Rebuilding after a fire: lessons from previous disasters

As fires continue to burn in the Los Angeles area, thousands of people who lost their homes are now confronted with difficult decisions — including whether to rebuild and how to do so in a way that gives them a better chance against the next wildfire.     

It’s an experience Matteo Rebeschini and Melanie Glover understand too well. Three years ago, the Marshall Fire tore through their neighborhood in Superior, Colorado, near Boulder.

Rebeschini was at home with his two kids. “Very quickly it became dark outside, and the smoke started coming through the walls,” he recalled. 

They were rescued by a passing police officer, but their house was destroyed. “At first you are in survival mode,” he said. “So you’re displaced. You have lost everything. You have a lot to process.”     

Rebeschini and his wife, Glover, thought about selling the lot and starting over somewhere else. But they loved the area. It was right next to acres of open space, but with easy access to a Target and downtown businesses. Then they learned that their insurance company would pay less if they didn’t rebuild on the same site. 

“We basically knew that if you want to go back and live there, and that’s what we wanted, we need to build differently,” Rebeschini said. “We need to build better.”

Glover is an avid gardener, and she’d noticed that, while the fire had destroyed the big, plastic planters in the yard, the dirt inside the pots was still sitting there, intact. 

“I was like, ‘I need to build a house out of earth because it doesn’t burn,’” she said. 

She found a local company that makes blocks out of compressed sand and clay and hired builders to construct a new house with the blocks. 

“So you’ve got two sets of these blocks with a space in the middle,” Glover explained during a recent Zoom call, pointing to what looked like a brick wall behind her. “That space in the middle is filled with perlite, which is also a fire retardant. It doesn’t catch fire.”

Because the blocks are air-dried, not fired, they have a low carbon impact. The company, Nova Terra, says they also reduce the energy needed to heat and cool the home by up to 75%. The new house also has triple-pane windows and a ventless roof to prevent fire from getting inside the house.

“Sadly, there’s not such a thing as a fireproof house,” said Andrew Michler, whose firm designed several houses in Superior after the Marshall Fire. “We like to think of it as loading the dice in our favor.”

Michler designs “passive” houses, which are low-energy, fire-resilient buildings. 

“The basic principles are making the home as airtight as possible,” he said. “Make the home more simple, so there’s less places for embers to go in.” 

It can cost up to 10% more to build this way, Michler said, though that’s offset by lower energy bills. He got into building after his father lost his house to a firestorm in Oakland, California, in 1991. In the aftermath, people built much bigger houses, making it easier for wildfire to spread.

“We’ve seen a lot of these fires, one big house next to another big house. It’s like dominoes,” he said. “One leads to another.”

Ideally, whole communities would follow fire-resilient building practices, Michler said, but every house makes a difference.

“We remove one or two of those dominoes, meaning that we harden a few of those projects, and hopefully more, so that that protects their neighbors throughout,” he said. 

But rethinking where and how we build is difficult in the midst of recovery, said Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“Unless we do that work ahead of time, it’s very hard to make those changes at the moment of rebuilding, when people really just want to get back to any degree of normalcy as fast as they can,” she said. 

After the Marshall Fire in Colorado, officials waived stricter building codes for fire victims so they could rebuild more quickly and affordably.

“I think that most people did the best job that they could,” said Melanie Glover.

Her family moved into their earth-block home in July, and she said it feels solid, quiet and safe in a way their previous, drafty wood house never did. 

Would it survive another fire?

“I don’t really want to say that,” she said. “But I feel confident that if something like that happened again, that everyone would be safe in the house until they could evacuate.”