President Kennedy was trying to make a point about international monetary policy when, in his 1962 State of the Union address, he said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” For Californians living under the threat of climate disaster, it might be time to start taking that advice at face value: Before torrential winter rains fall, seal up the leaks in your roof. And before wildfires threaten your community in summer and fall, prepare your home to withstand the flames.
The University of California has a wealth of expert guidance to help you prepare for this new reality, including how to prepare for wildfires, how to stay safer while they’re happening, and how to recover in the aftermath. And one of the most important first steps is preparing your home for fire season.
Fire safety tips for your yard
By now, most Californians who live in fire-prone areas have heard the gospel of “defensible space.” That’s the term firefighters use to describe a tidied-up yard that’s clear of extra-flammable vegetation like brush, tall grass and low-hanging branches within a hundred feet of a home. Depriving a wildfire of this kind of fuel can slow it down from a raging inferno to a manageable creep, giving you more time to evacuate and firefighters a better chance to save your house.
“Twenty years ago, you didn’t see as much attention paid to vegetation management out here,” says Susie Kocher. She’s a forester with the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension in the central Sierra Nevada. She says a lot has changed since her early days on the job and wildfires are now hotter, bigger and a lot more dangerous. “Towns have burned down and people are scared. They get that we're in an unnatural situation, and we need to take care of excess fuels that have accumulated due to fire suppression,” Kocher says.
The State passed its first defensible space laws in 1965. As the risks have increased, governments have refined and expanded laws mandating defensible space and fire departments have stepped up enforcement. Most importantly, Kocher says, everyday Californians understand that fire safety is a shared responsibility — that as a fire moves through, a given family has a greater shot at their home surviving if their neighbors upwind have done what they can to slow the fire’s advance and “knock it down” from the treetops to the forest floor.
Kocher got upfront experience with this during the Caldor Fire in 2021. Two weeks after it ignited, the fire tore through the forest on the outskirts of Christmas Valley, a few miles from South Lake Tahoe. But as the fire burned toward her neighborhood, it encountered forests that had been thinned in preparation, and yards whose owners had maintained good buffers around their homes. “Afterwards, firefighters said that the community had done so much fuels reduction that the flames went from 150 feet tall down to 15 feet tall,” Kocher says. “They could combat that fire.” Flames got to within a quarter mile of her house before firefighters stopped the advance.
Retrofit your home with fire risk in mind
Maintaining your property is critical, but it’s just the start. A fire that creeps relatively placidly across your well-prepared yard can still burn your house down if it encounters wood siding near the ground, or if an errant cinder lands on your wooden roof.
In 2008 regulators updated the building code to require that new homes built in fire-prone areas hew to Ignition Resilient Building Standards, which include things like screens over vents to prevent embers from getting into your attic and tempered windows that won’t shatter from the heat and let flames inside.
Those new standards will gradually produce more resilient communities as the housing stock turns over, Kocher says. But so far these policies only cover new construction, so they’re not so relevant for neighborhoods like hers, which date to the 1960s — a time when the local building codes mandated wood roofs. “I guess they thought that was more scenically appealing,” Kocher says. “But a wood roof is about the number one thing you shouldn’t have from a fire perspective.”
In recent years, Kocher and her colleagues at UC Cooperative Extension have stepped up their research in this area. Some of those studies take place in a lab where they build houses and then blast them with a flamethrower (nicknamed the Dragon) to see how and whether they ignite.
Two of Kocher’s UC forestery colleagues also studied the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed most of the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people. They found that homes built after 2008, when new building codes came online, weren’t likelier to survive the fire than homes constructed immediately before the new code. But houses built during the last two decades did resist wildfire better than older homes — 11 percent of homes built before 1996 survived, compared with 40 percent built after 1996. Researchers attributed the difference to a few factors: older homes tended to have taller trees close by, tended to stand closer to other homes, and tended to be built using materials and standards that made them likelier to ignite.
UC Cooperative Extension forest advisor Susie Kocher studying an area recovering from forest fire.
Informed by UC research like this, both policies and Californians’ general fire IQ are changing for the better, Kocher notes. In 2019 the State launched a program to help some homeowners in high-risk areas identify and pay for fire-safe retrofits. And a law that takes effect next year that will require a five-foot buffer of fireproof material like gravel or concrete around homes in fire-prone areas.
How to get started with fire-safe upgrades
UC Cooperative Extension has published guidelines for homeowners and developers to improve a property’s fire safety. But some of it is pretty technical stuff, and you can run up a big bill: A new report from UC Cooperative Extension emeritus forester Steve Quarles found that going all-in on fire-safe retrofits can cost $100,000. As a homeowner, it can get overwhelming.
But you don’t have to become an expert in fire ecology or materials science to start taking steps. Simpler changes, like installing flame-resistant vents, installing metal flashing along a deck, keeping gutters clean, or using noncombustible mulch in the yard might cost $2,000 to $15,000, or less if you can take on the labor yourself. And depending where you live, you can make use of state and local resources designed to make fire safety easier. CalFIRE or your local fire department can send experts out that will assess your specific risks and help you prioritize the changes you can make. Throughout rural California, communities offer free debris drop-offs or chipping services, local grants to fund defensible space and more.
Once your local experts have helped you get a sense of where your priorites are, you can start making changes in the course of regular life. If it’s time to rebuild the deck, maybe you replace it with a stone patio instead, Kocher suggests. If you have limited budget to replace your windows, maybe you put double-paned windows on the side that faces your neighbor’s house, so if your neighbor’s home catches on fire, those windows are less likely to shatter and let flames into your home.
“People have normal, busy lives, and probably don’t have funds laying around to make every change CalFIRE would recommend off the bat,” Kocher says. “But you can figure out how to reduce your risk through the routine maintenance you need to do anyway.”
