I’ll repeat what I said above-- light steel framing with rock-wool insulation. Sheeting is concrete tile-backer board with either stucco, metal or Hardiboard siding. Steel, clay or membrane roof over a couple layers of drywall on top of the sheathing. No soffit vents, buy a condensing dryer, so no dryer vent. Tempered windows with metal frames. All of this would add 10-20% to the cost. Xeriscaping and non-flammable fence materials. Not that hard.
Right, The damage here was NOT caused by poor home construction. Just by high winds, and it looks like maybe one arsonist.
My roof is concrete. Tile is very fire resistant, but problematic in an earthquake and expensive.
You don’t want xeriscaping. It’s very flammable. Green watered lawns or nothing. You want your landscaping flat, and nothing at all next to the house. No eaves. I lived in extreme fire country, and nobody wanted to live like that, they wanted to live in a (fire ecology) forest in wooden houses. We had a neighbor who had formed an association of homeownerrs who worked with Calfire on creating a defensible zone around rural homes, and promoted the same. She said it was really uphill work.
Xeriscaping can be many things–low water succulents, for one. If you have the water an irrigated lawn is a great firebreak, but tough in LA in a drought. You can have eaves if they’re designed and built correctly and there are NO soffit vents. GWB and cement board are your friends.
This is a real problem in burn areas, too. Although asbestos is not used in new construction there is plenty of heritage construction with extensive use of asbestos insulation, which is perfectly safe if sealed over but becomes friable and hazardous when demolishing burned out homes. Many homebuilding materials and components in cars, furniture, et cetera will also release toxic and carcinogenic compounds when vigorously combusted. Unless everything is made fire-resistant and people are scrupulous about their landscaping and outdoor furniture, and evacuating all vehicles during a wildfire event, the potential that you are going to have a standing house in the middle of a major environmental cleanup zone is a genuine concern.
The problem with xeriscaping (drought-tolerant landscaping) is that many drought tolerant plants contain a lot of burnable oils. Succulents, however, are more resistant and even when they do burn they don’t produce a lot of free-floating embers because they don’t have fine leaves. So, you have to be judicious about landscaping. Pretty much any tree—and especially eucalyptus or any fir—will burn so they have to be kept well-back from structures and trimmed or removed regularly to eliminate dying limbs.
It is possible to have soffits and vents and still be fire resistant but they have to be well-screened; in Southern California the damp isn’t such an issue but you do need to have some kind of ventilation even with a condensing dryer because it just takes one pocket of dead air to start frame rot. Eaves are kind of necessary for most home construction because while SoCal is dry, we do occasionally get deluges, so either you have eaves or a very extensive drainage system all the way around the foundation, but yes, massive overhangs with non-fire-resistant soffits (or no soffits as all, as seen in a lot of Craftman-style houses) is a negative because fire just curls up under that like a cat in its favorite corner and gets hotter until it burns whatever materials you put there.
And yes, maintaining a defensible zone next to wildlands is a lot of never-ending labor and policing; during the spring season it is near constant trimming and removing fire-prone species, and convincing people not to plant their beautiful perennials which are going to become a fire hazard in the fall and winter after vigorously growing through spring and summer, or ‘green’ bushes that turn into flaming torches in wildfire conditions.
Stranger
Well, to put a clearer point on it, the guaranty fund (which is funded by assessments on insurers writing business in the state) footed the bill. The ability of insurers to pass that on to their customers as an assessment varies by state, but typically some of it is a reduction in profits, and some of it is a surcharge passed directly to consumers as a charge on policies.
Ideally your unvented house would have a steel truss roof and spray foam. You will need an air handler for fresh air and to handle humidity issues. Those vents could have fire shutters ($500 each-ish) if you’re taking this seriously. Eaves would be light steel framing clad in cement board or steel.
Vulcan vents, for example. Purportedly one of the more cost-effective bits of fire-hardening retrofitting you can do for pre-existing homes.
Cool–I hadn’t seen those, only the spring loaded shutters with a fusible link. Intumescent coatings have come a long way in the last 20 years. I’d still prefer to do away with as many vents as possible–you’ll have to replace those after a fire which could be a real PITA for soffit vents.
In the case of a wildfire, making your house ember proof only works if all of your immediate neighbors have done likewise.
Not necessarily. You’re thinking about fires burning from the outside in. But as noted wind-blown embers can go a very long distances and enter a vent, then land on a rug, a piece of paper or whatever happens to be flammable. Then your house burns from the inside out, potentially even leaving your neighbor’s homes still standing.
This is a pretty common way for homes to burn down after an evacuation has cleared a neighborhood. The firefighters battling visible flames outside may never even notice until your house is already gutted.
I saw a post from someone describing the problem - the winds were reaching 100mph. He said with burning houses, the flames would go straight sideways in the wind, so the house downwind across the street is basically baking in flames. I would Imagine metal shutters would be required, otherwise those flames would break the windows from the heat and burning embers would reach the interior furniture etc. Plus, unless the window frames are burn-proof (steel?) then that’a a good starter too. You basically have to make the house blow-torch proof unless all the neighbours are the same. They showed on person on TV hosing his house down, but he had a 40-foot tree right beside the house. Good luck.
Also showed a video of some palm trees catching fire in the blowing embers- the fluff of old leaf stalks below the palm leaves, above the neatly cleaned trunk, was catching the embers - they were the first thing to start burning.
Other posts mentioned State Farm cancelling tens of thousands of policies in the last year - they got their premiums during the wet years, then when a drought made things risky, cancel everything. Some allege this was due to state government regulations.
(I recall in Tanzania, most high-end house roofs are metal trusses and sheet metal - a safe cheap and maintenance-free replacement for thatch, where decent timber is scarcer and liable to become insect food. Of course, houses there are much smaller, but the roof is essentially one big welded construction, and fairly light (relatively) so also less a risk in earthquakes. )
Also, lumber for rebuilding is about to get much more expensive just in time, when Canadian lumber is slapped with 25% tariffs.
How is rebuilding going in Hawaii, a more recent example of this sort of devastation?
One concern is that destitute, depserate, uninsured, or simply giving up, residents may sell their land to large corporations and rich accumulators, who will put up big developments or larger lot mansions, profiting on the backs of those who cannot afford to wait out the insurance/government merry-go-round.
Someone should write a cautionary tale about building a house out of straw or sticks instead of bricks.
Amusing, but straw bale houses are actually quite fire-resistant.
One of my sons worked for a while for an organization, Grizzlycorps, that specifically tried to encourage less fire promoting landscaping in CA. There are some very basic best practices that can have substantial impact. And too few implement them.
Not sure how much difference those practices would make with these sorts of winds and dry conditions.
I have some experience with building in a fire risk zone. As noted above Australia sees some similar fires as the US. Arguably we have seen some more intense ones. Things can get beyond imagination bad when one really takes hold.
The fire tornado of 2003 is one of the more insane. The text accompanying the video here makes for interesting reading as well:
Building for fire resistance isn’t too hard. At least in mild to high risk areas. But fire proof in the face of a major fire is essentially impossible. Hot enough and everything fails.
A friend of mine and his wife built a new house on the land where the 1983 “Ash Wednesday” fires in Adelaide had destroyed the previous house. (The fire actually occurred on Ash Wednesday. It was really awful. We just listened to the news as the day progressed hearing what had been lost. And later, who had been lost.) I remember poking around in the debris on the block before they built and finding a Pyrex oven cooking pot. It had melted.
Risk is assessed on a house by house basis and includes proximity to trees, other buildings and slope of the land.
The most important risk is embers blowing forward from the fire. Building codes require specific materials for roof materials, external cladding and for exclusion of embers. Simple things like requiring bronze or stainless steel insect screens on all windows. No external fittings made of plastic etc. No wood framed windows.
A lot of houses install a water tank and have a fire pump, possibly with a fixed fire suppression system fitted to the outside of the building. Essentially sprinklers envelope the house in water to suppress embers and anything that might catch fire. They can work pretty well. But are expensive to install. 22,000 lites is the recommended minimum size tank. My neighbours have already installed sprinklers, and I am planning to. I have a 55000 litre tank.
An old colleague of mine had a setup with remote sprinkler activation and a set of cameras watching the outside. He actually saved his house some years ago with this.
The design rules get more stringent as the assessed risk increases. Houses in areas listed as extreme risk require things like wired glass in windows. This is because another real problem becomes flying burning debris driven by the fire induced winds smashing into buildings. The rules basically say that building in extreme risk zones is highly discouraged.
Eventually there is nothing you can do. The radiant heat from a fire front can become so intense that everything burns. A wildfire front extending upwards into the trees becomes a large extended source. If you are in the near field of such a source there is no such thing as inverse square falloff of intensity. Fires set fire to the interior of houses by direct radiation through the windows. The first thing to start burning is the interior wall opposite the window. Similarly fires in forests propagate by direct radiation. At this point there nothing that can be done. You pray that it never gets this bad.
This is the point I wanted to make. Additional fire resistance isn’t that hard, and a lot of it is already standard practice in California. If you wanted to go full fireproof, you’d build out of poured concrete, with concrete block interior walls, and some sprinklers. Commercial construction and parking garages in earthquake-prone areas already do that, it’s not hard. Nevertheless, even if you have fire shutters over the windows, at some point a wildfire can get so hot that it simply auto-ignites the contents of the home. That’s your furniture, flooring, doors, cabinets, clothing, toys, books, rugs, appliances, electronics, and the vehicles in your garage. So even if the house doesn’t burn down, it can still burn (up?).
So the answer to the OP isn’t one size fits all, it’s more nuanced and dependent on the level of risk, price, design flexibility, and numerous other factors. Maybe such a home combined with other homes in the neighborhood of similar construction and proper landscaping would create enough of a low-flammability zone that the fire wouldn’t get that hot, or it would blow through quickly enough that the interior temperature can’t rise too high, but that’s a big ask.
Fire security, then is like thief-proof security or anything similar. Nothing is burglar-proof is the burglar is determined enough and has good equipment, but each layer of prevention helps deter the less determined. Similarly, each level of fire protection helps depending on how ugly and minimalist you want to make your house, but if it is immersed in Farenheit 451 for extended periods, then all bets are off.
Presumed cause of the Los Angeles fires
[O]ne theory that is gaining ground is that overhead power transmission and distribution cables, shaken or blown down by strong winds, may have produced sparks that ignited the dry vegetation below.
There, you see? An act of God. Insurance companies can’t be held responsible for events that are out of their control.
Please. Insurers aren’t going to bail on paying, for starters regulators have a lot of power in California and they’ll be all over those companies. They paid out in 2017 and 2018, and even paid out past the provisions in their contracts because of the intensity of the damage.
And that’s not even what that article implies - it implies that PG&E (if that’s the electric company) is going to get sued again, and possibly declare bankruptcy again.
What’s going to happen is that
- a bunch of people are going to be under-insured, particularly if they purchased through the state (which has a $3 million coverage limit).
- it’s not even just their homes, a lot of people don’t buy physical damage coverage on their cars, and they’ll get nothing if those burned up
- a bunch of people aren’t insured at all, and will be hoping for some relief from FEMA
- some small companies might go under, and those losses will be covered by the guaranty fund
- however unaffordable you thought insurance was in California before, it’s will get catastrophically worse. Not only were companies trying to pull out already, but they’ll keep trying, plus reinsurers (the companies that backstop your insurance company) are going to massively increase rates (again).
This makes Florida and Outer Bank hurricane/flood coverage look easy.