Fire Protection Measures Saved House in Pacific Palisades, CA,

In the charred Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, one home emerged unscathed from last week’s destructive fire and went viral for what appeared to be a miracle.

Luck certainly played a role, said the home’s architect. But a range of construction choices and preparation measures were key in shielding the property from the blaze that decimated thousands of neighboring structures.

These measures are hardly a mystery. California law requires homeowners to adopt many of the same fire-protective measures at home, but compliance remains inconsistent and enforcement is often lax.

Some communities with firsthand experience of fire destruction, like Paradise, have led the way in building fire-resilient neighborhoods. The recent destruction wrought by Southern California fires could motivate more homeowners to take the same action.

“We need to rethink how we approach preparation,” said Greg Chasen, the architect and builder of the home. “I don’t know how we’re going to make these areas safe without creating far more robust solutions.”

Chasen, who runs a Santa Monica architectural firm, completed the home’s construction last year. A Pacific Palisades native, he began his career rebuilding homes after Malibu fires in the 1990s, which shaped his instinctive focus on fire-resistant design.

Unlike older homes in the area with large vents, this one was sealed tightly to prevent embers, with stucco walls and a fire-resistant roof. Multi-pane windows helped block smoke and flames from entering.

These measures alone would likely have not have been enough, Chasen said. The home’s owner, who requested anonymity, cleared nearby vegetation well ahead of time and removed anything flammable from the home’s perimeter just hours before the fire struck.

“You can’t have material around the house that’s going to allow spot fires to accelerate, like a big tree that’s going to catch fire. Then you need a second line of defense with a hardened building,” he said. “In this case, both those things together were effective.”

Defensible space and home hardening

When California firefighters and experts discuss developing neighborhoods more fire-resistant and reducing damage during the worst fires, they often focus on two key strategies: defensible space and home hardening.

Defensible space generally refers to clearing flammable vegetation, debris and other materials within 100 feet of a home to create a buffer that slows or halts the spread of fire.

Home hardening, on the other hand, involves retrofitting and constructing buildings with fire-resistant materials, such as ember-resistant vents, fireproof roofs and tempered glass windows.

California’s public resources code was updated in 2020 to mandate that homeowners in wildfire-prone areas maintain 100 feet of defensible space around their properties, requiring them to clear vegetation and debris particularly within 5 feet of the structure.

Additionally, a chapter of the California building standards code requires homes in high fire-risk areas to use fire-resistant construction materials and take other home hardening measures.

For homes in wildfire hazard zones, Cal Fire offers inspections on request. The agency also has a low-cost retrofit list for homeowners interested in home hardening.

These requirements are more directly enforced during new home construction, but enforcement has been close to impossible for the state’s millions of existing at-risk homes that aren’t undergoing major construction or renovation.

With little statewide data available, it’s difficult to assess the compliance and impact of these laws. But in recent years, Cal Fire and local fire agencies have stepped up education and enforcement.

The agency has a goal of hitting 250,000 home inspections per year throughout the state for compliance with the defensible space law, said Jeff Hogue, wildfire resiliency program chief in El Dorado County.

He has been inspecting damage for Cal Fire in the Pacific Palisades this week, and noticed that surviving homes had attributes like cleared vegetation or flammable objects and used fire-resistant building materials.

“The research shows that if you have nothing combustible around your home and ember-resistant construction, the probability of your structure igniting is greatly reduced,” he said. “The homes that survived keep embers out and limit fire penetrations.”

Rather than harsh enforcement of the state’s defensible space laws, he wants to see stronger education campaigns. He argued that fines should be issued for repeated non-compliance because otherwise homeowners endanger their neighbors.

“From a neighborhood level, these measures can be extremely effective against giant conflagrations like we had last Tuesday,” he said. “But it’s going to take a big cultural shift for folks to really understand what needs to be done.”

Setting the tone in Paradise

For many Californians, the destruction of entire neighborhoods by wildfires evokes memories of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.

It’s no surprise, then, that Paradise and other wildfire-experienced communities are leading by example to create community-level defensible space and home hardening initiatives, making these practices more routine than in most high-risk areas.

Tom Meyer, program manager at the El Dorado County Office of Wildfire Preparedness and Resilience, said his office was created after the 2021 Caldor Fire, which burned more than 200,000 acres, to centralize fire resilience efforts.

The office coordinates vegetation clearing, forest thinning and removing understory brush across the county. It also applies for grants, prioritizes defensible space inspections, and has helped secure insurance discounts for homeowners.

“Not everybody can afford to remodel their home,” Meyer said, noting that he often spends an hour with homeowners during inspections. “It’s evaluating each home individually and making recommendations on what they can do to make it safer and better suited to withstand the fire.”

In Paradise, many residents are going further, obtaining “Wildfire Prepared Home” certificates to improve fire insurance outcomes, said Jen Goodlin, executive director of the Rebuild Paradise Foundation.

During a recent visit, she said, the president of Mercury Insurance was so impressed by local efforts to prevent future fires that the company began issuing new home insurance policies in the area.

Goodlin’s foundation also provides grants to help homeowners create zero-to-five-foot gravel buffer zones around their homes.

“We hope to be an example,” Goodlin said. “A few days before the LA fires, I posted a quote onto our Instagram story saying, ‘One day, you’ll tell a story of how you overcame and it will be someone’s survival guide.’ That’s exactly us.”