The easiest way to save your client’s home from wildfire

Wildfire is inevitable and fire suppression has limits, but there are easy steps your clients can take to help their homes survive a blaze, speakers said Wednesday at the CatIQ Connect conference in downtown Toronto.

Essentially, when the space closest to the home is kept ignition-resistant, there are no opportunities for embers to become flames. Conversely, unprepared homes — such as those with nearby wood mulch or combustible plants near walls — can burn to the ground.

“The moat matters,” says Ralph Bloemers, director of Fire Safe Communities at Green Oregon. “Not the ocean, not the sea of vegetation, not focusing on the wildfire that we can’t control, but the thing that we can control.

“And it works…We need to tell more stories about those homes that survived.”

How to help clients mitigate wildfire damage Image

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How to help clients mitigate wildfire damage

Clients looking to protect structures from wildfire damage should pay attention to embers, the farthest-reaching mode of wildfire attack.

3 min read

Simple steps can keep a home safe during a wildfire. “I like to call them wildfire gardening,” not home hardening, Bloemers says. “Because if you say it’s home hardening, then it’s expensive. It’s a contractor, it’s not a weekend project.”

One of the easiest ways to protect a home is by maintaining a five-foot non-combustible zone around the home by removing vegetation, debris and other flammable material. Vents with ember-resistant mesh can also prevent embers from entering homes during wildfires.

“If you have a fuel break that can interrupt the ground component of the fire…[and the fire] doesn’t find something that it can convert into flame next to your house, your house will survive,” Bloemers says.

These protection measures are well-known, adds Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR). The U.S. Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety has investigated more than 30,000 homes, while ICLR has looked at a few thousand of their own.

“There’s been probably 20 years of this research,” McGillivray says. “It’s nothing new. We know exactly why houses ignite and how to prevent it.”

Trees not the threat

And for the most part, trees and crown fire — intense, fast-moving wildfires that spread through the top layer of trees — are not what burns communities, Bloemers says.

“I’ll say it again: trees are not the threat,” he says. “Now, if you have a juniper or a cypress, those are green gas cans and you need to get them out.”

In fact, in last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles, Calif., “the trees that got burned and killed were mostly getting burned and killed because a home burned right next to [them], not the other way around,” Bloemers says. “There is really almost zero examples of a crown fire burning in the community, yet that’s what we see on the news.”

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In the recent Jasper wildfire, tanker pilots were dropping their loads just ahead of the firefront to try to limit the spread of the fire, but the loads returned back into the fire, McGillivray reports. “Tankers do not put out wildfires. You can get 1,000 times more tankers than we have in Canada, and you’re going to be in the same place.”

Fire is often talked about in terms of hectares burned, but it’s really the speed that matters, Bloemers says. “We want to be able to stop it, we want to be able to control it. But in those conditions, what are firefighters mostly doing? Making sure people don’t die…

“So, yes, suppression can stop a bunch of non-fast-moving fires, but it doesn’t stop [others] because they move so fast.”

Consider that during Canada’s costliest disaster — the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire — there were about 2,000 firefighters at the fire’s peak for 27,000 homes, or less than one firefighter for 13 homes, Bloemers says. “If you got a structure involved, you need 15.”

Jason Contant

Jason has been an award-winning journalist with Canadian Underwriter for more than a decade, including the past three years as associate editor and, before that, as digital editor for seven years.