How to rebuild a more fire-proof Los Angeles

Last year, as other insurance companies fled from California, one startup launched with the goal to help homeowners in the highest-risk areas get coverage. The startup, called Stand, believes that by making targeted design changes, homes can become resilient enough that they’re feasible to insure. While the company focuses on retrofits for existing homes, the same strategies apply to houses built from scratch. We talked to Stand’s CEO about what homeowners should consider as they begin to rebuild in L.A.—and how the right decisions could not just protect residents but begin to deal with the state’s insurance crisis.

Protect yourself from the house next door

In Pacific Palisades, part of the fire danger came from the fact that homes were densely packed together. If the home next door is burning, that’s a problem for your own house not just because the flames may spread, but because the blast of heat can cause damage.

One small step that can help: using tempered glass in windows. “In any window that’s facing anything burning, one of the biggest risk points is that the glass will break from the heat, and then embers will fall inside,” says Stand CEO Dan Preston. “It’s a way a lot of these homes ultimately burn down. So you want to have tempered glass, which dramatically improves the odds that it won’t break.” Other materials on the house should also be fire-resistant, from the siding to the roof, to protect them from embers blowing through the air.

A tall stucco wall between yards can also help stop the spread of fire. In the L.A. fires, some of the homes that survived had this feature. Built-in sprinkler systems, which spray exterior walls with water and flame retardant, are another solution. (One example is from a company called Frontline, which makes a system that attaches to a house with reserves of water and foam, and which automatically turns on when a fire is within range of a house.) Preston says his team had previously been cautious about how well sprinkler systems work. But the recent fires proved their effectiveness. “We’ve found a couple of examples where they basically saved the home,” he says.

When rebuilding from scratch, homeowners should also consider a new layout. If a house has a smaller footprint, for example, that means there can be more space between it and the neighbors. If there’s at least 15 feet between your home and the next one, as long as your house is built with the right materials, “your chances of surviving are much higher,” says Preston.

Keep embers out

Terrifying videos from the L.A. fires show embers flying through the air, propelled by hurricane-force winds. Most houses in wildfires ignite because embers make their way through gaps at the bottom or top of the building. Once an ember gets inside, it’s hard to avoid the house burning down.

Making sure that there’s flashing (thin strips of metal) around the edges of your house, and that vents are covered with an ember-proof mesh, can keep embers out. “These are not huge changes—hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars of changes,” says Preston. “They can be pretty minor things. And that can be the difference between losing your multi-million-dollar home or not.”

Maintain defensible space

The first five feet around a house—what fire agencies call “Zone 0″—is the most critical place to avoid having flammable objects, whether that’s wooden deck chairs, trash cans, or a pile of dead leaves. If embers fly into your yard and ignite something close to your home, it’s almost inevitable that the fire will spread to the house itself. Inside that five-foot buffer zone, the ideal landscaping might be stones and small, high-moisture plants like cactus.

A little farther away from the house, it’s fine to have trees, though the type of tree matters. (One of the lessons of the L.A. fires was that palm trees are especially flammable, since they tend to have dead branches near the top; native oak trees are safer.) Trees also need to be trimmed correctly. Stand uses models to advise homeowners about where limbs should be cut to make it less likely that the crown can catch on fire.

If a house is built with the safest materials, there’s more flexibility with landscaping. “If you have tempered glass and you have fire-resistant siding, you can actually have more vegetation near the home because it’s less likely that the home will be lost in those cases,” Preston says.

The more that houses are built and retrofitted with these strategies in mind, he says, the more that insurance rates can go down. That’s true not just for the individual homeowners making changes, but for the market as a whole. “The thing that really drives insurance costs is not just the likelihood that your home will burn down in a year, it’s the likelihood that your whole neighborhood gets lost,” he says. “If you could demonstrate that these fires no longer burn down 10,000 homes, but burn down 10, it’s not going to just reduce your insurance costs by 10% or 20%. It could cut it in half.”