This year—with the entire state of Colorado in drought and wildfires visible from our offices—the Natural Hazards Center had the dubious pleasure of showcasing some homegrown hazards. And while we’d rather not have such shining examples, it was a great opportunity to raise some important issues—both for here and the rest of the country.

Take drought, for instance. As far as disasters go, drought is a red-headed stepchild. Even though the creeping hazard packs a wallop that can take generations to fully recover from, it gets little attention, even among hazards experts.

“It often takes impacts to get people to take action,” said Chad McNutt of the National Integrated Drought Information System in a panel on state and local drought emergency management. “By the time you have impacts it’s too late.”

No one knows that better than Mike Bewley of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. Bewley has the unenviable job of figuring out what to do with Texas towns that completely run out of water—and not in a theoretical way.

“We have a lot of droughts in Texas, but what we have here is something else,” Bewley said. “This is unprecedented planning about what are we going to do when these cities start running out of water. How do you depopulate a city? It’s there, it’s totally intact, it just doesn’t have any water. If you live in the Western states, it’s coming your way.”

Although Texas has been besieged by years-long drought and resulting wildfires, and some suburbs have indeed run out of water, Bewley is only beginning to see some federal interest in regional drought planning.

That's not surprising, according to Taryn Hutchins-Cabibi of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, who spoke on the same panel.

“You have to look long and hard under FEMA standards to even realize drought is a hazard,” she said. “Managing drought often falls to local and state management.”

In Colorado, the CWCB has done a lot of work to make that easier, creating tools and guidelines for local drought management, overhauling the Colorado drought plan, and trying to start a dialogue with those in impacted sectors like industry and tourism.

Despite all the hard work being done by low profile drought planners, there seems to be one good way to call attention to how dry it's gotten—wildfires. Which brings us back to the one we were watching from our office, the Flagstaff fire in the Boulder Flatirons.

The Flagstaff fire burned perilously close to the National Center for Atmospheric Research Table Mesa Lab, where we have our annual Hazards Workshop barbeque. Since we were there anyway (and nothing livens a party like talking about looming hazards) we brought in Kevin Stewart of the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District, Bob Glancy of the National Weather Service, and Mike Chard of Boulder Emergency Management to explain the contours of a singular partnership born of necessity.

The three have been able to work together, using a vast system of UDFCD rain gauges, to detect and warn residents during two seasons of extreme and persistent flash flood danger—yet another Colorado hazard exacerbated by burn areas where there’s no longer vegetation to soak up rapid rainfall.

While the tour and its visual reminder of Colorado’s beautiful but dangerous environment was great success, it was somehow fitting that Glancy insisted that the session be finished up inside—thanks to the threat of the state’s number one natural hazard—lightning.