Architect Explains How to Design Fire-Resistant Homes with Former Cal Fire Chief Jon Heggie

Jon Heggie (JH): When people built homes 20-30 years ago, they didn't have the environment that we see right now.

Wayne Visbeen (WV): Our hearts are heavy with respect to the fires in California. In addition, my fiancé Carrie’s brother was the Chief of Cal Fire.

JH: Hey, my name's Jon Heggie. I am recently retired after working within the Fire Service for 31 years.

WV: Using our expertise and having Jon Heggie as a consultant, we are going to make a concerted effort to design homes that will fit the vernacular, fit the style of what people want, and yet are as fire-resistant as possible.

JH: No one wants to live in a concrete bunker, but [we’re] looking at different ways to make building construction more resilient and resistive, but also beautiful.

WV: The question is, can I design a California bungalow, which is traditionally a wood structure, and use concrete as my base? How in the world do we start to get this to feel like the Southern California we want it to feel like, and yet have the fire resistance that we need?

JH: That starts with building construction [and] the materials we're using. Whether it be the roof on top of your home or the siding, [the goal] is to eliminate anything that has that potential for being combustible. Houses don't typically burn from direct flame. What they burn from is being showered with embers, and where those embers fall and where they become seated is why homes burn out. The least amount of opportunity for ember cast to become embedded into a structure is really the key to preventing [fires].

WV: We're going to do some different textures in the concrete. This is all going to be lightweight concrete siding, and we're going to try to integrate those materials in this entire structure so that we can get fire-resistant exterior materials. Then we want to deal with the fact that the wind will potentially blow windows in.

JH: Where are the open windows? We always want to have a nice view. We want those windows. Are they facing toward where the potentially highest risk would be?

WV: If a home is built beautifully to withstand the fire and the wind blows the windows in, the contents of the home are now burned. So you have to think about hurricane glass in a wind-resistant method as well as a fire-resistant home.

JH: Where we had a lot problems in the past with homes burning down is because they had open vents on the side of the structures. Unfortunately, it was great for ventilation and for comfort, but it just was an amazing seat for fires to get started.

WV: So it's the materials on the exterior, it's the glass. It's then going to be the landscape and the environment.

JH: We all love having lush landscape around our home, [but] be smart about it. Maybe not having those shrubs directly next to the home, creating space in a smart way where maybe you have the driveway that creates a defensible space between your home and that ornamental vegetation. We still want to have nice things, but just be smart about it.

WV: Then, the question is going to be on a lot of these 50 by a-hundred-and-some foot lots, how to protect them from one another? We're going to want to think about walls and ways of blocking between homes in ways that are beautiful, yet can also maybe become fire separators.

JH: Where we fall short and where we can see innovation is to look at what has just happened in Los Angeles and get lessons learned from some of those structures that burned. Look at the pictures of the structures ahead of time. Look at the ones that were affected and see, okay, these ones were obviously affected because of this, landscape being too close to the home. So being really proactive of taking intelligence from what we've seen and maybe using that as information moving forward.

WV: To answer the question, I just drew a very simple structure here. Obviously, the walls can be concrete. And you think about this wall, and the dormer can be stacked on the wall below, so that concrete can structure and go up on the second floor. The same in the back, if we do dormers in the rear of the home. They can stack on top. So now you put your roof on the house and basically then the roof structure is the next question. What's it going to be made of? Are we going to do concrete shingles? Which we can. Are we going to do a metal roof? What's going to be the most fire-resistant? Because really a lot of the fires start with an ember. The ember gets embedded into a piece of wood or into a place that potentially can burn, and next thing you know, the fire starts. So everything we can do to keep that fire and that ember at bay will help the process. So don't think you couldn't have this traditional home in a fire-resistant material, because, in fact, we can.