Some Homes Beat the Heat: Design, Landscaping Helped Withstand Fires in California

By Kirsten Scharnberg, Chicago Tribune

Oct. 29–LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. — The hand-painted sign in front of the home, one of just a handful still standing amid mind-boggling destruction, credited a higher power for the house’s unlikely survival: “We believe in miracles.”

Yet Adrienne Freeman, a Yosemite National Park official who has been working the California fires for nearly a week, believes something very different can explain why some structures survived the ravaging fires and others were reduced to unrecognizable piles of rubble.

“Some people up here are extremely, extremely fire savvy,” Freeman said, speaking of the beautiful communities — many of them vacation destinations — around picturesque Lake Arrowhead. “Many of them have done everything possible to reduce the likelihood that their homes will be lost in the event of a fire. Others have not been as vigilant.”

Since the wildfires were destroying more than 2,000 home in Southern California last week, many from elsewhere in the nation were stuck on one simple question: Why do so many people choose to build their homes in areas that extensively burn, year after devastating year?

The breathtaking views, the peace and the fresh mountain air around Lake Arrowhead answer much of that question. But experts like Freeman say that the trade-off for such natural beauty must be a dramatic shift in construction techniques, in forest thinning and in landscaping patterns to decrease the chance that so much will be lost each year in blazes like the Slide and Grass Valley Fires that have consumed close to 300 homes around this lake in the past several days.

A contrast in survival

People, for example, must stop building quaint vacation homes with highly combustible shaker siding and enormous wrap-around wooden porches. They must agree to clear some of the very trees they are leaving the city to appreciate. They must surround their homes with rock pathways that serve as fire breaks instead of extensive landscaping that will go quickly up in flames when the Santa Ana winds start blowing sparks and embers.

“A lot of residents are skeptics,” said Veronica Magnuson, a lands officer for the U.S. Forest Service in San Bernardino County, home to Lake Arrowhead’s communities. “A lot don’t want to cut down a single tree. It’s essentially a problem of loving our forests and this area to death.”

Grass Valley, just west of Lake Arrowhead, is a stunning neighborhood that was quickly threatened by the fast-moving wildfires last week. Golf carts still stand in the middle of the country club, evidence of games abandoned as residents fled.

From a perch atop one street, Brentwood Drive, it is possible to see exactly the path that the fire blazed through the valley, clearing nearly everything in its path. But there are houses that illustrate what Freeman and others are talking about.

Take one lonely structure standing at a beautiful point of lookout over the valley. The houses around it are gone, and combing through their rubble one can discover they had wooden shake roofs and wooden siding. In contrast, the surviving home is stucco with slate and stone detailing. The heat the home endured was so intense that the exterior paint is cracked and peeling and most of the windows have broken out. The eaves along the home’s roof were built closed in, with little overhang, a deliberate design that prevents blowing embers from becoming trapped under them and starting a roof fire. Even the home chimney was designed to prevent blowing embers from entering it.

“It is not an accident this home is still here,” Freeman explained.

The house even served as something of a tackling linebacker for others near it. The wildfire was clearly slowed — if not stopped — by its construction, and the homes directly behind it survived with little damage.

Officials around Lake Arrowhead have tried for years — since epic fires tore through the area in 2003 — to get residents and communities to operate with that kind of forethought. But it has not been easy.

Too many trees

Magnuson said that a healthy forest climate should have somewhere in the ballpark of 100 trees per acre — any more translates to trees that die or that never reach their full potential. And during a forest fire those smaller, weaker trees simply become high-octane fuel.

Yet despite all the outreach forest officials are doing, many people refuse to thin trees, believing that would change the rustic beauty of the area. In many places around Lake Arrowhead, there can be as many as 2,000 trees per acre.

“We try our best to convince people,” Magnuson said. “Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don’t.”

One Lake Arrowhead community, Deer Lodge Park, had been working closely with forest officials for the past several years on “fuel reduction” programs — the thinning of trees, unnecessary wild grasses and bushes that feed wildfires. Though fires tore through the area around Deer Lodge Park, the community suffered much smaller losses than others because of its efforts.

Sadly, it is often wildfires that finally persuade people to begin to make the changes necessary to reduce their fire risk, officials say. They expect that after this fall’s fire season, a large number of Lake Arrowhead area residents will take advantage of a program launched several years ago. The program, funding by the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Association and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, reimburses residents up to 75 percent of the costs of thinning out trees and unnecessary brush on their property.

Yet doing everything right doesn’t always mean a home will survive. A few canyons over from the Lake Arrowhead wildfire, the Santiago Fire threatened homes in Silverado Canyon.

There, Linda Gottlieb and Don Hrossowyc, who moved from Chicago in the late 1970s, had built a home used as a model for fire safety.

“We’ve done everything they say you should,” Gottlieb said as the wildfire neared her home over the weekend. “But if the fire is big enough, they say that none of it could be enough.”

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kscharnberg@tribune.com

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