Rebuilding LA: Here's What Fire Survivors and Experts Say Is Key

Annie Barbour knows what it feels like to lose everything she worked for in an instant.

The home she bought in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood in 1989 was almost paid off. She had just started to make renovations to prepare it for her son and his wife to live there someday. Then it burned — along with more than 5,600 other structures in the 2017 Tubbs Fire.

When she returned to the spot where her home once stood, all she could see was rubble.

“This whole place looked like a bomb had gone off,” she said. “You could see all the way through Coffey Park. No houses all the way to the railroad tracks. It was decimated.”

Now, there’s a one-story, taupe house with white eaves and a neatly trimmed front yard. Many of her neighbors’ homes have been rebuilt, as well. To the untrained eye, it might look like any other suburban neighborhood in the state, but most of the homes now have features designed to withstand wildfires to come.

Barbour and her neighbors’ experiences with rebuilding offer lessons — backed by the latest research from architects and experts — for Southern Californians displaced by January’s wildfires, who are now just beginning to think about whether to rebuild.

Barbour said she never considered not rebuilding her home.

“We were all in shock,” she said. “And it took us a bit to just get our feet on the ground. But I really felt propelled by my anxiety to move forward.”

Not every fire survivor can rebuild. A year after Barbour lost her home in Santa Rosa, the Camp Fire destroyed more than 18,000 structures in Paradise. Remaining residents have slowly built back some of those homes, about 600 a year, but the city is significantly less populated than it was before the fire.

Since then, the cost to rebuild has only increased and most insurance companies have limited, or altogether stopped, offering policies in certain areas with high fire-risks.

“People are looking at $10,000 to $20,000 a year for fire insurance, which doesn’t work for middle class Californians or those on a fixed income,” said Dr. Crystal Kolden with UC Merced’s Department of Engineering.

But for those who can and want to rebuild, fire experts say understanding how wildfires move and grow can help homeowners protect their house against the next one. That means reducing the fuels that feed fires, said Ian Giammanco, a researcher at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety.

“If you think about a hurricane or tornado, they’re not getting more intense because they’ve destroyed a bunch of buildings, but a wildfire absolutely is when it turns into one of these conflagration events,” he said.

The solution? Starve the fire of fuels by hardening homes, redesigning yards with fires in mind, and implementing neighborhood-scaled mitigation measures.

Rebuilding a home with fire-resistant materials

When homeowners consider hardening their homes against earthquakes or hurricanes, they have to consider its structural integrity. With wildfires, it’s all about the outside of the house.

Starting from the top, Giammanco said an up-to-date roof can make a world of difference for a home’s chances of surviving a fire. A “Class A” roof, which can be made of asphalt and fiberglass, concrete, clay or other materials, is the most fire resistant and is often required by California’s building code for new construction in fire-sensitive areas. Some homeowners may choose a metal roof, which can be more expensive than an asphalt one, but is slightly more durable than asphalt.

Below the roof, vents and eaves on the outside of the home can sometimes carry embers or hold debris, which can ignite inside or along a home. Cal Fire recommends installing vents with metal mesh screens, which block the embers before they enter a home and will not immediately melt in the heat, along with closing eaves with similar, nonflammable materials.

Moving down, the walls of a home can also be built using stucco, concrete fiber board siding, or insulated concrete form, all of which are both less combustible and more energy efficient. These building materials are used to construct some homes today, but Giammanco said they would need to be adopted more broadly, especially in fire-prone areas, in order to achieve the scale needed to see them as the default option in homes across the state.

“Most of these materials are readily available today,” he said. “We are not asking for something new to be invented. We can take building materials we already know about that we already use and simply apply them in this way.”

Lastly, Giammanco said it’s important to make sure the bottom of the house is not sitting on flammable material. The most critical part of the wall is the six inches between the ground and the home, which should be noncombustible, he said. Barbour’s home was rebuilt on a thick concrete slab, which holds the house slightly above the ground.

Architect Brandon Jørgensen had recently finished a home in Napa, when the 2017 Atlas Fire started. The blaze, which broke out the same night as Santa Rosa’s Tubbs Fire, destroyed 783 structures and killed six people.

The home was built with a Class A roof, without gutters or vents where embers could collect and had walls made of stone and cedar. Each external wall had several inches of concrete and earthen berms — compacted dirt or gravel — at its base to protect them from embers that could collect there during a fire.

“The house took on a large amount of embers and those embers collected in the dead spaces at the base of the walls,” he said. “And the house was undamaged.”

Landscaping makes a difference 

The next line of defense against a wildfire is the area immediately surrounding a home, what researchers call “Zone Zero.” This area should have nothing combustible within it. Imagine concrete sidewalks, beds of stone pebbles or gravel around the home instead of shrubs, wood mulch and wooden fences.

“Five feet around our homes — it’s the last place where things connect fire physically to our homes,” Giammanco said. “If we can make that noncombustible, we help break that chain.”

California’s Mediterranean climate means some of the state’s vegetation is flammable and is adapted to fire, according to Kolden.

Two of the most common — and also most flammable — plants Kolden sees in Californians’ yards are Italian cypress trees and juniper shrubs. Italian cypress trees can burn down quickly and spread embers through the air, igniting whatever it lands on.

Juniper trees, when set on fire, can become a “Roman candle” and shower flames around it. As homeowners in Southern California rebuild, Kolden, a former firefighter, hopes they will rethink planting these trees near their homes and instead choose plants that are still aesthetically pleasing, but less flammable, like succulents or flower annuals.

Before the Tubbs Fire, a wooden fence encircled Barbour’s home and acted as a wick, spreading the fire from house to house. Since then, Barbour has rebuilt much of that fence, but the last five feet — the part that touches her home — was replaced with a metal gate, which can stop the flame from reaching her home.

Her neighbors still have wooden fences that touch their homes, but after seeing Barbour’s gate, some have asked her for quotes on how much it might cost to make that change.

“My home is paid off, I don’t need to lose it again, so I’ll do whatever I can do,” she said. “It would be really ridiculous for me to not set an example.”

But a house is still a home, and there are certain changes Barbour knows she needs to make to ensure hers is wildfire-resistant. Though, it doesn’t mean those changes are any less painful to enact.

Today, a Japanese maple tree sits in her backyard, a gift a friend gave her after she rebuilt her home. Its branches and brightly colored leaves touch her home’s back wall, closest to the primary bedroom. She knows she will have to cut it down eventually, but she said it will hurt. She recently cut down a blooming wisteria vine on her boyfriend’s property to make it more fire-safe.

“It was beautiful, and he was like ‘I’ve trained that for years, it’s one of my happiest features when I come around in the garage, and it is draped around the porch,’” she said. “We finally came to a meeting of minds, and he stayed inside while I hacked it down. It was very hard for him.”

Building back your community

Many homes in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu that were destroyed in the fires were in an area fire experts call the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI. According to Cal Fire, one of the most effective ways to mitigate wildfires is to create a large “defensible space” of clean, noncombustible materials 100 feet around a home.

The homes rebuilt there should not only use wildfire-focused building codes to ensure it can meaningfully resist fire, Giammanco said, but should be spaced farther apart from each other, especially if they are within 10 feet of their neighbor’s house.

“The key is to make sure the outer ring of structures that butt up against where the wildfire is going to enter that community have as much protection as we can give them,” he said. “It allows us to use almost a perimeter defense working our way inward where we could allow dense construction because we’ve got really good provisions and protections.”

In Coffey Park, a cement wall runs along the back of Barbour’s property and the other homes along her street, which is parallel to a busy thoroughfare. This type of wall is commonplace in suburbs across the country. California has spent more than any other state — over $1 billion since 1963 — to construct these walls, which block sound pollution from highways and busy roads.

Before the fire, Coffey Park’s wall had a wooden beam running along the top of it, which spread the flames across the neighborhood.

But these walls, if constructed with fire resistant materials, can also act as a barrier against oncoming flames. Coffey Park’s wall was rebuilt with styrofoam supported by rebar and cement, encased in a metal cage and concrete. Those materials, assembled by the building company RSG-3, make the wall more fire resistant.

As California, and the rest of the world, grapples with the increasingly damaging impacts of climate change, Kolden said the state cannot afford to design its cities the same way it has for decades.

“These are places that were predominantly built during an era of really different approaches to building communities — more suburban tracts of cookie-cutter housing was the norm,” she said. “What Altadena and Pacific Palisades have right now is an opportunity to say, ‘Alright, we have a blank slate with a lot of stakeholders, and every parcel owner is a stakeholder in the future.’”