Essential Tips to Protect Your Home From Wildfires

7/16/2024 (Permalink)

Firefighter Hosing a Wildfire

Essential Tips to Protect Your Home From Wildfires

Creating a safety zone to fire-proof your home and yard can keep your family and valuables safe from damaging wildfires. Implementing some effective yet simple tips can increase the chances of preserving your house during fire season, ensuring you can enjoy it with family and friends for years to come.

Defensible Space is Essential

One of the most important strategies to protect your house from wildfires involves creating a defensible space around the perimeter of your home. This buffer zone can prevent fire from reaching your house. The space around your house should be free of flammable materials. Start by clearing vegetation, which removes dead plants, pine needles, dry leaves, and other organic debris from your yard.

Prune trees with branches hanging over your house and perform additional trimming to make or keep space between the other trees on your property. Enhance your yard with fire-resistant trees and shrubs, planting them so they will have a safe distance between them even when fully grown. Keep your lawn regularly mowed; do not let the grass height exceed four inches.

Use Building Materials With Fire-Resistant Properties

If sparks or embers land on your home's roof, it could catch fire, depending on the roofing materials used. Class-A fire-rated materials such as tile, asphalt, or metal shingles are the best types of roofing to protect your home from fire. Instead of wood siding, choose fire-resistant materials such as brick, stucco, or fiber cement siding.

Add additional protection by installing double-pane windows or tempered glass to reduce the heat that could penetrate your home if a fire is nearby. For decks and patios, use fire-resistant building materials and avoid combustible decking. Some plastic and wood-plastic composites are potentially combustible and should be replaced with ignition-resistant or solid materials like concrete. Consider applying a fire-retardant treatment to any wood roof shingles or other vulnerable areas of your home's structure.

As an additional layer of safety, have fences, gates, and any other attachments built from fire-resistant materials, and ensure that garages have fire-rated doors and walls. Fire-resistant doors are also available, adding extra protection, but they must be appropriately sealed to ensure they function as intended. The doors are designed to stop smoke, flames, and, in some cases, conductive and radiant heat transfer.

Install Devices to Arrest Sparks

Cozy fires are lovely on a cold night or a balmy summer evening, but sparks and embers can fly out of the chimney, land on leaves, dry grasses, or trees, and start a fire. To ensure your home is safe, fit all your chimneys and stove pipes with chimney caps with approved spark arresters. They should have fine-gauge screens made of fireproof mesh. Spark arresters should also be used on vents from the attic, foundation, and soffit.

Regularly inspect and clean spark arresters to ensure they remain unclogged and function as intended. Local building codes and standards may dictate the type of spark arresters you must use, so ensure you are in compliance when making your choice. Chimneys, vents, and soffits should also be regularly inspected for damage.

Create a Zone of Fire-Resistance for Protection

You can protect your house from wildfires by making simple changes to the yard and land surrounding your home. Remove combustible or flammable materials close to the house, keeping them at least 30 feet away from structures.

Wood chips are commonly used as mulch in landscaping but are combustible, so consider switching to mulch using non-combustible items such as gravel, rock mulch, or pavers in your yard. For outdoor furniture, consider choosing items made of metal or other non-combustible materials, and use seat cushions and pillows that use fire-resistant fabrics for your decks and patios. Aside from trees and grass, choose low-growing, fire-resistant plants in your landscaping to maintain a zone around your home that will not fuel a fire.

Keep Roofs and Gutters Clean and Maintained

To reduce the amount of available fuel during fire season, it is essential to clean gutters and roofs regularly by removing built-up needles, leaves, and other organic debris. Additionally, you can install non-combustible gutter covers or metal mesh screens to guard the gutters and prevent any material inside them from catching fire. Routine maintenance can also prevent storm damage, ensuring that your gutters and roofs are in good repair to effectively manage debris and heavy rainfall. Catching potential roof storm damage early avoids complications that might otherwise exacerbate fire hazards.

It is a good idea to have a roof inspection to check for any gaps or damaged shingles and have them repaired, preventing flying embers from entering. Any downspouts from the roof should be inspected to ensure they are clear, do not have impacted leaves or needles, and are directing water away from the house.

Keep Firefighting Equipment On Hand

Depending on where you live and the fire risk, keeping firefighting equipment on the property might make sense. At a minimum, you can protect your house from wildfires by having garden hoses long enough to reach all areas of your yard and keeping them connected and functioning. Also, sprinklers can help keep the ground damp and reduce the chance of igniting plants or grass.

Purchase fire extinguishers and keep them readily accessible in critical locations around your home, ensuring they are adequately maintained and work if needed. If you need to keep your home wet under threat of a fire, ensure that you have access to a reliable water source such as a well, pool, or cistern. Finally, you may want to consider a backpack fire pump, a portable pump, and a water tank that enables you to mount a quick response against any fire threat.

Have an Emergency Plan

Having an emergency plan for yourself, your family, and your pets is critical to getting to safety as quickly as possible in a fire. Identify evacuation routes, make sure you have multiple options, and practice them with your family.

Establish a way to communicate with each family so that you can stay in touch during the emergency and ensure that everyone understands the plan. Assemble an emergency kit with the essentials like water, medications, food, and important documents. Additionally, plan how you will stay informed to monitor alerts and local news regarding wildfire updates.

Participate in Developing a Community Plan

The neighborhood stands a better chance of making it through a fire event if everybody works together. Collaborate with your neighbors to prepare a wildfire preparedness plan as a community. You may consider joining a local neighborhood watch or creating one to dispense wildfire information and alerts.

Neighbors are invaluable for sharing resources like equipment and fire safety information to ensure everybody is better prepared. In the event of a fire, community members can work together to create fire breaks and maintain the buffer of defensible spaces to protect their homes.

Defend Your Most Precious Assets

Taking a proactive approach to making your house fire-resistant can save your property and, more importantly, save lives. In a fire, SERVPRO® restoration services can help get your house, yard, and life back to normal as quickly as possible. Contact our expert team today to see how we can help.