becomes a federal matter in one of two ways. A Fire Management Assistance Grant (FMAG) is requested while a fire is burning and threatens destruction on the scale of a major disaster; if granted, FEMA covers 75% of eligible firefighting costs. A major disaster declaration is the larger instrument, usually after the damage is done, and opens recovery programs for people and public infrastructure.
OpenFEMA lists every declaration and every county it designated. For Colorado fires since 1978 there are 86: 79 FMAGs and seven major disasters.
By county
| County | Fire declarations | FMAG | Major disaster | Most recent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Larimer | 15 | 12 | 3 | 2024 |
| Boulder | 9 | 7 | 2 | 2024 |
| Custer | 8 | 6 | 2 | 2026 |
| Pueblo | 7 | 5 | 2 | 2026 |
| Garfield | 7 | 6 | 1 | 2020 |
| Jefferson | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2024 |
| El Paso | 5 | 2 | 3 | 2013 |
| Fremont | 5 | 3 | 2 | 2013 |
| Park | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2008 |
Ten further FMAGs between 1978 and 2016 were designated statewide rather than to a county.
What the pattern says
Larimer is the most declared county, and it is the county of Cameron Peak and High Park. Twelve of its fifteen declarations were FMAGs: fires that were fought with federal help before they became disasters.
El Paso has the most major disasters, three, with only two FMAGs. Two of the three follow the Waldo Canyon (18,248 acres) and Black Forest (13,111 acres) fires, which burned into Colorado Springs and its suburbs. In El Paso the federal record is about damage more than about firefighting, the same split between acres and damage that part two found in NOAA's numbers.
The seven major disasters were declared in 2002 (wildfires), 2012 (High Park and Waldo Canyon), 2013 (Royal Gorge; Black Forest), 2021 (wildfires; wildfires and straight-line winds, the declaration that followed the Marshall Fire) and 2026 (wildfires, flooding and mudslides).
The pace has held. There were 31 fire declarations from 1996 to 2005, 24 from 2006 to 2015, and 24 from 2016 to date.
What the record cannot tell you
A declaration counts a request granted, not a fire. One declaration can designate several counties, and one county can be designated for several fires in a year. A large fire on federal land can be fought without any county being designated.
Requests denied are not in the data. OpenFEMA lists declarations made, so a county that asked and was refused looks the same as one that never asked.
For the county emergency manager
An FMAG request is time-critical: it is made while the fire is burning, against criteria about threat to lives and improved property. The facts it needs (what is in the fire's path, which critical facilities, how close) are the facts Calchis puts on one screen: active fires and red flag warnings inside your county, the hospitals, substations and water plants nearby, and an incident record that prints the ICS-209. Every county above has its own county page built from the same federal records.
Sources: FEMA, OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries, incident type Fire, Colorado, 1978–2026, as loaded into Calchis and queried October 6, 2026; counts are distinct disaster numbers. FEMA, Fire Management Assistance Grant program, for the program's terms.
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Decision-support intelligence — not a primary alerting or dispatch system. Verify against official sources. All data referenced in this article is sourced from publicly available federal agencies and peer-reviewed publications.