As the flowers start blooming and days get warmer, it means fire danger increases. Living alongside the wilderness in a region where fire is part of the landscape, spring is an important time for residents to get prepared for wildfire.
Each spring, re-evaluating defensible space and home hardening techniques is part of life in the basin. While it’s important to focus on the vegetation around the home, it’s also key to reduce the risk from the infrastructure as both play important roles in protecting property.
Several fire scientists and agencies from both California and Nevada collaborated to produce a step-by-step 20-page guide for homeowners to retrofit their homes to be more suited, resilient and less vulnerable to ignition from wildfire. It’s called the Wildfire Home Retrofit Guide which was funded primarily by Cal Fire.
Tahoe Network of Fire Adapted Communities
As spring and summer approach, so does the threat of wildfire. You can get ahead of the curve by planning projects that harden your home against embers and increase the chance of it surviving during a wildfire.
Home hardening is the process of preparing your home for wildfire embers by addressing its most vulnerable components and retrofitting them with fire-resistant building materials.
How you prioritize home hardening projects may depend on your time and personal budget. Even if you can t do everything, anything you do to harden your home can increase its odds.
Annual Maintenance
The Tahoe Network of Fire Adapted Communities, along with many other amazing authors and contributors, helped produce the Wildfire Home Retrofit Guide: How to Harden Homes for Wildfire.
The guide includes detailed recommendations on how to retrofit homes to withstand wildfire. Each section contains an explanation of how every home component is vulnerable to wildfire and what can be done to improve that component. It can be downloaded for free HERE.
In conjunction with the release of the guide are three virtual Wildfire Home Retrofit workshops to educate the public, building professionals, and fire professionals and educators about retrofitting homes to withstand wildfire.