1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse.
2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses.
A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.
One of the immediate takeaways was to change roofing materials to resist embers, but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious.
The problem is probabilities. Fires are common, constant. They are exceedingly rare in any one location though. So fire resistant design is no one's urgent problem, fires are always something that seems like it will happen to somebody else.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/
1. Our entire approach to fighting forest fires may just be making them worse.
2. Smart and simple design decisions can save houses.
A house can be thirty feet from an entire forest on fire and never burn down.
We learned this through hardcore experiments in Canada where they built homes to test and lit forests on fire nearby.
One of the immediate takeaways was to change roofing materials to resist embers, but there are other options for materials and landscaping that could make homes basically impervious.
The problem is probabilities. Fires are common, constant. They are exceedingly rare in any one location though. So fire resistant design is no one's urgent problem, fires are always something that seems like it will happen to somebody else.