LAKE CUSHMAN, Mason County — When Jenny Sinanan looks at her home, she sees the wraparound porch, the fenced yard where her three Brittany spaniels like to play and the lake she swims in just down the hill.
But when Jesse Duvall, a community wildfire resilience coordinator with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, takes a look, he sees the danger of wildfire lurking in inconspicuous places.
Duvall imagines a shower of embers from a nearby blaze raining down and wonders whether they would nestle into a clump of leaves in the roof’s gutter or blow under the deck. Are the gaps around the dryer vent too large? What about the plants in the garden bed, brushing up against the house?
Duvall is inspecting Sinanan’s home as a part of a free state program targeting people living in places that blur the line between urban and wooded, sometimes called the wildland-urban interface. The program aims to increase the odds that a home will survive in case a wildfire sweeps through the region, triggering evacuations and stretching resources.
The home visits are growing in importance and in scope for the state. In a wave of new funding, the program expanded to Western Washington in 2021. Last year, the Washington Department of Natural Resources spent a little over $5 million on community resilience programs, including the home visits program.
Last year there were more fires west of the Cascades than east for the first time on record, Washington Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz said in a news conference last month. And research predicts the risk of wildfire in the Puget Sound region will grow in the decades ahead.
As summers become hotter, drier and longer, wildfire risk across the Western U.S. has risen, contributing to catastrophic fires that have destroyed communities and claimed lives. Since 2006, wildfire has destroyed around 3,570 buildings in Washington, according to Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group that analyzed federal wildfire statistics. Fires in Spokane County last year damaged or destroyed 447 homes, more than any other wildfire in state history, according to disaster declaration documents.
Despite the growing risks, there are simple fixes around homes that can make a big difference, according to researchers who have analyzed computer models and surveyed dozens of scorched neighborhoods.
Even if large wildfires can’t be contained and firefighters are overwhelmed, neighborhoods and homes can be modified to withstand them, they argue.
The answer could lie right outside your front door.
Surviving the embers
Franz said she was inspired to expand Washington’s wildfire assessments program after the devastating Labor Day fires in 2020.
That weekend, Washington saw 56 fires ignite within a day and 600,000 acres burned within three days, fanned by high winds. In the town of Malden, Whitman County, 80% of its buildings were razed in a span of hours, Franz said.
Only the foundation and chimney remained for most homes. But there were glaring exceptions.
“On almost every single block was a home that was completely untouched. It literally looked like luck had just come to that family, where the grace of God had been able to save it,” she said.
She later learned it was more than luck at play. Homeowners can do a lot to prevent their homes from being burned.
A common misconception about wildland fires is that homes burn down from a wall of advancing flames. In reality, 90% homes are damaged by embers blown ahead of the fire line — which can be miles away, according to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety.
If residents can prevent embers from starting a fire within 5 feet of the home, and remove anything that could lead a low-burning fire up to it, researchers say, the structure is significantly more likely to survive.
Remove the dead plants and wooden fencing touching the home, they advise. Screen in gaps around doors, vents or areas below a deck or roof. Replace wood chips abutting the home with rocks. On the riskiest days, stow wicker chairs and cardboard boxes inside.
U.S. Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen pioneered these ideas beginning in the 1990s, coining terms like the “home ignition zone.” As a fire behavior analyst in Southern California the decade prior, Cohen was often called to fires where firefighters were stretched to their limit trying to stay alive as communities burned to the ground. That’s when he noticed homes were catching on fire indifferent to the position and direction of the fire.
“I’m seeing structures closer to the wildfire surviving at a higher rate than the subdivisions — the tract developments full of flammable wood roofs — that are farther away,” he said. “They’re igniting without the wildfire even getting there as flames.”
Today, these principles have been reaffirmed by around three decades of research that has spanned everything from post-disaster assessments, computer modeling to lighting actual stands of trees and homes on fire in controlled environments, said chief engineer Anne Cope with the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety.
Washington has also made changes to its building codes to adopt some of these principles for homes in wooded areas.
Protecting the lakeside home
At Sinanan’s home, Duvall issues a series of recommendations: Remove the plants touching the home in the flower beds, replace the cedar mulch in the dog area with rubber mulch and use screens with smaller openings to cover the dryer vents and gutters.
Farther from the home, Duvall advises Sinanan to move her woodpile and trim back some tree branches touching a shed containing propane. He also recommends clearing the space around the shed of vegetation, so bare dirt can serve as a fuel break. Low branches can turn into “ladder fuels” for the fire to move up a tree and should also go, he says.
Glancing down the hill leading to her home — which a wildfire would race up — he recommends clearing dead branches and leaves to create a buffer, sometimes called “defensible space.”
Sinanan said she became more aware of wildfire risks after moving to her rural neighborhood from Snohomish County. She learned more while attending fire safety meetings and requested a home assessment from the state.
DNR’s program called “Wildfire Ready Neighbors” is in 11 counties in Washington and has just expanded to Gig Harbor. Officials are also eyeing bringing the program to San Juan Island where it would be difficult to get bulldozers and firefighters quickly if there was a wildfire. DNR has had over 3,000 requests for home visits in Eastern Washington and around 580 in Western Washington since 2021.
Local fire and conservation districts also conduct their own home assessments. Eastside Fire and Rescue wildfire mitigation specialist Cat Robinson said more homeowners have been looking for assessments after reading about the devastating fire in Lahaina, Hawaii, or after breathing in smoke from the Bolt Creek fire along Highway 2 two years ago.
“Smoke is becoming such an ever-present feature in our lives, that it’s hard to dismiss wildfire as something that happens somewhere else anymore,” she said.