Day 3: TALK STORY: IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Program: The Road to Implementation with Amanda West and Mark Vaughn
“We’re not powerless. We are not powerless against wildfire. We know what we need to do.” —Amanda West
“I try not to use the word remove. Just move them. You can have plants. You can have a beautiful landscape. We want that five feet for the fire break.” —Mark Vaughn
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
Wildfires pose a serious threat to homes and communities, but we don’t have to be helpless in the face of these disasters. By implementing proven mitigation strategies, homeowners can take proactive steps to protect their properties and create more resilient neighborhoods. It’s time to move beyond just rebuilding after the flames and focus on building better from the start.
In this episode, CTEH Senior Advisor Christa Lopez sits down with IBHS Director of Product Services Amanda West and Wildfire Prepared Home Program Manager Mark Vaughn.
Tune in as they share the latest techniques to harden homes and create effective ember defense systems— from the critical importance of a non-combustible zone around the home to the role of building materials in wildfire resistance.
Highlights:
- 00:22 Making Homes More Resilient
- 05:53 The 5 Feet Non-Combustable Zone
- 12:45 Safe Landscaping
- 15:00 Use Non-Combustible Materials
Twitter:
Wildfire season is here, but we don’t have to be powerless against it. Listen in as Amanda West and Mark Vaughn of IBHS share proven strategies to harden your home and create effective ember defense. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #IBHS #WildfirePreparedness #WildfireResiliency #EmberDefense #HomeHardening #NonCombustibleZone #DefensibleSpace #BuildingMaterials #WildfireResearch #HomeProtection
Quotes:
01:19 “Improve the houses that we’re building for our disaster survivors so they don’t have to come back to us the next time there’s an event because we’re making those homes more resilient and mitigating against future events.” —Christa Lopez
02:05 “I knew and needed to do something before the disaster happens, not trying to help people through it afterward.” —Amanda West
05:15 “We’re not powerless. We are not powerless against wildfire. We know what we need to do.” —Amanda West
13:00 “I try not to use the word remove. Just move them. You can have plants. You can have a beautiful landscape. We want that five feet for the fire break.” —Mark Vaughn
15:45 “In a wildfire, fire’s coming from the outside, not the inside, so it makes a difference in the type of material that we choose.” —Amanda West
Meet the Moderator:
Christa Lopez, Senior Advisor, CTEH
Christa López, PhD, CEM is a dedicated professional in disaster recovery, crisis management, and environmental justice. With a PhD in Public Policy and Administration from Walden University and a Master’s in Emergency and Disaster Management from the American Public University System, Christa has held significant roles at CTEH, Deloitte, and the Texas General Land Office. Her extensive volunteer experience includes serving as a medic, firefighter, and search and rescue team member, all contributing to her mission of improving lives through effective disaster response and recovery.
Connect with CTEH:
- Website: https://cteh.com/
Meet the Panel:
Amanda West, Director of Product Services, IBHS
Amanda West is the Director of Product Services at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). With over 19 years of experience at The Weather Channel, Amanda has honed her skills in project management, strategy development, and client relationship management. She is dedicated to enhancing weather resiliency and wildfire mitigation, leveraging her expertise to strengthen homes and communities against severe weather. Amanda holds a degree in Digital Media from Full Sail University.
Mark Vaughn, Operations Manager – Wildfire Prepared, IBHS
Mark Vaughn is the Wildfire Prepared Home Program Manager at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). Prior to joining IBHS, Mark spent 15 years in the insurance industry, primarily insuring commercial properties. He then transitioned to working for Habitat for Humanity, where he ran construction programs and built dozens of homes with hurricane and wildfire resilience in mind. Mark’s experience in the insurance and home construction sectors, combined with his expertise in wildfire mitigation, make him well-suited to lead IBHS’s Wildfire Prepared Home program, which provides homeowners with actionable steps to protect their homes from the growing threat of wildfires.
Connect with IBHS:
- Website: https://ibhs.org/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IBHSorg
- X: https://twitter.com/IBHS_org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ibhs_org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/institute-for-business-&-home-safety
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IBHS_org
Transcription:
Christa Lopez This is a really important topic to hear, and I can give a testament to it. Like Jennifer, I’m a nerd. I love diving into the science behind things, as well as the policy. I used to work for the State of Texas, ran disaster recovery operations for a couple decades. And so when our team was getting ready to start our CDBG DR program after Hurricane Harvey, and our 2016 events and our 2015 events, all that DR funding, we wanted to make sure was well spent and it was being put into mindful houses. So I asked for permission. We sent a bunch of our staff out to the facility so they could learn, and they all came back, super excited. And then our builders hated us because we said, Change Order Number one, you’re now going to put nails closer. You’re going to use these specific nails, and you’re going to put roof decking take down, because what we learned from them improved the houses that we’re building for our disaster survivors so they don’t have to come back to us the next time there’s an event, because we’re making those homes more resilient and mitigating against future events. And so that’s something I’m super passionate about, and so I’m glad to share the stage today, and I’m gonna let you all introduce yourselves, and really, the show’s yours.
Amanda West Hey everyone. Amanda West, IBHS. I spent 20 years before coming to IBHS at the weather channel, going to hundreds of disasters, from hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, all of it. And I someone mentioned it earlier. Wildfire is different. It’s so much worse. Not to, again, it’s all bad. So I’m happy to be here today. And after going to all those disasters, I knew and needed to do something before the disaster happens, not, you know, trying to help people through it afterwards. And so I found IBHS, and we are a nonprofit research facility. If you don’t know who we are, you can go to IBHS.org and see exactly what we do from wind driven rain, hail and wildfire. After 10 years of research on wildfires, and even more than that, like going into the field to see exactly what happened and then taking it back to our research facility, we decided to launch wildfireprepare.org and so we’ll learn a little bit more about that, and I will let Mark introduce himself.
Mark Vaughn My name is Mark Vaughn. I run the Wildfire Prepared Home Program on the operational side with IBHS. So my background, I spent about 15 years in the insurance industry. I insured primarily commercial properties. Garage insurance is my primary part of my book, and they told me I couldn’t ride anymore in Louisiana. And I left and started building houses. So I worked for Habitat for Humanity in the North Shore of like pots train North New Orleans. I ran two different affiliates construction programs there. Built dozens of houses and with wildfire or with hurricane in mind. And that’s when I became aware of IBHS. I built fortified construction, fortified roofs, fortified professional on their training. And when my wife and I decided to move out West, I was going to build to the risk, and it was out here, wildfire. So started researching it, and and found that IBHS had some research on that as well, and ended up but they ended up hiring me to run the program after I asked a lot of questions. And here we are today.
Amanda West So we launched the program in June of 2022, and it is a wildfire mitigation program. We launched it in the state of California, and it is basically a program in which homeowners know exactly what to do and how to do it. We have lots of research. We know that embers travel. They travel into communities. They are usually the first things that come into communities, which then lead to flames around and on structures and then radiant heat. So we knew we needed to do something about that. So we came back to the research facility and we tested building materials and how these embers affected each of the buildings. We have ember generators that we can blow at homes in order to see how the embers affect the built environment. We do structure to structure fire research. We do fuel breaks, different types of building materials as I’ve said. We know that embers can be anywhere from this small to this big. These are some 3d printed embers. This is vegetative embers. Once a home catches on fire, the embers get bigger than this. So we know we need to do something about that. So we know that we’re not powerless. We are not powerless against wildfire. We know what we need to do. We’ve created this system of actions. It’s not just one thing, it’s not just two things. It is a whole system of actions that homeowners need to take in order to keep the ember intrusion from igniting the home. The whole point of this product that we’ve created, and we’re a nonprofit, we’re not trying to sell anything. We just want people to build stronger. And the whole point is to keep the flames away from the homes, keep the embers from igniting things, and embers away from the home. So that’s how we created this program.
So has anybody in here heard of the zero to five foot non combustible zone? It was no accident how we discovered this. These are our Ember generators. We have 105 industrial sized fans on one side of our nine story building, and we can blow winds up to 150 miles an hour. And we can rotate this house. It’s on a turntable. We can do all of that, and we have Ember generators, and we see what happens in a real wildfire with real winds at different speeds and directions, all of that. So this is what we know, that embers, when they hit a home, they’re going to fall down and bounce out to five feet.
So that’s where the zero to five foot non combustible zone came about. Also you can see right at the edge of the building there, they also accumulate right there. So that’s why another one of our base requirements is that the bottom six inches of the home needs to be non combustible material. So that could be the foundation, the concrete foundation, it could be non combustible siding, such as fiber cement board, brick, stone, something like that. A lot of that’s in California Building Code, modern code, due to water and termites. So it’s already there for modern building codes. So this is our the base level. So this is where you you have to start the mitigation from here. This is for Ember defense. So we’ve got, I want to start actually, with the roof. You want to have a class A roof, gutters, if you even have gutters, not every home has gutters. Make sure that they’re metal material, and then keep the maintenance, keep them cleaned out. Defensible space, the zero to five, as I mentioned, and then 5 to 30. 5 to 30, we know we want to break the connective fuels. And then over here, the building features vents.
We all know the vents are important the eighth inch or finer metal mesh, which you can buy a roll of that mesh from amazon for like 80 bucks and cover your whole house, all the vents in your house, the six inch at the base of the wall, non combustible, and then decks. We know that decks are another vulnerable component. So this is basically one of the demonstrations that we show a lot. We were just at the Ember stomp last weekend in Marin County, and did a demo where we– the right side is the non combustible five foot zone, and then wildfire prepared home, and then on the left side is just a typical home that you would see, and we’ve got mulch, we’ve got trees, we’ve got a fence, And all we did was light the mulch on fire. That could be an invert this big, this big, that landed in the mulch, and it will smolder and it will spread, and it will ignite the fence, the bushes and anywhere along that fence, and will eventually, you know, create that pathway right to the house itself.
So I can’t stress the importance of the zero to five foot non combustible zone. And I know homeowners do not want to take their bushes out, or their foot their privacy fence out, but that is, if there’s any takeaway today, it’s that. So here’s another example of the 5 to 30 foot defensible space, and again, no five foot non combustible zone and then the 5 to 30 feet of connective fuels. We know that, like if you have a shed, a tree, a fence, a hot tub, all of those things all together, and it leads that pathway of fire right to the house. We’ve got to spread these things out as far away from the house as possible. So what do we do about this? What about in our built environment already? We’ve got to take that vegetation out in between the homes, just taking out that five feet of wood fence. We’ve also got manufacturers who are selling their products. Oh, well, it’s a vinyl fence. It’s fire resistant. It’s fire resistant to what you know, cooking on your grill next to it, but not in a wildfire. It’s still going to burn. So it’s education. It’s informing homeowners that these are the actions that they need to take.
So the base level of the program that’s easier to get to in a retrofit. Having homeowners do that at a minimum, just doing those things against Ember entry. And then on the plus side, this is the home hardening. If you’re building new, it’s easier to get to this because it’s going to be a little bit more expensive to get to this if you’re trying to rip off the siding that you already have, if you’re trying to change out the windows in your home to double pane tempered windows. So if you do this on new construction, you’re going to bend down that risk curve. So that’s kind of where, where I wanted to go with this. If there’s any question?
Christa Lopez I have a couple questions. When I first started looking at this, I thought, How is this possible? Like, how can people afford this? Are people going to be able to what do HOAs say about it? And I’ll tell you, I moved from Texas to North Carolina recently, and their test facility is in South Carolina, so they can attest to it. And anyone who’s been in that part of the country can attest everybody out there likes to put, instead of mulch, dried pine needles, and it literally made my skin crawl the minute I saw that as an instant flame. And we had more wildfires in North Carolina I could count this summer, because we were in extreme drought. I am the person literally last Friday, just finished a total of nine cubic yards of stone where I ripped out all of the mulch, and I ripped out all the shrubs, and I put stone around my house. And luckily, my fence was already made of a brick wall, and we had a metal gate, so I didn’t have to do the fencing. But there we put in brand new gutters with leaf guard and things like that. And the neighbors are like, Oh, that looks really nice. And I’m like, I’m doing it for a reason. And so I sit and I educate all my neighbors why what they’re doing in their yards is bad, and then they look at me like, I’m the crazy new neighbor, and they don’t talk to me anymore. But hopefully I put something in someone’s mind that they need to fix things. So if I’m a homeowner, this seems overwhelming at first. What are those first steps I can take? What’s realistic? How can I achieve this?
Mark Vaughn That first five feet is the first thing that we look for. It’s the easiest to check remotely, look at photos and tell very easily, a lot more easily than checking the vents on the house, for example. So starting there just and I try not to use the word remove. Just move them. You can have plants. You can have a beautiful landscape. We want that five feet for the fire break, if you will, against the house. And you know, humans were terrible at death perception. If you move those plants five feet away from your house now you can walk around your house and make sure that there’s not pests and bugs next, getting into your house, from the street, nobody can tell the difference. That looks the same as if the hedge was right against the wall when they drive by. So it does take effort, it does take time. It takes money, but that is a low hanging fruit. You can do this in a couple of weekends on sweat equity,
Amanda West And then you can actually get to the vents and things that you need to do to maintain your home.
Christa Lopez I also made the argument to folks that it helps with people breaking into my house. If you have shrubs up against your house, people can hide behind shrubs and get into your– so, like, if that wasn’t motivating people enough, I was trying to bring up other do it. I’m instilling fear in all my neighbors. Any other, you know, Mark from a building and standpoint, any other thoughts for folks on ways they can kind of mitigate and just think about their homes in general and practices they can build, especially as black communities, hear of starting that rebuilding process before you start to rebuild. How do you infuse that early on?
Mark Vaughn We’re pretty much out of time. But the go to the website, wildfireprepare.org, look at plus if you’re going to rebuild, that really is it’s incremental cost. You’re already putting windows in, make them double pane tempered as opposed to just double pane on neiled glass. It’s an incremental cost up front. If you were to replace all your windows and existing it’s much more expensive. So keep that in mind. And our goal, I’ve told Jennifer this, if we’re successful, then we don’t have after the fires anymore, right? And I think we’d all be happy with that.
Amanda West There is one thing I did bring this in here. There are some materials that we go a little bit above and beyond chapter seven, there are some materials that that we’ve tested and we know that are a little bit more vulnerable than others, even though they are in that building code. And one of them is the siding material. This is fiber cement. This is wood fiber.
Mark Vaughn Basically, there’s products that look like– they made to look like wood. Both of them made it look like wood. One actually is wood. The ones made of non combustible material.
Amanda West It’s made of wood, but the sheathing behind it is what keeps it chapter 70 compliant. But we know that in a wildfire, fire’s coming from the outside, not the inside, so it makes a difference in the type of material that we choose.
Mark Vaughn We run into a lot of people that are sold stuff, because salesmen will tell you anything. And yeah, like Amanda was saying, you know, vinyl fences are non combustible, which we know that that’s not true, but they’re told that all the time. So the class A ratings, different ratings of materials. There’s certain ways that those protests are performed, and actually items that melt tend to perform very well as far as a rating goes, because they can’t survive the entire test. So there are some materials that hit ratings that we just can’t accept because the physics of the test don’t work out for that actually end up with that.
Amanda West It’s not just for wildfires, just fire
Mark Vaughn But that’s what IBHS does. We’re a building science organization and trying to perform some good testing to give you guys more resilient housing and survive disasters.
Christa Lopez Well, thank you all so much. Appreciate it.
