Fire-hardened house offers lessons on rebuilding Los Angeles

AFP English

The house that Michael Kovac built is the only one on his street still standing after a huge fire raced through his Los Angeles neighborhood. Now, this architect says the city needs to learn from homes like his as it begins to rebuild. The walls are covered with non-flammable cement fiber siding, the windows are insulated to have the highest degree of protection against heat, the vents are covered in metal mesh, and the fireproof roof is topped with soil and vegetation.

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00:00I mean, we can believe it and that our house was designed for this horrible day that we

00:11knew was coming.

00:13But we can't believe it.

00:14We're walking through and these are all friends' homes.

00:16I mean, it's a big mess.

00:31I can imagine the solar panels are, they're probably going to need to be, you know, that's

00:36earth about that deep, so that's the best.

00:50Anything with wood on the outside of a house is, from a fire perspective, is just horrible.

00:56One of the other things here is you can see that the window frames are aluminum, so they're

01:02not wood frames.

01:03And that's another thing.

01:04You know, if they were wood and an ember landed on that frame, that's the end of the

01:09house just right there.

01:11That was their garage and it just burned and flopped over.

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