cnn
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Sitting in the hotel room where his family took shelter from the Eaton Fire, Eric Martin was sure that his Altadena, California, home (the place he once thought his 1- and 3-year-old children would know as their childhood home) had disappeared.
When a friend sent him a photo of the house still standing, he and his wife hugged each other, stunned, crying discreetly so as not to alarm their children.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Martin told CNN on Monday, his voice breaking. “The fire was advancing very quickly. I thought it would surely go out. It just didn’t seem possible that he could still be standing, and there he was.”
Martin returned to the house later that day and discovered that it was indeed still there, as were those on either side. Almost everything else on his block was gone.
“It’s just ashes and bare chimneys,” he said.
Up to 12,000 homes, businesses and other structures could have been destroyed by the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles County, turning entire communities into piles of rubble.
But here and there, in the midst of the Palisades and Eaton fires, in places not protected by the private fire crews of the rich, one house survived, an apparent miracle, raising questions about how one structure can survive while others do. located within a reasonable distance are burned to the ground.
While it may be impossible to know for sure, several variables could be at play for those homes that survive, experts say: smart, fire-resistant design; a homeowner preparation, such as clearing flammable vegetation; the sometimes unknown intervention of firefighters; wind and weather; or, frankly, luck.
“We’ve seen some examples where ‘luck’ isn’t the worst word to describe how some houses survived,” said Janice Coen, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who studies fire behavior.
“But sometimes people just don’t recognize factors in the physical environment,” he said. “It could be a matter of luck or some action they took.”
It may seem that the survival of a house depends largely on its construction. And in fact, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is increasingly encouraging homeowners to “harden” their homes, implementing features that help protect them from fire.
This may include building or retrofitting key parts of a home (such as roof, walls, windows, decks, garages, fences, and gutters, among others) with more ember- and flame-resistant materials, such as concrete and steel.
Architect Greg Chasen believes several of these features helped save a house he designed and helped build last year that survived the Palisades Fire: He posted a photo of the house on X, showing it nearly intact, in perfect condition at the time. next to its neighbor, now a charred husk with a burned-out vehicle on its frame in the driveway.
Building the house to withstand a wildfire was not a “design priority,” Chasen told CNN. But both he and the owner had witnessed these types of fires firsthand, and they proceeded with that threat in mind. “Once you see what a wind-driven fire can do, I don’t know, it’s just indelible.”
The architect highlighted some features of the house, such as the walls, which have a one-hour fire resistance rating, meaning a fire could be next to the wall for that long without breaking out. The roof was made of non-combustible materials, he said, as was the deck finish.
Multi-pane tempered glass windows were also a “big part of the equation,” Chasen said. The only damage to the house was to two of the exterior panels: one cracked and the other broke completely. But the interior panels held, Chasen said, preventing sparks from entering the home, where furniture could have fueled the fire.
In California, adding wildfire safety measures beyond building codes can increase new home construction costs by 2% to 13%, according to a report from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. Retrofitting existing homes can and is likely to range from $2,000 to $15,000, while total retrofitting could cost up to $100,000, according to Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonprofit research group.
Chasen also praised the homeowner for taking steps to prepare the home. The landscaping was already pristine, the architect said, but as the fire approached, the homeowner spent hours clearing the land. For example, he left open a wooden gate attached to the house, which could have acted as a “fuse” if the fence caught fire, Chasen said. Garbage and an outdoor barbecue were also kept away from the house.
This is called creating a “defensible space” around the home, Coen said: a buffer zone free of flammable materials, such as the dry vegetation that has helped exacerbate this round of fires in Southern California. Creating this “defensible space,” he said, gives a home a greater chance of survival by reducing sources of “radiant heat” directly above the home.
“We tend to think of big fires destroying trees,” he said. “But often they can be small fires that sneak up on the house, and that’s why defensible space is so important.”
Firefighters look for these elements, Coen said, and make decisions about which homes might be more defensible than others and therefore deserving of the resources needed to save them.
“Our experiences as firefighters on the ground allow us to see which homes can be saved and which are destroyed,” state Fire Chief Daniel Berlant told CNN in November, as another wildfire burned through nearly 18,000 acres in the state. outside of Los Angeles. “The research we’ve done has really led us to rely on science to be able to say that if you take these mitigation measures, the house is much more likely to survive a wildfire.”
But there is often no evidence whether a first responder worked to defend a home, said Alexander Maranghides, the senior technical leader for the wildland-urban interface group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
In fact, determining why a house survived can require in-depth research and reconstruction that takes years, like that carried out by Maranghides’ team, he said, rejecting the idea of a “miracle house.”
“It’s not a miracle, it’s just that we don’t know,” he said. “Was it luck? Was it the wind? Was it the wind and the defensive action? What happened? “You can’t say because you don’t know.”
Some homes (not including those protected by expensive private firefighting equipment that often provoke negative reactions) survive because a firefighter was well placed to defend them.
Another factor could be wind direction, which can vary rapidly in both space and time depending on weather, topography and air temperature, among other variables, said Coen, who is working to determine how a fire can spread based on in the airflow, weather and winds that fire creates.
“Even in wild areas, far from houses, you will see what we call the ‘combustion mosaic.’ That is, there will be a lot of variability in the severity of the combustion,” he said. “Some areas will burn completely, but other nearby areas will remain intact and there will be islands of unburned fuel.”
In an urban environment, “a house’s survival may be due to local wind effects that may not be known about,” Coen said.
As for Martin, whose Altadena home survived, he has no idea why his house is still standing. It’s a stucco house, one of those fire-resistant materials, but it’s also surrounded by dry vegetation and bushes that haven’t seen rain in months.
“It seems like pure luck,” Martin said.
CNN’s Alaa Elassar contributed to this report.
