Up to 48 million homes are estimated to be located in areas at high risk of wildfires. Michele Steinberg of the National Fire Protection Association shares ways you can reduce fire risks at your home.
01:07Those are the areas during a wildfire where embers could blow in.
01:11Those embers, those little burning pieces of material coming off the main part of the fire,
01:16those are the real culprits to our home ignition and then destruction.
01:19So even just those cleanups right around the edges of your home will make a big difference, and that's where we tell people to start.
01:28Can you explain what the home ignition zone is and why it can be crucial during a wildfire?
01:33Right. So the home ignition zone is a concept developed by researchers who looked at what is happening when we have these wildfires that impact communities and homes.
01:46And what they discovered was the home itself and everything around it, just about 200 feet, is the critical area where we can make changes to our homes and immediate surroundings that actually prevent the ignition from happening.
02:01And if we prevent the ignition, we prevent the home from burning and then burning other homes.
02:06So we're breaking that chain of disaster that we see in these fires.
02:10The home ignition zone is that place, the home and everything around it, just out to 100 feet where we need to work.
02:17And for a lot of people, they don't have 100 feet of their own property.
02:20That's going into neighboring property.
02:22So again, this idea of preparing our homes and working with neighboring property owners is a really good idea.
02:29Yeah, that's really great advice.
02:31All right. During the Los Angeles wildfires in January, we saw some homes that did survive.
02:36What made the difference in many of those cases?
02:39Right. So I had the privilege to be with firefighters a few weeks after the fire had started to view the damage and the surviving homes in the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire in those two communities.
02:51And really what we saw for those surviving homes, and we were able to talk to firefighters about how these homeowners had prepared their homes.
02:59They had made sure they had a good solid roof that was in good repair, maybe had changed out windows.
03:06They had screened things like attic vents to prevent ember entry.
03:10That is another way that homes unfortunately burn.
03:12And they'd moved any material that could burn at least five feet out from the home.
03:17So they'd done a little bit of re-landscaping and other features.
03:21And it is just amazing to walk into what you see all around you is devastation.
03:26And to see these homes standing is just amazing.
03:29But we would love for that to be much more common, to have the common issue to be the home survive as opposed to all these homes that have been destroyed.
03:39Michelle Steinberg, director of the Wildfire Division at the NFPA.
03:44Thank you for joining us here on AccuWeather Early.
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