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Architects agree that new builds, refits, and better escape routes are key to surviving wildfires

With creeping urbanisation the rate of wildfires went down and architects put only minimal thought into fire safety. Since 2017 there has been a surge in fires globally – and buildings aren't ready for them, writes Andrea Valentino

Wednesday 09 September 2020 17:02 BST
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A home burns in Vacaville, California, during August’s LNU Lightning Complex fire
A home burns in Vacaville, California, during August’s LNU Lightning Complex fire (AFP/Getty)

On the evening of 9 October 2017, around midnight, Howard Booster got a call from his neighbour. There’s a fire, Booster was warned – so he went outside and had a look. And yes, there was a fire, but no flames. All he could see was a dim red glow over the ridge, skipping north to south across the dark California sky. But Booster lived further east – safe, he thought, from the roiling cauldron over the hill. “Somebody’s going to have big problems,” he told his wife as they watched. And in a sense, he was right.

At about one in the morning, the wind shifted east, launching the fire towards Booster and his eight-acre property, the place he’d called home for 35 years. He acted fast, bundling his wife and her 97-year-old father away to safety at a nearby church. But Booster stayed – and what he witnessed next is impossible to forget. He saw flames, tumbling over one ridge, then another, faster than he could run, urged along by 95mph winds. He remembers the houses in its path weren’t so much burning as exploding: the air around was so hot that they disintegrated the moment the fire arrived.

It was time to go, Booster knew, but time was short. So he grabbed his fiddles (in happier times, he plays in two bands), threw them in his pickup, and left to check on his wife. When he returned the following day, there was nothing left, save some rubble and a pair of red-brick chimneys. Booster, unfortunately, was far from alone. The inferno that took his home near Santa Rosa, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, was just one of the 250 wildfires that ravaged northern California in October 2017 – and which altogether burnt more than 200,000 acres of land, caused $14.5bn (£11.2bn) of damage and killed 44 people. 

At the time, the so-called Wine Country Fires were the most costly on record. Yet pretty soon they were outdone by even more destructive blazes. Forest fires in 2018 blistered nearly 2 million acres of California and killed more than 100. The situation has become so serious, says Professor Scott Stephens, a wildfire specialist at Berkeley, that wildfires in the Golden State have almost been elevated to a public safety issue. Nor is California unique. From Australia to Siberia, blazes are becoming ever fiercer and more frequent, with some experts predicting that the fire season in the northern hemisphere could lengthen by 20 days by the end of the century.

Of course, human beings aren’t the type to just stand by as flames lick their front porches. Booster is in a new home now – one of many that, in the way they’re built and the way they interact with the environment, stand a far better chance of surviving the next catastrophe. Yet even as architects draw up elegant designs from Napa to the Melbourne suburbs, uncertainties remain. With climate change bubbling on unabated, and fires becoming more ferocious, perhaps we need to think more fundamentally about where we build our homes – or put up structures – accepting that they will one day be swallowed by the flames.

Fires have been a part of California’s landscape for a millennia. Before Europeans started to arrive in large numbers from 1800, an estimated 4 million acres naturally burnt each year. From the 20th century, though, urbanisation dragged that number down: before northern California’s 2017 fires, the last comparable blaze was back in 1964. And for Brendan Kelly, this period of relative calm may explain why so many Californians saw their houses ruined when the conflagration finally came.

“There was never a time before the wildfires in 2017 where any architect would have been interested in anything other than minimum code requirements for sprinklers or smoke evacuation,” says Kelly, an architect from Napa. That changed, he says, when the profession watched the havoc wrought by the Wine Country Fires. For many, though, it was too late – decades too late. Designed in the 1960s or 1970s, before the fire codes were updated in 2008, many northern California houses were built with soaring attics, ventilated to the outside. That helps keep occupants cool even on hot summer days. A clever idea – and one that Kelly says worked “right up until it didn’t”.

Even the layout of streets can cause problems. After wildfires devastated the California town of Paradise in 2018, some victims died in the gridlocked roads while trying to flee

To understand what he means, you first have to grasp how wildfires spread. Action movies sometimes show them as sheer walls of flame, advancing steadily like disciplined rows of redcoats. In fact, says Stephens, they jump and hop and hurl embers and sparks two miles out in front of them. Even if the bulk of a fire avoids a building, its scouts can still spell disaster. That’s particularly true if a structure is superheated already: and with the biggest fires boasting temperatures of more than 1200C, nearly five times those of the hottest household ovens, it’s easy to see how homes can quickly become kindling with just a single spark. 

That, in the end, is how Booster lost his home. At around six in the morning on 10 October, a few hours after he had left with his fiddles, a neighbour sent him a video of his property, apparently untouched and with the fire far away. But when he hiked back over the ridge later that day, the house had disappeared. With so many embers floating about, one must have snuck in through a cooling vent under the eaves near the attic, burning the house from the inside.

In this, too, Booster is not alone. According to one 2010 study, at least 50 per cent of American “home ignitions” start the same way. The story is similar abroad too. Near Melbourne, for example, Kate Cotter, founder of the Bushfire Building Council of Australia, says that the “majority” of buildings in her country’s devastating bushfires are lost due to ember ignitions. 

Yet if embers are the vanguard of forest fires, they do not march alone. For starters, explains Brandon Jorgensen, people in warm places like California want to revel in nature. “They want to be able to enjoy where they are,” says Jorgensen, another Napa architect. That often means building extravagant decks, even if they’re vulnerable to fire. Beyond that come broader environmental challenges. Both Cotter and Stephens note how urbanisation on their respective sides of the ocean has brought humans worryingly close to forests or bushlands. These areas, known as wildland-urban interfaces, pose serious challenges when wildfires begin, especially if residents have dotted their lawns with flammable plants or trees.

Then there’s the makeup of neighbourhoods. One danger, for instance, is if nearby houses have windows that face each other. “When one house catches fire, the window blows up, and the flame comes out the window,” explains Cotter. “And if you’ve got a window exactly opposite that on the neighbouring property, it’ll be the first thing that goes, then the fire will be in the next house.” Sometimes even the very layout of streets can cause problems. After wildfires devastated the California town of Paradise in 2018, some victims died in the gridlocked roads trying to flee. 

Snuggled in a quiet corner of the Napa Valley, a rugged landscape of woods and vineyards north of San Francisco, Mount Veeder Outpost looks, at first, like many other elegantly designed modern homes. Windows tiptoe up from the ground to the roof, and the open design gives the space an airy, uncluttered feel, as if you could wake up and start picking mushrooms right from your bedside. But examine the walls and you’d quickly discover that the opposite is true; however graceful the design, this is a house expressly made to keep the elements out.

Designed by Brandon Jorgensen and his team, Mount Veeder Outpost epitomises many of the ways that architects like him are facing up to the scourge of wildfires. Rather than erecting walls that protect houses from one hour of fire – as dictated by the California Building Code – Jorgensen built three layers. The walls are made from timber; the third and final layer is built from plywood, the type normally used for insulation, and topped with metal sheeting. It goes without saying that the house is also free from the sorts of cavities that hamstring so many older builds. In short, says Jorgensen, Mount Veeder Outpost is the sort of home that could last a 100 years, whether or not a wildfire comes rolling down the hill. 

Mount Veeder Outpost epitomises the ways architects are facing up to the scourge of wildfires
Mount Veeder Outpost epitomises the ways architects are facing up to the scourge of wildfires (Atelier Jorgensen/Instagram)

Other architects are battling the elements in similar ways. Though he was initially thinking of just selling his eight acres after the 2017 blaze, Kelly convinced Booster to rebuild instead (it may have helped that Kelly’s cousin is Merritt Booster, Howard’s wife). Like Jorgensen’s design, the new property is free from dangerous vents. Unlike it, Booster’s new house is made from fire-resistant steel, with an inwardly-sloping metal roof that makes the structure look like it’s huddling close to the ground, trying to stay warm. Other safety features extend beyond the walls of the building itself. Gravel is scattered for six feet around the foundations, and the area is generally free from vegetation, which helps reduce fire risks still further.

And if architects fight wildfires with new builds, others are reflecting more broadly about how to keep communities safe. Kate Cotter says retrofitting older properties is a great place to start, emphasising how even simple measures can make a huge difference. From swapping out garden mulch for stones to sealing gaps with silicone, these are steps, she emphasises, that can be taken for just A$100 (£56). “That seems to excite to people – they feel like they’ve got some power over the situation.” 

Elsewhere, whole towns are thinking about how they can fight fires together. For example, Paradise plans to reconfigure streets for better escape routes. Other vulnerable places, like Flagstaff in Arizona, regulate how close adjacent structures can be built, limiting the risk of window-to-window spread. Letting their imaginations run wild, one team of Polish architects has even conjured a wildfire-busting highrise, envisaging hundreds or thousands of people sheltering together in a single building.

Stephens, for his part, comes at the problem from another angle, suggesting that to truly battle blazes, we can’t just focus on the second half of our wildland-urban interfaces. He points out that in the woodlands of northern California, for instance, dry leaves and branches scattered on the forest floor represent a major fire risk. But with a robust management system, officials can burn or shred them, or even use them to make electricity.

What, then, of the future? Do we simply build and rebuild as the blazes come, doing our best to keep the flames at bay?

Stephens is pleased, then, with a new law tabled by California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein. “It puts resources on both sides of the line of the wildland-urban interface,” Stephens explains. “It wants to do more in the wildland to reduce the rate of spread, but it also wants to provide a grant programme for individuals to retrofit their houses.”

Look at a map of the October 2017 fire, the one that levelled Booster’s home near Santa Rosa, and it looks like a wine stain on a tablecloth, splattered southwest from State Route 128, down towards the Pacific. You don’t notice anything strange, though, until you overlay it with a map of the fire that came before. Apart from a bulge at the top, the 1964 blaze follows the path of its younger cousin almost exactly.

“Everyone forgot that these wildfires do have a level of predictability,” Kelly explains. “They always happen around October, they always start in the north.” Nor do modern experts have to rely on mere maps and folk memory – computer models can now predict up to 99 per cent of fires that start in a region each month.

All this raises some difficult questions. If we know where fires are likely to strike – and as everyone I spoke to emphasised, no house, except perhaps a concrete bunker, can ever be totally fireproof – maybe we should just stop building in risky areas? That, anyway, is what Kelly argues. Unsurprisingly, most architects are not “wired” to talk potential clients out of building new homes. But he suggests the profession could, if nothing else, point them towards older properties in safer urban settings. Aaron Betsky, director of Virginia Tech's School of Architecture and Design, makes a similar point, suggesting that “we have to appeal to the judgements of individual architects”.

Clearly, none of this is easy in practice. If you’ve grown old on a property, raised your family there, do you really want to be frogmarched away? Though he sees the logic in having stricter regulations about where we should build, Booster implies as much himself. “In general, people should make their own decisions – to the extent that they’re responsible for the results.” Jorgensen agrees, although he encourages his clients to not take chances, for instance warning the new owners of Mount Veeder Outpost about some flammable trees they planted; he’s ultimately not going to “shove the decision down their throat”.

Nor do officials seem interested in getting tough. That’s partly a question of price. In Australia, Cotter says, buying back all the houses within 50m of flammable bushland would cost an eye-watering A$1 trillion. And in America, property rights are just too sacred – homebuilding in high-risk zones across the US actually increased by 41 per cent between 1990 and 2010.

But if we can’t change where people build, could we change what they build? In a daring argument, Betsky says we should abandon the ideal of architecture as “building for the ages” and instead accept that what comes up must come down. Among other examples, Betsky says the Covid-19 crisis shows how successful this philosophy can be. As we speak over the phone, he watches construction workers erect temporary structures to help Virginia Tech operate as the pandemic rages. “That kind of light and flexible response is what we need.”

A fascinating idea, but one that’s probably harder to swallow in practice. As Jorgensen says, almost everyone, wherever they live, craves nostalgia. “I think the thought of building something different frightens them.” To explain what he means, Jorgensen describes the proliferation of flammable wooden decks he sees in his corner of northern California – many built, he says, in the exact spots that helped burn earlier properties.

What, then, of the future? Do we simply build and rebuild as the blazes come, doing our best to keep the flames at bay? Look at what the scientists are saying and you get the sense that something may eventually have to change. If even half their warnings are wrong – from the doubling of California blazes by 2050 to the doubling of wildfire smoke deaths in America by 2100 – Kelly is adamant that we’ll soon be forced to reconsider our relationship with flammable wildlands (the 585 fires that are ravaging his state at the time of writing are a case in point).

In Australia, Kate Cotter agrees, arguing that “we’re going to have to embed resilience to wildfire and other hazards into how we live across the board.” What that looks like on the ground is still uncertain, though Cotter and Stephens both highlight the belated arrival of government into the fray, with education, forest management and retrofitting programmes all gaining popularity. 

These enormous challenges feel awfully distant when viewed from Booster’s new home near Santa Rosa. Although he says “a project like this is never really finished”, he and his wife are safely moved in. When we spoke in mid-August, he was working on polishing off cabinets and windows fittings. He describes how his new house has a tower, is three storeys high, and how, when lockdown finally ends, his grandchildren can come and camp there.

He describes how, on a clear day, you can see San Francisco, 50 miles away. And he describes how, after he and his wife are gone, his kids will be able to remodel the property, because the external walls carry all the load and the internal ones can be moved around easily. “They can make it into a winery or a tasting room or whatever they want,” he laughs. A wonderful image – even as ominous new fires cause devastation not so far away.

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