For some Wyomingites, getting home insurance has become harder due to the increasing risk that their home will burn in a wildfire. A new designation aims to address that by certifying that a homeowner has taken steps to “harden” their home and protect their property.
Laura Blauel with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety talked about the nonprofit’s Wildfire Prepared Home program, which recently expanded into Wyoming, with Wyoming Public Radio’s Nicky Ouellet.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Nicky Ouellet: This might seem obvious, but how does a home catch fire from a wildfire?
Laura Blauel: Most often it's embers. Once the embers land on a home and catch on fire, everything around it is an exposure. Everything around it can catch fire from either embers from that burning home or from the radiant heat or direct flames from the home. The wind will lay down the flames and let it reach the home next door or any of the connective fuels between the home and the adjoining home.
NO: When you say embers, this is little sparky bits that are landing, maybe, in a gutter that's got leaves in it or something?
LB: Exactly. The embers can fly miles in front of the flaming front of a wildfire. Or once it gets into the community and we have home-to-home fire spread, that produces different types of embers that can be even bigger and hotter. And those will land anywhere. They can land on things next to your home or on the home itself, and if anything is flammable or not non-combustible, [if] it can burn, then it will.
Nicky: Your organization is offering a new program called the Wildfire Prepared Home. What is this certificate?
LB: Wildfire Prepared Home's been around since 2022. We are new in Wyoming.
The designation comes after a homeowner downloads the checklist from wildfireprepared.org, goes through the checklist and looks all around their home: "What do I need to do to make my home more survivable and insurable?"
It's a pretty easy checklist, and if you have a contractor or landscaper that you work with, you can share it with them, and it walks through. It's got photos, and it's step by step.
If you'd rather hire somebody, we do work with a company. They will do the assessment and arrange for contractors to come out and do all of the mitigation work for them. Then, also assist them with the designation.
Once you do all those steps, we give the homeowner a certificate that says, "This home is wildfire prepared." That verification process is really key for insurers.
They're looking for science-based steps that a homeowner takes, and then that third-party verification to ensure they have it, and that's what that certificate, that piece of paper, does for you.
NO: So if I get this certificate and I bring it to my insurer, is it going to lower my premiums?
LB: It could. Each insurer has different requirements, but all of them will look at reduced risk, and they should either let you continue your insurance [or] some may offer discounts.
NO: You've mentioned a couple of these basic steps to mitigate a home from wildfire risk. One was this defensible space. What is that?
LB: Defensible space is what's immediately around your home. We go out 30 feet. A lot of local fire jurisdictions might go out as much as 100 feet. But we start at what we call the home ignition zone, so that's the home and then the five feet immediately around it is the most critical.
That needs to be non-combustible, because that's where embers can gather. They hit the wall of the home, they fall down, go out about five feet and anything in that zone can ignite. So no plants, all of that needs to be moved five feet away.
Then, in the five to 30 foot zone, which is another zone that we look at as critical, is just thinning your vegetation and making sure you have good spacing between plants. You can still have beautiful trees and plants, just not right within five feet of your home.
NO: What about like propane tanks? Grills?
LB: Anything combustible, like a propane tank, needs to have its own little defensible space zone around it. So locating it at least 10 feet from the structure, and then making sure there's no grass, creating its own little buffer zone right around that propane tank. So if a fire is moving through, it will hit that defensible space zone around the tank and not ignite the tank.
The same thing with, like you said, grills. A lot of those are non-combustible, so moving those just out of your five foot zone. You can still have them on your deck or next to your home, near your home, just not within that five foot zone.
NO: What are some of the other basic steps?
LB: Vents are critical, because like we were talking, embers are the primary source of ignition for homes. So making sure that you enclose all your vents with eighth inch metal mesh, and that allows the embers to probably catch in the vent. If they do squeeze through, they won't have enough energy to ignite anything.
It's really important that you look at all the vents in your home. Some people have foundation vents. There's vents on your roof. There's vents in your eaves. You want to make sure that you look at all of the ember intrusion places: against vents, under doorways, anywhere where an ember could squeeze through. Make sure you've sealed those up.
NO: Any other basic steps that you want to cover?
LB: Once you protect your home from embers, it's good to keep going. Working with your neighbors is critical because fire doesn't see property lines. So hardening your own home, working with your neighbors to harden theirs and then working as a neighborhood, you can go on to the next steps.
Next time you replace your roof, you might want to enclose your eaves and make sure that you don't have open wood exposed where embers can gather and ignite. Or you look at your windows. You want to have dual pane, dual tempered windows.
NO: How do you know that these are methods that will work to reduce risk?
LB: We do that in two ways. First, after every major wildfire, we dispatch our research team. They look at which homes burned, which ones survived and why they survived.
We take all of those findings and go back to our research lab in South Carolina, where we have a chamber, and we create a full-scale home. We build a full-scale home in the middle of our chamber on a big turntable, and then we have a wall of fans that can generate winds up to 130 miles an hour. We blow embers at the home and we determine how it fails so we can validate what we saw in the field to make sure that when we produce our standard, it's a verified standard. It's based on post-fire analysis, as well as our research, as well as our full-scale testing.
NO: As you said, fire does not respect property lines. How much of the responsibility to protect homes and neighborhoods falls on individual homeowners versus maybe the county, the state, even federal land managers?
LB: The home ignition zone is really where it happens, right? That's where a home ignites, and so it's a homeowner's responsibility first and foremost.
Of course, open space needs to be managed by those other partners. But a homeowner – and this is good news, too – has not just the responsibility but the ability to be empowered to say, "Hey, I am going to make sure my home is protected as it can be from the next wildfire."
You really wanna look at your own property first, and then work with your neighbors.
