Let NFPA® help you get ready for Wildfire Community Preparedness Day on May 6 by attending a Facebook Live event next Thursday, April 6, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. I will be hosting along with our special guest, Drake Carroll (pictured at right) from the South Carolina Forestry Commission. Drake is the state’s wildfire prevention and Firewise USA® coordinator and has been working in forestry and fire since graduating from Clemson University more than 15 years ago. Most importantly, Drake has spent years working closely with communities to help them prepare for wildfire. He has helpful information to share with you about the lessons he has learned. During the event, you’ll hear from Drake about examples of wildfire preparedness activities you can do in your area on May 6. He’ll highlight the important partnerships that help the small team at his agency reach neighborhood residents. And he’ll share the story of a wildfire that occurred last spring, and how preparedness is helping to protect not only homes, but also an important community institution and the lives and safety of residents and visitors. You’ll be able to ask questions and get answers in the chat during the live event, and to review the recording after the presentation ends. It’s easy to join the event, either through Facebook’s registration process where you indicate you are “Going,” or by using our Zoom registration link. Whichever way you register, you’re sure to get valuable information and insights about wildfire preparedness that can help you have a Prep Day activity on May 6 that makes a real difference.

In just under two months, it will be “that time of year again”—time to prepare your home and neighborhood for wildfire! The annual Wildfire Community Preparedness Day (Prep Day) campaign has begun. For the ninth consecutive year, NFPA® and campaign cosponsor State Farm® encourage everyone to join together on the first Saturday in May for events and activities that can help make homes and communities safer from wildfire. On Saturday, May 6, 2023, people from across the United States and Canada will take part in projects that increase their safety from wildfire. Take the opportunity to defend your home ignition zone by taking simple, low-cost steps along with your neighbors.   NFPA and State Farm make it easier with a Prep Day toolkit. The toolkit is a wealth of project ideas, safety tips, promotional material, and more. While project awards are not part of the 2023 campaign, Prep Day activities bring tremendous value to your community. For instance, Prep Day work can help Firewise USA® sites meet their annual investment criteria for volunteer hours. Engaging in Prep Day can be an important first step for people who want to be safer from wildfire but aren’t sure how to begin. Use the Wildfire Community Preparedness Day Toolkit, videos, social media cards, and other wildfire safety resources at wildfireprepday.org. Share them with others in your community to not only make a difference in safety on Prep Day, but to make a difference all through the year as well.

If you’re one of the millions of people living in an area where wildfires are part of the landscape, you may be wondering where to start to protect your home or business. The Reducing Wildfire Risk to Property: Protecting Your Home or Business online training course from NFPA® is the perfect first step for you to learn how to make your property more resistant to wildfire flames and embers. This free, self-paced course is available to anyone interested in understanding how wildfires spread to buildings and the steps they can take to prevent ignition and destruction. Participants can select each element of a building—roof, windows, siding, vents—to get a complete view of how fire can affect it, and what changes can be made to make the whole structure much safer. As you complete each section, you will be creating your property improvement plan, which can later be downloaded or printed for your use. In addition to having a plan of action to safeguard your home or business, the course comes with a free mobile app, NFPA Wildfire Risk Simulator, available for Apple or Android devices. The app gives you a dramatic depiction of how well—or poorly—a structure will fare when exposed to wildfire depending on its design, materials, and surrounding landscaping. Register for this interactive online course today. With only a small amount of time invested, you can start taking big steps to secure your home or business from the threat of wildfire.

The Outthink Wildfire™ policy initiative from NFPA® is a bold call to action and a challenge to end the destruction of communities by wildfire. It’s a comprehensive push to address one of the gnarliest challenges we face in the fire safety arena. The gnarl factor is heightened by the fact that there are already 45 million existing US homes at risk of burning to the ground due to wildfires. At a recent policy summit, more than two dozen experts discussed what it would take to upgrade these homes to be more ignition-resistant and to improve their chances of survival. Phrases like “retrofit” and “home hardening” were used, but in the face of ever-growing wildfire threats, some may wonder if a home improvement strategy could truly be effective in stopping the trend of multi-billion-dollar disasters involving thousands of homes in a single incident. While home improvements alone will not solve the problem, individual home retrofits across neighborhoods, and scaled up across regions, can absolutely make a difference. Sixty-plus years of research, experiments, and analysis give us the confidence to say that what people do to their homes and immediate surroundings can indeed improve fire-resistance and structure survival in the face of wildfire, as described in detail by the University of California Cooperative Extension Forestry. Many of these structural improvements are simple and inexpensive, on the order of regular home maintenance. Others involve a large but infrequent investment that will pay off over time, such as roof and window replacements. The key activities appear on the NFPA preparedness checklists, in NFPA standards, in some state and local regulations, and in the new Wildfire Prepared Home designation from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). These standards and guidelines all derive from what fire safety advocates have learned from the research community over decades. What do we know about how homes burn in wildfire events? We know that burning vegetation can ignite homes in three ways: radiating heat to the structure, flames touching the structure, and burning or smoldering embers piling up on or entering the structure through openings. These three mechanisms of fire spread can all happen at the same time. The most notorious culprits in home ignition from burning vegetation are embers, also known as firebrands. These pieces of burning material pile up on roofs, in gutters, and on flat surfaces like decks. They are driven by the wind into any openings in a home, including chimneys, vents, windows, pet doors, and in the cracks under doors. They can also burn mulch and shrubs up close to the home that then ignite the structure. Homes can also ignite if any flames touch the house, porch, deck, fence, and any other structural attachments. Imagine a dry lawn or a bed of pine needles providing a continuous path for flames to travel to the vulnerable parts of your structures. Finally, if there is enough dense vegetation within 30 feet (9 meters) of a structure, it can potentially radiate enough heat to ignite the walls. But for all the damage that burning vegetation can do to homes, it’s our own human-made fuel packages, in the form of vehicles, firewood piles, outbuildings, and our homes themselves that present some of the greatest dangers and can result in the destruction of whole neighborhoods. Once the wildfire burning through the vegetation ignites one of these fuel packages, it’s arguably no longer a wildfire. It’s a conflagration where these elements burn for a long time and ignite nearby homes through radiant heat or by generating flames that touch other houses or by casting off embers that go on to ignite neighboring properties. What can we do to prepare homes for wildfires? There are a number of steps homeowners can take to prepare. 1.     Operate under a worst-case scenario. Assume firefighters cannot respond with personnel, vehicles, and water to protect your home. Keep in mind that your home safety upgrades are for when a wildfire is approaching, and you and your family have evacuated. Retrofits should be aimed at preventing the wildfire or surrounding structures from igniting your home. 2.     Minimize ignition to your home’s exterior with roof repairs or replacements, dual- or triple-paned windows, and screened vents and openings. Repair any cracks in shingles or siding, and remove ignitable material from decks and patios during times of high wildfire danger. 3.     Address the area within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of your home’s perimeter and ensure there is nothing there that can burn—mulch, shrub, wood piles, wooden attachments, and so on. 4.     Keep large fuel packages like firewood piles or vehicles 30 feet (9 meters) or more from homes at times of high fire danger. 5.     Reduce the ignitability of your yard or acreage within 30 feet (9 meters) of your home and out to your property line by landscaping with fire in mind. 6.     Work with your neighbors to reduce ignitable elements on your shared boundaries and encourage them to work with their other neighbors. These tips and more can be found on the NFPA website. As advocates for improving policy to incentivize and support home and community fire safety, NFPA and like-minded organizations continue to seek ways to accelerate the pace of home and neighborhood upgrades so we can end wildfire disasters.

Through a new set of rules dubbed Safer from Wildfires, the California Department of Insurance (CDI) has required insurance companies doing business in the state to provide discounts for residential property insurance when policyholders reduce their wildfire risks. The Safer from Wildfires menu of creditable activities includes community-wide mitigation in the form of participation in the Firewise USA® recognition program. This is welcome news for property owners in active Firewise USA sites in California and can be viewed as a reward and additional acknowledgement of their efforts to protect their homes and neighborhoods from wildfire. However, the new rules have spurred a lot of confusion among consumers. Let’s try to clear some of it up by answering these FAQs. Does my insurance company offer a wildfire risk reduction discount?   California’s new rules come years after a few insurance companies had already voluntarily been offering discounts to their policyholders living in Firewise USA sites. For customers of USAA, Mercury, and a couple of other companies, this benefit was already available. The CDI maintains a list of all the insurers doing business in the state that offer wildfire risk reduction discounts, whether for being a Firewise USA site or for meeting other criteria outlined in their program menu. Before doing anything else, consumers should find out whether their company offers a discount by exploring this list. If your carrier is not yet on the list, be aware that CDI has given companies 180 days to make a filing that would provide a discount for one or more of the program categories. Am I eligible for a discount? Insurance companies have access to information about whether properties are part of a Firewise USA site through data providers that are working with NFPA®. If your company is on CDI’s list and specifically offers a Firewise USA discount, they should be determining your eligibility using these data. NFPA cannot make this determination for consumers, so it’s best to contact your insurance agent or a company representative with questions about eligibility. I am more worried about losing my insurance than getting a discount. Does wildfire risk reduction make my home more insurable? Whether to provide insurance or not, the cost of the policy, and any discounts are all decisions of the individual insurance company, which it bases on many different factors. In known high-risk areas, insurance companies are generally very interested in any wildfire loss reduction efforts that homeowners are making, especially if they fall into the categories listed in the Safer from Wildfire program. Consumer education professionals advise that property owners shop around for insurance, since insurance companies compete for business. CDI also provides consumer protections for property owners, including what to do if your insurer does not renew your coverage. How do I get involved with Firewise USA? If your neighborhood is not already engaged in Firewise USA, check out firewise.org and invest a little time in reading through the process of how to get organized, evaluate wildfire risks to property, develop an action plan, and conduct annual events. NFPA offers an interactive online tool to help neighbors organize their risk assessment and action plan. Its Firewise Portal walks you through the process of applying for community recognition. You can also work on protecting your own property from wildfire while working on the community-wide process through the tips and tools on the site.

Solving the problem of wildfire disasters—events where whole communities are impacted and thousands of buildings are destroyed—isn’t simple. Using codes and standards to address wildfire risks to the built environment is a critically important activity, but it is also quite intricate. To make the job of elected officials and AHJs easier, NFPA recently consolidated its wildfire-related documents into one convenient package, NFPA 1140, Standard for Wildland Fire Protection. A two-page, downloadable explainer, “Using Codes and Standards to Reduce Risk in Wildfire-Prone Areas,” has also been created to help local officials, AHJs, and policymakers navigate the complexity of this process. The asset draws connections between sections of NFPA 1140 and the relevant needs of community wildfire protection, from fire protection infrastructure to building materials to defensible space. Part of the Outthink approach Launched last year, NFPA’s Outthink Wildfire™ initiative promotes five key tenets based on decades of experience and research that we believe can make a significant difference in saving property and lives. Two of those five key tenets focus on using codes and standards to help make new construction safer and to address the hazards and exposures that existing homes and businesses face. NFPA 1140—which combines the previous standards NFPA 1051, NFPA 1141, 1143, and NFPA 1144—represents the consensus of wildfire experts on the most effective and efficient means for reducing risk to people and property. As communities consider how to mitigate wildfire dangers to existing and future development, as well as allocate resources for safe and effective emergency response, these standards should serve as the basis for their actions. The two-page explainer on using codes and standards to address wildfire risks notes when and where standards for wildfire mitigation should apply. It points out the relevant chapters of NFPA 1140 and other standards that can be used to protect existing structures. It addresses the need for water supplies and other firefighting infrastructure, including multiple access and egress routes enabling first responders to quickly enter threatened communities and allowing safe evacuation for residents. Finally, it suggests the roles and responsibilities for community officials who may be charged with enforcing elements of the standards. Wildfires are part of our natural environments, and they are inevitable; wildfire disasters are not. Learn more about the value and effectiveness of using codes and standards to bend down the wildfire risk curve for your jurisdiction by downloading our brief explainer here.