Protecting your home from wildfire: things you can do

Following up on the post that I made yesterday on structure protection strategies used by structure firefighters in the wildland-urban interface, I want to share a couple of videos with you on things you can do to protect your home from wildfires. Both of these videos focus on the work of Dr. Jack Cohen, a fire science researcher with the US Forest Service. I would encourage you to go the FirewiseUSA website where there are many resources that you can access to learn how to protect your home from wildfire. There are over 1500 FirewiseUSA sites (or communities), a listing of these sites may be found here or you may look at an interactive map where you my learn about each community, for example you can zoom in on your state and learn about firewise sites in your state.

The first video, just under 20 minutes long, seems to have been done many years ago. In this video you learn about research focusing on how wildfires lead to home ignitions, following up with some tips on what you can do to protect your home. I include this video for an historical perspective on Dr. Cohen's fire science research.


Direct link to video from Public Resource Org


The second video is just over 13 minutes and was done more recently. Dr. Cohen takes you through the danger posed by fire brands to homes and other buildings. He then takes you through an example of a home that has many ignition sources around the house and what the homeowner can do to create a defensible space around a home, finally there is an interview with a homeowner whose house survived a wildfire thanks to creating a defensible space.


Direct link to video from the National Fire Protection Association

Keeping your home and property safe in the wildland-urban interface (pt 2 of 2)

direct link to video on Home Improvements: A Firewire Approach

I learned about this video on Firewise home improvements from this video page on Firewise.

Keeping your home and property safe in the wildland-urban interface (pt 1 of 2)

I am not naive enough to think that a wildland fire  won't affect be because I don't believe I live in or near the wildland-urban interface. Perhaps because of NJ's recently changing weather (wet to dry and perhaps back to wet again), I found myself thinking about what homeowners can do to keep their homes safe. To continue due diligence regarding wildfire danger no matter what the weather is or is not doing.
I struggled yesterday to find something to share on this topic when I found these two videos last night on videos for the general public found on Firewise dot org . By the way, Firewise dot org has a lot of information on their website about what homeowners and communities can do to be firewise. 
I learned a lot from these videos. For example, over the last few years I had heard that homeowners should keep a 100 foot zone around their homes clear of trees and debris to ward off wildfires. But I never where that 100 foot figure came from. Now I do. Watch these two videos and you'll find out where the 100 foot figure came from. In a couple of days, I'll share another video from the same website with more information on how to make your home itself firesafe.



At the time I posted this on 10/5/13 at about 1:30 PM, I found that the audio was muted when using the Chrome Browser on my Mac. If you should have a problem, a workaround that worked for me is moving the slide next to the speaker icon, this got the audio working for me. Safari and Firefox on my Mac did not appear to have this problem. I don't have a PC, so I can't speak to what happens to Internet Explorer or other PC browsers.