good morning america and univision deftly illustrate the ins and outs of wildfire prep
Updated February 2025: Looking to get the gist of preparing a property for wildfire? In under 30 minutes, these clips from Good Morning America, the Theodore Payne Foundation, and Univision can jumpstart your understanding.
January 2025 Notice: This article is designed to provide long-term guidance. If you are navigating loss, consider waiting to read it. If you have been asked to evacuate, Get Set and Go!
Why Fire Ignites Homes
See an Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) experiment that casts embers at two homes to discover how homes ignite – and what can keep them from doing so.
Learn about the retrofits, construction materials and strategies that can help homes defy flames via Univision’s tour of the Fire Resilient Home with LA County Fire Department’s Alex Villalta.
Protect Your Home with Defensive Landscape Strategies
Ginger Zee discusses the ins and outs of fire defensive landscaping with FormLA Landscaping President Cassy Aoyagi.
While no plant is fire proof, and a handful can raise LA’s wildfire risk, and some plants resist ignition. See University of Irvine experiments with “drought tolerant” arson grasses and the more fire resistant LA-indigenous White Sage.
Dive deeper into defensive strategies with Cassy Aoyagi and Theodore Payne Foundation.
How to Maintain Your Space
Cal Fire’s Landscaping tips focus on effective maintenance strategies. Learn about fire defensive behaviors from FormLA’s Oscar Ortega and Cassy Aoyagi in conversation with Univision.
Take Action
Each layer of wildfire preparation you create will protect you – and your neighbors. Get started here:
Simultaneously Increase Fire Safety, Beauty and Home Value
Updated June 2024. By Cassy Aoyagi: California’s fire risk is intimately connected with how we landscape – just not in the way we usually think! While our landscapes can amplify fire danger on and beyond our properties, they can also make our homes less vulnerable to ignition, as well as safer and easier for fire fighters to defend. How?
January 2025 Notice: This article is designed to provide long-term guidance. If you have been asked to evacuate, Get Set and Go!
FormLA President Cassy Aoyagi walks through 10 Steps to Fire Defense in a South Pasadena garden.
Think Home First
The most critical step we can take to reduce the risk of losing our homes is to “harden” them… not the landscapes that surround them.
A native landscape is designed to defend the Jean Roth Driscoll architecture from embers.
Understanding how fire moves is critical to understanding our homes’ vulnerabilities. In most settings, embers are more likely to ignite homes than a fire-front or radiant heat. Embers can look like swirling fire flies, or they may be more substantial – lit palm fronds can travel miles on the wind. Regardless of their size, embers do not walk to our homes – they fly, bounce and roll with the wind. Where there is nothing to inhibit their trajectory, they arrive at our doorsteps. Or eves.
Once embers reach our homes, they may enter through an open window or find dry, flammable materials they can ignite to gain strength. Are you picturing plants? Stop that! Outdoor cushions and toys, wood fences, shake shingles… many materials are ready to burn, unlike healthy, hydrated foliage.
While home hardening is the best way to prevent home ignition, there are a few low cost, relatively easy actions that can immediately add layers of protection as you think through architectural options.
Clean and Store
Keeping your landscape tidy and healthy helps your home resist fire. Cushions and curtains, un-stored tools, toys and furniture are often made of flammable materials. Often near homes, they offer embers fuel to build heat strong enough for home ignition. Pay particular attention to cleanliness and clutter at foundations, windowsills and in gutters. Ember resistance in the 5 feet closest to your home is critical. These fire defensive landscape maintenance practices both protect and improve home value – a reason to whistle while you work!
Tip: Readily accessible storage for flammable objects, for example, in-furniture storage for cushions, reduces these dangers and increases the likelihood that items will often be stored when not in active use. Here, your investment in native plants will save time and reduce waste, as they tend to produce less litter.
A vernal pool feeds the garden’s hydration in summer.Bioswales traverse the garden, fueling foliage health.
Hydrate!
Well-hydrated objects need to be dried before they can burn. Smart irrigation paired with the right mulch is a great way to ensure foliage and the soil itself maintain hydration through LA’s hot and dry months.
Tip:Check irrigation systems monthly to ensure proper functioning. Use compost-grade mulch to hold-in soil hydration – avoid combustible rubber mulches anywhere in the landscape and chip mulches within 5 feet of structures.
Protect Trees
Healthy tree canopy at a safe distance from rooftops can act as catchers mitts for flying embers, shielding a home. This is really lovely news, as tree-full landscapes provide so many other benefits, from decreasing energy costs and increasing home value to shading outdoor spaces and attracting birds.
Tip: When hydrating your landscape, prioritize tree care. Native trees, including Coast Live Oak, Palo Verde, and Western Redbuds are particularly beneficial as layered protection. As with native plants more generally, native trees have advantages in resisting infections, diseases, and maintaining hydration in drought.
Remove dangers
While well spaced, placed, and maintained plants can be defensive, there are a few that create danger in the best of circumstances.
Mexican Feather GrassFountain GrassPampas Grass
Weed Arson Grasses
Several popular plants marketed as “drought tolerant” like Pampas, Feather, and Fountain grasses, and Pride of Madeira, are easily ignited. These plants travel from our gardens to wildspaces on the breeze and our hiking boots. As they are not well-adapted to our climate, they quickly dry out without supplemental water to increase our fire danger in the wild and in our landscapes.
Tip: Do not plant invasive foliage in home or community gardens. See the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC) for help removing dangerous non-native from public spaces. Visit Plant Right for lists of invasive plants and native foliage swaps with similar aesthetics.
Palm trees almost always contain dead material. They are highly combustible even when they do no.
Remove Palms, Junipers and Cypress
LA’s iconic palm trees greatly increase fire danger. They ignite easily, cast embers widely, and lit fronds can travel miles beyond a fire front. Similarly, Junipers and Cypress pose dangers, behaving “like little gas cans.”
Tip: Avoid planting new palms, cypress and junipers. Remove any in your space, especially within 5 feet of your home. Check to see if your municipality offers incentives for these actions. If you have a palm tree you simply can’t imagine taking down, invest in aggressive maintenance. Take great care with hydration, hand watering where necessary.
Reduce “Hardscapes”
Gravel and decomposed granite paths and patios provide fire breaks and space where fire-fighters can safely defend your home. Beyond that, large areas of hardened spaces invite embers to fly, bounce and roll right into homes. This is more dangerous than having low, well-hydrated foliage that may stop ember travel or even extinguish embers.
Tip: Maintain or plant low-growing, ideally native, foliage rather than gravel or hardscaping large areas in the 5 feet beyond your home. In addition to increasing your safety, it will save energy and therefore save money!
create defensive layers
Plants can be spaced and placed to intercept embers that might otherwise reach a home.
Coast Live OakManzanitaDwarf Coyote Bush | Native Yucca
Plant Native Foliage
The same qualities that help native plants stay lush and leafy in drought serve us well in fire season. As they are well-adapted to our climate cycles, native plants retain hydration through our hot, dry summers. While no plant is fire-proof, well-hydrated plants have an advantage in resisting fire. As homebuyers seek low-maintenance, low-water landscapes, planting natives also delivers dividends at sale.
The Calscape database is a wonderful resource for getting to know native flora. Native nurseries offer both foliage and abundant know-how and educational programs. See El Nativo Growers (Wholesale/Trade), Las Pilitas Nursery, and Theodore Payne Foundation Nursery. If you are hiring a landscaper, look for one with a Native Plant Landscaper Certification.
The Clayton Garden, Newly PlantedThe Clayton Garden
Space and Place Plants Carefully
All foliage, especially trees and shrubs, need room to grow to full, mature size. Effectively spacing and placing plants will increase fire safety, and also result in greater long-term design integrity. Most importantly, it will reduce maintenance needs, enabling year round fire readiness. Planting small and allowing foliage to mature makes for a healthier, less expensive landscape that will and appreciate in value as it grows.
Tip: Research the mature size of the foliage you intend to plant. The amount of space needed by a Coast Live Oak (82H x 35W) will be substantially bigger than that needed by a Western Redbud (20H x 20H). Create a design plan to ensure foliage has room to grow. As you plant, look up and around to ensure the full sized tree or shrub will be far from structures, wires and will complement other plants.
Bob Spears, Jim Walsworth, Georgia CaseFirefighters, including Isaiah Marin, maintain the garden.
Inspire Your Community
Particularly at the Urban Wildland Interface, public and neighboring properties impact the safety of our homes. It is in our best interests to work together to reduce this danger. Communities that come together to reshape common ground, stabilizing slopes, and planting native foliage (like Sunland, La Crescenta, and Sierra Madre) increase their luck and resilience.
Tip:Resilience hubs and the California Fire Safe Council, supported by fire agencies, are great places to start and have incredible impacts. Other possible steps include encouraging local nurseries to carry more natives and to cease offering invasive foliage. Evaluate the condition of nearby open and vacant spaces. If you see problems, bring community together to improve the space.
Develop Outside Fire Path
While we’ve long thought locating within a city would protects us, the impact of recent fires on Santa Rosa and Paradise show the limits of that protection. The fact is that we have built communities within known fire pathways. Those homes are simply in greater danger than those located in areas that burn less frequently.
Tip: As we work to create more housing, policy makers, planners and developers must consider fire-safety as a criteria for assessing and locating new developments. As citizens, we can encourage them to do so.
Sierra Madre Post OfficeSunland Welcome Nature Garden
Before you ask us for a fire defensive landscape, please harden your home
September 2023. By Cassy Aoyagi: Alongside Hawaii’s losses weighing heavy on hearts, we see amplified fire fear. That’s natural. Yet, fear often clouds our ability to see and take the most productive action.
January 2025 Notice: This article is designed to provide long-term guidance. If you are navigating loss, consider waiting to read it. If you have been asked to evacuate, Get Set and Go!
When fear rises, people look out to the wild with trepidation and want to pave entire landscapes. That won’t save homes or lives. Thinking home first will. The fire scientists, fire fighters, and fire-defensive architects who have taught us to fear less have been sounding this warning for years.
Research like that of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety can leads us to more calm, clear-eyed solutions. Fire defensive architect Amanda Cavallo perfectly defined our true problem:
It’s important to understand that buildings and structures are the first thing to perish in a wildfire and provide the most fuel for a wildfire.
We use materials in our building and construction that are flammable, chemical, synthetic, combustible and explosive.
IBHS ember tests illustrate how to protect homes from the most common source of ignition.
The first of the 10 fire defensive actions we hope you’ll take is to think home first.
Home first thinking involves looking at where on your home embers could gain access to the interior or gather to build enough heat to ignite the exterior of your home. Here, Cavallo brings additional clarity:
[Home fires] start because the worst impacts are due to wind blown embers that can travel for miles and land on roofs, get in through vents, and will burn a structurefrom the inside out. The biggest danger is to the home is the home – that is where we need to start.
Here are highly effective home-first actions, from low-cost to high. (Yes, we’re being a bit sneaky here, as thinking home first involves a few actions.)
Maintenance: Block any spaces between roof and decking (“birdstopping) and in siding – we hear gorilla tape can work wonders in a pinch! Keep your roof, gutters and the base of your home free of debris.
Vents: Cover chimney and other vents with “spark arresting” mesh screens.
Gutters: Install non-combustible leaf guards. (Bonus: This will save rainy season maintenance too!)
Attached Fence/Gate: Add a metal plate where the gate attaches to the home. Replace wood gates with metal or composite. Avoid designs that could catch and hold embers.
Eves: Install soffits if you have an overhang. Install fire resistant (1-hour rating) soffits and fascia.
Doors: Add weather stripping to doors and shutters to sliding doors. Replace wooden garage doors, particularly if they are not solid-core.
Decks: Replace plastic, wood plastic and softwoods with hard woods and be sure to select sizes that comply with California building codes.
Windows + Skylights: Replace with fire resistant materials, tempered glass – this includes windows in doors!
Roofs: Re-roof with Class-A materials (e.g. composition, metal or tile)
Siding: Replace siding that could burn (wood) or melt (vinyl) with fire resistant materials such as brick, stone, or stucco, starting with the vertical six inches closest to the ground.
Tour Examples
To get a sense of what this looks like, tour the model Fire Resilient Home designed by architect Clark Stevens as an educational tool for the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains and LA County Fire Department’s Forestry Division.
Tour the Fire Resilient Home with Architect Clark Stevens
For a more detailed checklist and cost versus efficacy assessment, see the House Upgrade Section of DefensibleSpace.org. If you are will apply these insights to your home, don’t do it alone!
If you live in Malibu, city inspectors will help you for free. In Simi Valley or the Santa Monica Mountains? The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains (RCDSMM) will provide a freeHome Ignition Zone Evaluationfor free – they will also train you in the evaluation technique if you aim to be a resource for your community.
Of course, all of this home-work will be much easier if the five feet around your home is ember resistant and clear of artwork, furnishings, toys, tools, wood piles, storage, and container gardens. We would be very happy to help you create this ember resistant Zone 0, which will be required for all those in high and very high fire sensitivity areas by January 2024.
Not yet in a high fire severity zone? They are expanding year by year. Let’s get ahead of things. We love you, and we want to know we’ve done all we can to keep you safe.
