Southern California is at an inflection point. Rebuilding efforts are ongoing in the wake of last winter’s Eaton and Palisades fires, which claimed 30 lives and destroyed more than 16,000 buildings. In a relatively speedy effort, debris removal on affected building sites—led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—began just 35 days after the fires first ignited. In early March, less than two months after the fires started, the city of Los Angeles issued the first permits to rebuild or repair homes in Pacific Palisades. While those permits were issued on accelerated timetables compared to how California typically handles such matters, the numbers thus far are modest. This only reinforces Governor Newsom’s plea, via executive order last January, to “identify additional ways to streamline the rebuilding and recovery process.”

Building for wildfire resiliency

One viable option could lie with the Wildfire Prepared Home standard, created by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS). Back in 2022, the year the standard was introduced, the town of Paradise, Calif., where the Camp Fire had displaced more than 50,000 people a few years prior, announced that all new homes would be built as Wildfire Prepared Homes. Since the standard’s launch, more than 7,200 applications have been submitted and over 1,200 homes have received the designation.

Late last year, home builder KB Home broke ground on a subdevelopment called Dixon Trail, a 64-home community in Escondido, a suburb of San Diego, that will be the first designated Wildfire Prepared Home Neighborhood. Of the homes built thus far, a handful are already occupied. Every Dixon Train home will be built to IBHS’s upgraded Wildfire Prepared Home Plus standard.

“As we look at the growing wildfire threat, there will be ignitions and there will be spread,” says IBHS CEO Roy Wright. “We want to limit the pathway. We want to ensure that when it comes down from the foothills, we’re not likely to see the first structures ignite … What we’re seeing with Dixon Trail is exactly what we need to replicate across the [American] West.”

Characteristics of a Wildfire Prepared Home

A Wildfire Prepared Home is a structure that is hardened against the elements and sited to enjoy ample breathing room, so to speak. Its baseline version includes a 5-ft. noncombustible buffer around the home (known as Zone 0); a Class-A fire-rated roof; at least 6 in. of vertical noncombustible material at the base of exterior walls and decks; ember-resistant vents (or 1/8-in. metal mesh vent covers); a 30-ft. defensible perimeter (aka Zone 1) to prevent ember ignition; gutters, decks, and other areas cleared of natural debris; and various maintenance requirements.

To qualify, homeowners begin with a checklist to prepare their home, complete each step, and submit their application along with photos to verify the work has been done. IBHS then performs a quality assurance review and orders a third-party evaluation to verify compliance. Designation certificates, which are good for three years, can be achieved for both retrofits and new construction and are currently available in California and Oregon for single-family detached homes.

The standard’s Plus version is assuredly an upgrade. In addition to forbidding any accessory structures within Zone 1 boundaries (something the baseline standard allows), Plus stipulates several home upgrades. These include adding dual-pane tempered windows; installing noncombustible exterior siding, doors, and shutters; enclosing the underside of eaves with noncombustible material; covering gutters; and removing all back-to-back fencing within 30 ft. of the home, among other measures.

The fact that all 64 homes in the Dixon Trail development will be built to the Plus standard should be noteworthy enough. But to ensure that scalability doesn’t compromise the integrity of individual homes, IBHS has created a Neighborhood designation that, for good measure, considers contextual factors that lie beyond the neighborhood itself.

Building on a neighborhood scale

To achieve adequate preparedness on a neighborhood scale requires examining a range of plausible scenarios within what Steven Hawks, senior director for wildfire at IBHS, labels “the neighborhood flame zone.” “We do a fuels assessment around the neighborhood and look at how fire that’s burning in the wildlands or around the neighborhood could also [impact] an adjoining neighborhood. So we’re looking at the larger community as well,” he says.

No longer working with hypotheticals, Hawks highlights how Dixon Trail was platted with consideration to all surrounding elements, including future subdevelopments. Scenarios involving direct flame contact between adjacent structures, traveling embers, and radiant heat are all analyzed. “We assess how far that potentially could occur in the outer area,” he says. Within the larger neighborhood flame zone, homes will need to be built to the Plus standard to provide maximum protection. Going inward from there, one enters the neighborhood ember zone, where homes would need to be built to baseline Wildfire Prepared Home.

To be fair, the mandate of IBHS is to make homes more insurable, which is of course a critical concern throughout California. “Insurers want to write policies, but they want to write policies they see as a good risk,” Hawks says. Some may think it perverse, but it’s worth noting that an organization established by the insurance industry, rather than one focused on building efficiency like a Phius or USGBC, is the first out of the gate with a research-backed performance standard specific to wildfire resiliency. While those organizations have been vocal about the types of measures that are good for mitigating risk, like using filtered ventilation systems, high-performance windows, and airtight construction to limit ember infiltration, they are also careful to point out that those things can only enhance, but not ensure, fire resiliency.

Anticipating regulatory hurdles

“We work very closely with the California Building Industry Association and their member builders like KB Home to bring the wildfire science to them,” Hawks says. He highlights how this work goes hand in hand with efforts to ensure builders, at minimum, heed the recommendations outlined in Chapter 7A of the California building code, which addresses materials, assemblies, and construction methods for exterior wildfire exposure. This is particularly critical in areas where homes are being rebuilt and the need to withstand future wildfires feels inevitable.

Of course, existing homes that were fortunate to survive the Camp, Eaton, Palisades, or other catastrophic wildfires of recent years may not be so lucky next time. Retrofitting those structures is likewise a paramount concern.

Of note, both Los Angeles and San Diego Counties are among the counties selected as part of California’s Wildfire Mitigation Program, a joint program between CAL Fire and the state’s Office of Emergency Services (OES), established in 2021, that addresses home hardening needs, among other matters. Integrating the Wildfire Prepared Home standard into the program, rather than relying on deploying minimal resiliency measures, would likely help speed up rebuilding efforts and, eventually, rehabilitate several of the state’s insurance markets.

To all those ends, just last week IBHS released a report titled “Resilient Rebuilding: A Path Forward for Los Angeles.” In it are recommendations for broadening the scope of Chapter 7A requirements to include, among other things, a Zone 0 standard for the entire footprints of the Eaton and Palisades fires. The report’s authors also note the importance of retrofitting all surviving homes with baseline wildfire protections.

According to Hawks, “We can’t eliminate the exposure down to zero, but we can significantly reduce it … We can make homes more resilient to those items that are going to burn around them.”

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Justin R. Wolf is a Maine-based writer who covers green building trends and energy policy. He is the author of Healing Ground, Living Values: Stanley Center for Peace and Security, published by Ecotone.