We put together this quick debrief and checklist to help survey your roof for the average homeowner. The roof can be the most important element of your property’s survivability so these items definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.

By taking care of materials, debris, and general maintenance (for low costs and low effort!), you greatly increase your chances of protecting not only you and your family but some of your most prized possessions. Read more to find out!

You see that gorgeous tree hanging over this house? How beautiful - it gives you shade, it makes things a bit cooler, and the scenery is amazing.

But believe it or not, some of the most beautiful things become deadly when paired with natural disasters like hurricanes. That tree is the difference between surviving and not.

Learn more about reducing this risk here.

Storm shutters are a fundamental part of your home’s surviveability. Why?

There are many weak points on a property that we probably don’t think about, one of which being our doors and especially our windows. Glass protectants are great, but it’s important to highlight the many ways we can help protect our most valuable assets during hurricane season.

Defensible space can range from heavily complex and expensive tasks, like adding concrete fuel breaks along your home and changing the material of your roof and siding, to the smaller details that you don’t second think. But, small innocuous actions could be what leads fire right to your home.

So, what’s something we all do that we probably shouldn’t? Leaning stuff against our home’s wooden structures. This is something that you don’t necessarily have to remedy immediately, but it’s definitely something to remember if wildfire seems like it’s coming your way.

Storing stuff underneath your deck seems easy, it seems like a safe bet, and you might even imagine that you’re keeping out animals from hanging out under there.

But, it’s not safe in high-risk wildfire areas, especially if you have grass or other flammable ground cover around your home. The leaves and anything else flammable stored underneath your deck will catch on fire. Even if your deck doesn’t ignite from an ember landing on it, it might ignite from the direct flames catching underneath it.

Siding is something in defensible space that can be seen as a ‘nice to have’ all the way to ‘TOTALLY must have’ depending on where you live. The reasoning behind it can be a bit complicated, and that’s because fires can start in 3 different ways: embers, heat, and direct flame exposure.

Some siding can be more resilient to embers hitting it, and then bouncing off because it’s a vertical plane. It’s less of a concern than roofs because it doesn’t land flat and stay on the material all the time, so it has less time to ignite.

Roofs are something we don’t think about a lot. They’re up and away, out of sight, out of mind. But, our roofs basically are the most vulnerable parts of our house. Think about it: when it rains, snows, or hails, your roof is the one of the only things keeping the elements outside. So, what does that mean in a high risk wildfire zone? It means that not having the proper roof materials can literally rain fire from above.

A new study just landed from the University of Montana that brings bad news: closing your windows isn’t enough to keep wildfire smoke from infiltrating your home. Building science is a constantly evolving field, and more recent developments push for something referred to as an air tight envelope. This means that when your home is built, different materials and techniques are used to fully seal the openings of your home to stop air from being able to pass through.

If you have plastic gutters filled with flammable vegetation, even if you have an ignition resistant roof (like metal), the plastic / vinyl can melt from the heat and fall to the ground, potentially catching on balconies, decks, and more. And that’s really all it takes to lose your home.

Everyone loves their fireplaces in the fall, and the sign of a chimney puffing out smoke on a fall day genuinely is the hallmark of cozy fall and winter seasons everywhere. But, branches NEAR your chimney can get your house a little too cozy with wildfire.

The height of fire season is almost upon us and if you’re like many Americans in high-risk wildfire zones, you’ve yet to start on your defensible space and wildfire prep!

Recently, Northern Canada has been ravaged by fires that have blown smoke into the East Coast, making much of the air unbreathable for weeks. This is just a taste of what the West Coast has felt more times than we can count and it’s only getting worse.

Wildfires have been going on since before civilization began. Let’s go into how humans became the target of wildfire, instead of a beneficiary.

Wildfire is the only natural disaster that we, as a species, still try to fight. So we have to be prepared to discuss how wildfire works in order to fight it most effectively.

Premiums have gone up over 300% in the last decade, with entire zipcodes being dropped and neighborhoods left vulnerable. But why? Why is this happening and is there anything we can do about it?

Defensible space refers to the area around any structure (from 5 feet to 100 feet+) that has been cleared specifically with the purpose of slowing down the rate at which fire spreads. This is one of the most important tools for residential wildfire prevention.