The Los Angeles fires that have damaged more than 12,000 structures are a reminder of a new but growing reality for Americans living in hotter, drier and more fire-prone areas – the need to create defensible space and fire-harden their homes.
This doesn’t mean cutting down every tree and surrounding a home with a desert of pea gravel, wildfire safety and insurance experts are careful to say. Instead it’s implementing the tenets of this new-to-many concept to give homeowners in fire-prone areas a fighting chance when firestorms swoop down on their neighborhoods.
“You can maintain the essence of your esthetic and still create a defense,” said Roy Wright, President and CEO of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.
He cautioned that none of this is meant to blame victims of these horrific fires. Why some houses burn and others survive isn’t always obvious and can seem capricious and haphazard, despite preparation and mitigation.
“I’m not here to tell that defensible space would have changed the Pacific Palisade fire,” he said. “When you’re dealing with sustained winds of 50 to 70 miles an hour on a downward slope. you have all the ingredients of conflagration.”
The Los Angeles fire can be compared to a Category 4 hurricane, which often means even the best preparation might not save a home. “But we have a lot more ‘Category 1 fires'” and those are survivable with preparation, he said.
What are defensible spaces?
The concept of defensible space was invented in California to describe an area where firefighters could safely defend a home from a fire in a wildland, said Jessamyn Hise, community outreach manager with Fire Safe Marin, a non-profit in Marin County in Northern California.
That’s now morphed into the tools and techniques that allow a home to defend itself.
It’s also no longer a California-only concept. Today it applies to much of the country, said Wright. Oregon, New Mexico and Colorado have all either passed laws or set aside money to help homeowners fire harden their lots. Wildfires in Hawaii, New York and Tennessee have shown it’s not only a Western phenomenon.
At baseline, the concept boils down to a few elements, all meant to keep flying embers from igniting something that could lead to a house burning down.
Most important is removing everything flammable from within five feet of the house and each outbuilding and insuring that embers can’t make their way inside through roof and crawlspace vents.
There’s good data that it works. During the 2022 Oak fire in Mariposa County, California, homes that were compliant with defensible space standards were six times more likely to survive, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force.
“When they rebuild Pacific Palisades, they can rebuild it in a way that the community will look beautiful, maintain its existing charm and absolutely be resistant to the next wildfire,” said Todd Lando, a Battalion Chief wildfire specialist with Central Marin Fire Department in Marin County, California.