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Despite clear directions from my GPS, I felt certain I was in the wrong place as I drove the last mile to meet Colorado Representative Joe Neguse in March. We were meeting in the city of Superior at the site of a recent devastating wildfire in his district, and yet the subdivisions I sped past seemed to be buzzing along normally. Shoppers drove into a shopping complex while parents ferried kids to school. But then, in the middle of idyllic suburbia, it appeared: a 30-acre subdivision in ruins. Every single home in the neighborhood, once home to nearly 200 houses, burned to the ground in the Marshall Fire in December. Now a visitor can see the outlines of where the homes used to stand and the frame of a burnt-out car here and there, but not much more remains.
Waiting at the entrance to the Sagamore subdivision stood Neguse. While I moved ploddingly through the wreckage to take it all in, Neguse, 38, jumped briskly from one spot to another, not quite cheery but not morose either. For him, touring fire wreckage has become a ritual, following a string of major fire events that rocked this part of the state over the past three years. He’s done variations on the tour more times than his office can count—with journalists, residents, and local officials, even with Joe Biden. It’s just one small indicator of how addressing wildfire fallout has become, in his words, the “primary occupation” of his office. “Because there is no fire season, this wildfire work is year-round,” he says. “It is every month, every week, every day.”
Neguse, a lawyer by training who previously oversaw Colorado’s consumer-protection agency, seems like a good fit for this bleak job. He likes to dig into details (he spoke for 16 minutes in response to one of my questions), and in the district I watched him dive into the particulars of federal…
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Source : time
