Ready to prep your home for whatever Mother Nature throws your way? Join me as I chat with Fred Malik from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety about getting your casa ready for wildfires, storms, and hurricanes. We’re diving deep into all the cool things you can do to beef up your home’s defenses, from roof upgrades to simple landscaping tweaks that can make a world of difference. Fred spills the beans on the Fortified program, aimed at making homes resilient against the elements, and trust me, you'll want to hear about the practical steps you can take to protect your space—and maybe even save a few bucks on insurance while you're at it. So, whether you're in hurricane territory or just looking to fortify against those pesky winds, this episode is packed with tips you won't want to miss!

To get your questions answered by Eric G give us a call in the studio at 833-239-4144 24/7 and Eric G will get back to you and answer your question and you might end up in a future episode of Around the House.

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Information given on the Around the House Show should not be considered construction or design advice for your specific project, nor is it intended to replace consulting at your home or jobsite by a building professional. The views and opinions expressed by those interviewed on the podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Around the House Show.

In this lively chat, Eric and Fred Malik take a deep dive into the world of home safety, particularly focusing on how to prep your home for wildfires, storms, and hurricanes. The conversation kicks off with Eric sharing a personal anecdote about a devastating storm experience, setting the tone for a discussion that balances humor with some serious insights. Fred brings in his expertise from the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety, emphasizing the importance of being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to home safety. They break down practical steps homeowners can take, such as ensuring your roof is fortified, inspecting for damages, and keeping up with regular maintenance. There’s a playful banter about the crazy weather patterns sweeping across the nation, reminding us that no place is truly safe from nature's fury. They also dig into the Fortified program, which offers guidelines on how to build and maintain homes that can withstand severe weather, making sure your home stays standing when the wind starts howling. Plus, they touch on the often-overlooked areas like garage doors and landscaping, which can make a world of difference in mitigating risk. Get ready to take some notes because this episode is packed with actionable advice that'll have you feeling empowered to tackle whatever Mother Nature throws your way!

Takeaways:

• Understanding the importance of roof maintenance can drastically reduce your risk of severe damage during extreme weather events.
• Wildfires and severe storms can affect almost every region, so preparation isn't just for coastal areas; it's a nationwide concern.
• The Fortified program offers homeowners a chance to enhance their home’s resilience against hurricanes and other severe weather conditions.
• It's crucial to regularly inspect and maintain your roof to prevent small issues from escalating into major repair costs later on.
• Creating defensible space around your home can significantly decrease wildfire risk, particularly by eliminating combustible materials close to your house.
• Utilizing resources like the Thunderstorm Ready Guide can help homeowners plan and prepare for severe weather, ensuring safety and protection.

Links referenced in this episode:

• monumentgrills.com
• ibhs.org
• fortifiedhome.org

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Monument Grills
• Fortified
• Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety
• IBHS

Mentioned in this episode:

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It's around the house.

On this episode of around the house.

The petroleum products that make up the shingle.

And so when those granules start to come off, especially due to foot traffic or scraping off, whether it's organic stuff or other things like even snow that might accumulate during severe weather, if somebody's going up there and shoveling that snow off, that can abrade those granules off and that can accelerate how the roof is aging and diminishes its performance.

Yeah, you're real.

It's real smart to be thinking, hey, what could be going on up there and how do I make sure that I stay on top of that?

Now that's another thing that we haven't talked about yet that's probably good for folks to know.

If you're interested and you decide to participate in Fortified, we issue a certificate that you can use that can show.

When it comes to remodeling or renovating your home, there is a lot to know and we have got you covered.

This is AROUND the house.

Welcome to the Round the House show, the next generation of home improvement.

Thanks for joining me today.

This hour is brought to you by our friends at Monument Grills.

If you're looking for that brand new barbecue this spring, don't waste that time.

Just jump online, head over to monument grills.com and take a look at the latest and greatest for those portable, affordable barbecue grills.

Making me hungry just talking about it today.

We have got an old friend back in the house, Fred Malik, managing director of Fortified with the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

Welcome back to around the House show, my friend.

Hey, Eric, thanks.

Glad to be back, bud.

Man, I have seen you guys all over design and construction week.

It was great to see your presence in there and seeing the Fortified program.

It's so important.

And we've had some big things in California happen since the last time we talked and man, absolutely incredible.

And there is so much going on in the world out there with insurance, home and business safety.

And I want to start out by saying it was pretty amazing.

I feel bad for my good friend David Applebaum, who has been on this show a lot, who lost his place down in Pacific Palisades.

I've been to his house and the crazy part is I stood there on his certified deck that was fire rated and looked up and went, oh, there's no way this could get hurt down here next to the beach in a wildfire.

And I could not have been more wrong.

Yeah, wildfires are certainly a tricky hazard and that is devastating out There in Los Angeles, we do a lot of work on the wildfire prevention and understanding the mechanics of how wildfires move in those really heavily populated areas.

And that it is shocking how many ways fire can find a way to burn.

And then I saw it's not just California.

What was that?

North South Carolina this last week or two that I saw out there that there were some wildfires getting close to Myrtle Beach.

That's crazy in my book.

Yeah, it's, it really does underscore the fact that people should be really paying attention there.

There really aren't very many places in the United States that aren't subject to all kinds of natural hazards and severe weather.

Gosh, up there in the Pacific Northwest, you guys had a atmospheric river that was driving hurricane force winds and torrential downpours a couple of weeks ago too.

So fire, severe wind, water, it's all there.

It's all over the country.

Yeah, it really is.

And it just highlights the work that you guys are doing out there.

And we've had big storms here.

I've, we've talked about it before in past episodes.

I've been there in eastern Washington and had 100 plus mile an hour winds and I was in my apartment complex in my twenties and I watched the drywall sheer diagonally across the second floor of my apartment and I went, I'm in a bad spot right now.

But that was scary.

Yeah.

When I, the roof came off and then when I saw this 3, 8 crack go diagonally across about a 20 foot wall from the top right to the bottom left.

I'm like, oh no, I'm in a bad spot.

And there was no place to go because outside was even worse.

And we just went into the bed, into the bathroom in the middle and wrote it out and went okay.

And it wasn't like it was a, it wasn't a hurricane, it wasn't a, it wasn't a tornado.

It was a four hour long windstorm that just went and might as well been a hurricane because it had the same amount of damage.

Yeah.

We try to put a lot of our research to work in something like our Thunderstorm Ready Guide, which deals with severe weather.

And one of the components of planning for that thunderstorm season is having a plan, knowing where you're going to go and how to stay informed so that if you have the opportunity, you can get to a safer surroundings.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's dial it back here.

I want to talk a little bit about, because we're nationwide, I wanted to really talk about what's Been going on with hurricane safety.

We're creeping now into summertime, which means we're going to be getting into that hurricane season again.

And really, I think it's one of those things that we need to think about because so many places in the country go, oh, that's just a south kind of thing, that's just a Gulf states, East Coast, Southern East Coast.

But really those same weather conditions that we see there can show up in just about any state in the country.

When you're talking about massive rain event, massive wind event, we throw the hurricane thing on it.

But it could be a bomb cyclone out here on the west coast or it could be some massive windstorm cutting across the Midwest.

Yeah, it's something that if you ignore it or you think it's local, you're really putting yourself at risk.

And your.

So let's talk about the fortified program again here and what you guys are doing with that because I think it's so brilliant because I can have a wind event in my area and I drive around and I can really see go, okay, that house has plywood sub sheeting underneath the roofing.

That one's got OSB and that one's got wood lap up there.

You could just see what's going on.

And with your program, it really gives that backup when maybe the winds exceed what the roofing material can handle.

There's still a backup below it and you're much more likely to have less damage with that.

With using the fortified roofing program.

Yeah.

And I think the important thing is if you're going to invest your hard earned money.

We're both homeowners.

If I'm going to put my money into my house, I want to make sure that I'm going to get value and performance from that.

And what Fortify does is it draws on the decades of science that we've done here at ibhs, really studying how disaster impact the house as a complete system.

And one of the things that we've been able to really understand is what is the pattern of damage and where does that usually start?

And then what can you do to break that chain, break that cycle of damage, rebuild, repeat.

And so in the fortified program, we start with the roof.

Every one of the 70,000 plus homes that live under fortified roofs in the United States starts with the roof.

And there are essentially four basic phases that you got to pay attention to.

It's how is the roof deck attached.

Do you have a system that seals the roof deck in case the primary cover comes off?

So it's a belts and suspenders approach.

How do we make sure that we're protected at the edges?

Because when the wind moves around the roof, it exerts the highest pressures and really initiates damage frequently at the edges.

So that's at the eave, up near the ridge, at the top of the peak of the roof, or along the rakes if you have a gable roof, which is like that triangular shape.

And then finally we look at the roof cover itself.

So like you said, unfortunately, a lot of that ensured damage that we see year in and year out is when the roof cover fails.

And we haven't seen that many design level events in the United States.

So all that damage is happening before the wind speeds get to the design level of the material.

So we is really about reinforcing the system.

And that's what we do in Fortified.

And on top of the science, Fortified also brings the verification component, which you and I talked about before is so important when you, you can have the best standard in the world, but if you're not having somebody look at it and make sure that standard is being followed, you're not likely to get the results you're after.

Exactly.

And it's crazy.

I'm in Oregon State here in the Portland, Oregon area, and we have very strict building codes.

Except I can do a reroof of that, pulling a building code in my area.

So there's nobody that ever goes up and does any kind of an inspection whatsoever.

Now, hopefully the project manager of the roofing company goes up and takes a peek at it, but really that's all you've got.

And with our wind events we have here, and I know there's plenty of places across the country that are in the same boat, that there's nobody ever on that roof inspecting it other than the people to put the roof on.

It's nice to have that verification from start to finish on it.

From nailing patterns all the way up to did you get the drip edges right and did you use the right materials on the project?

Yeah.

So we work with a network of third party evaluators that can come and take training from us.

And we certify them to be documentation specialists.

They are going to collect documentation, work alongside the roofer on the homeowner's behalf.

So when the project gets started, the evaluator and the roofer, they talk, they connect about the critical path.

Because the last thing we want to do is particularly on an existing home that's being reroofed.

We don't want to tear that roof apart and then have it be delayed, getting it dried back in and stuff, waiting for documentation to occur and stuff.

So the roofing contractor and the evaluator, they connect, they share scheduling information so that the evaluator can be on site when needed, but also they can give some direction to the roofing contractor on what pictures and other documentation they might need to collect when the evaluator isn't there.

And one of the things that really should do for homeowners that participate in Fortified is give them confidence.

Most of the folks that we deal with, tens of thousands each year, they aren't roofing contractors.

They're not.

They're not tradesmen.

They're typical homeowners who don't really know much, and they're relying 100% on the roofing contractor to do their job.

And while roofing contractors, as a trade, most of them are very reliable and conscientious.

It never hurts to have somebody who's really.

Their only motivation is to make sure that you're getting what you paid for.

They're following behind just to make sure that everything's going on the way it should.

Yeah, that makes perfectly good sense.

And there's so many details in doing these projects.

Right.

So many times we'll have a wind event around here, and I'll go by and I know exactly what's roof on a neighbor's house, what roof is on that house, and you go, wow, that did not perform to the standards that they are rated at.

Which tells me one thing, that there was an installation error or mistake that happened in there someplace, because otherwise that roof wouldn't have blown off or they wouldn't have lost a square of shingles off the side of that thing.

And so you really look and go, wow, obviously somebody missed a nailing pattern.

Something happened there for that to fail.

And you guys really are going to be able to check that out with that program, which I think is awesome.

Yeah.

So we do pay attention to installation, that's for sure.

But one of the other really comprehensive lines of research that we're doing here at IBHS is called the Roofing roadmaps.

And we look at how different roofing materials age over time and how it reacts and weathers to weather conditions in a variety of different ways, whether it's cold, heat, excessive uv, that kind of stuff.

Because that roof, even though most of us aren't getting up there every day, it's a pretty harsh environment and materials do age and as they age, their performance can, can start to suffer even if they're installed.

Well, we, we pay attention to both.

What, what is the material that's going on there?

Does it have the proper wind ratings?

In places that experience hail, there's an option for a hail, a hail designation as part of the fortified program.

So we're looking at the impact resistance of the material that's going on the roof.

And then we're also, like I said, trying to make sure that there's a belts and suspenders because at some point the roof cover is going to reach the end of its usual life and it's going to, it's going to fail under certain conditions.

And a lot of times code compliant roofs have underlayment that's just barely tacked on there.

And when that underlayment comes off, it opens up all those pathways where those little seams are between those roof decking boards.

And that is just to become highways for water to enter the house.

We can limit that by having a sealed roof deck up there.

Then we can make sure that the occupants and their property are protected.

They can get back to normal faster and just concentrate on repairing, replacing the roof that got damaged.

So it's all about really limiting damage, not necessarily making something disaster proof.

Yeah, disaster proof is a pretty hard thing, especially when your neighbor's trampoline and the wind event comes and bounces off your house.

That's one of those things that you're just dealing with whatever gets thrown at it.

But it's an amazing thing because you're right about that.

Where, because somebody in Texas is going to have hail and UV damage.

Where in the Pacific Northwest, a lot of our stuff is organic matter growing like moss and stuff on the roof and people getting up there every six months, walking across and cleaning that stuff off.

So it's a completely different wear cycle and it's getting beat up two different directions.

Yeah.

And 70% of the roofs in the US are covered with asphalt shingles.

And asphalt depends on granules to protect the petroleum products that make up the shingle.

And so when those granules start to come off, especially due to foot traffic or scraping off, whether it's organic stuff or other things like even snow that might accumulate during severe weather, if somebody's going up there and shoveling that snow off, that can abrade those GR those granules off and that can accelerate how the roof is aging and diminish its performance.

Yeah, you're real, it's real smart to be thinking, hey, what could be going on up there and how do I make sure that I stay on top of that?

Now that's another thing that we haven't talked about yet.

That's probably good for folks to know.

If you're interested and you decide to participate in Fortified, we issue a certificate that you can use that can show prospective buyers that you've taken some additional precautions.

It can be used to show your insurer that you're a better.

Your home is a better risk to insure, which can increase availability and affordability of insurance.

But one of the other components of the process is that we do require the home get reevaluated every five years.

And the primary thing that we're looking for when we go back at that five year interval is what is the roof covers condition?

If it's still in good condition, chances are the redesignation happens without a hitch.

But if there are issues that are starting to creep up, that's a great time for us to be able to inform the homeowner that hey, there's something going on here that you need to pay attention to and you need to address it so that you can keep counting on that roof to deliver the protection that you expect.

Man, that is great.

Because roof maintenance is probably one of the least things done on a house these days.

If it wasn't for insurance companies sending out nasty grams from the, from satellites or drones around saying, hey, you got a lot of organic matter on that roof, you better get cleaned up.

And I get it, because they're trying to reduce their risk.

Nothing wrong with them doing that.

But I've had plenty of people reach out to me on social media and go, hey, my insurance company's doing that.

I'm like, guess what guys, you're missing maintenance day.

And it's a better investment for you to be doing that anyway.

They're just giving you a helpful reminder that hey, that's a fire hazard or it could be additional roof damage and get up there and maintain it.

I recommend that people have their roofing contractor come out there every year or two and take a peek at it and make sure that things are looking good.

Because most people don't get up and go poking around and see how their roof looks.

Yeah.

In our Thunderstorm ready Guide, that's a, it's a free guide for preparing for severe weather season.

It's available on ibhs.org part of that plan says, hey, there's a, there's some annual things you should do.

And if you break down some of These maintenance tasks into annual things that you're doing, Whether it's inspecting or making small repairs as you move along.

It's a much more manageable thing.

If you wait too long and too long.

Usually it looks like, hey, I've got a water stain in my ceiling now I got a leak.

I got to go figure out where it is.

And maybe that gets to be a really expensive thing to fix.

But if you wait until that happens, you might miss the opportunity to nip a small problem in the bud before it becomes a really big, inexpensive problem.

It's a good idea to have an annual plan.

Like you said, Once you have a relationship with a roofer that you trust that has all the proper credentials that your state says is in good standing, Once you have a good relationship, Then having them come out every year to go up there.

Because I don't know about you.

I've been building houses for 35 years.

I still get a little nervous when I'm on my.

My third story roof.

Walking around at 7:12 pitch.

It's not the most comfortable place for me to be.

But roofers get to pay to do that stuff every day, so they're a little bit more comfortable in those surroundings, and they can really pay attention to details that matter.

Man.

And Fred, you're so right.

The older I get, the less I like getting up there.

And I put a fall protection system up there.

I could tie off and actually be legit.

And I still get up there on my 712 and go, I still don't like this.

I still don't like this.

And it's smart.

Just get people out there and take care of it.

And I'm in the same boat.

My roof is.

I'm at the end of the life cycle of it's probably second roof that I can guess.

And I'm walking around, I'm like, ah, this is a little spongy right here.

Yeah, there's no signs of water damage, but spongy you feel you can't see.

And you go, okay, there is something going on there.

Which means it's time to do that roof.

Yeah, for sure.

It's not always the damage or the deterioration that you can see that ultimately leads to a problem.

Right.

Because if it's something spongy.

And what does that mean?

That means that the fasteners that are there to hold that roof deck together, that hold the shingles on.

They're probably not as secure as they should be.

And there's no way to really know that unless you're getting up there and taking a look around.

Otherwise mother nature will, will let you know when the roof cover comes off and bad things start to happen.

Yeah, that's no fun when you got half your roof sitting in your driveway, including the sheets.

That's, that's creating all the other issues with that.

And you guys have a great, great solve for that.

I wanted to ask too.

Within the fortified program, there are so many other things that can go wrong.

Of course, the roof is what we see in all the videos on the Weather Channel and places like that with the literally the whole roof and trust system ending out in a parking lot someplace.

But there are so many other things that people can be doing to deal with wind events outside of even hurricanes out there.

Yeah, and I'm glad you bring that up.

So as we start to look at, hey, where are their opportunities?

Where could homeowners benefit from the science that we do and the programs that we offer?

And we're looking to bring some more of that, that really important wind science and mitigation, those mitigation strategies inland where, you know, you're likely to have severe convective storms, maybe derechos, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms.

And like you said, once you take care of the roof, the next place you should look, coincidentally is the garage door.

If your home has a garage, when, if you look at the videos and pictures following say even a low grade tornado and houses with structural damage, a lot of times what's going on there is the garage door actually was compromised by the pressure that the wind can exert in those situations.

And what happens is the air rushes in through that opening and then it blow, it tries to blow the house up like a balloon and it pushes out on the walls and up on the roof and that's where you can have some structural problems.

And taking a look at that garage door and considering replacing it with one that's properly pressured.

And again, we've done all that work for you in our standard we tell you, hey, if you have a two car garage with a door that's eight foot tall, here's the design pressures that door should be able to meet.

That gives you all the information you need to either give it to a contractor that you trust or to go to a retailer, a garage door retailer, and say, hey, I'm looking for a door that can meet these design criteria that can make a huge difference in Whether your home actually survives in an EF0, one or two tornado versus having a real bad outcome.

I was at IBS week and a half, two weeks ago and I got my phone is lighting up.

I'm like, is there an emergency?

I go down and it's all my weather, weather apps saying that I've got a tornado warning here.

Yeah.

At my house.

And I'm like, oh wow.

And a lot of these thin metal entry level garage doors.

If it's like a 16 by 7 garage door.

If I wanted to do that as a demo day, I could run for the middle of that, slam my body into it and taco it pretty good.

And that's nothing like the pressures that mother nature is going to go throw out with a 40, 50, 60, 70 and above wind events.

Yeah.

And it really comes down to are you asking the right questions at the right time?

And the majority of builders, through no fault of their own, the building codes really haven't kept the criteria moving along as the wind science has improved to say, hey, this is how pressure is really going to act on those really large openings.

It's pretty common along the coast for the garage door to be attended to, but it's not real common once you start to move inland.

And in Fortified, we raised the base design wind speed.

Most people probably don't even know that they have a design wind speed at their location.

But the majority of homes in the United States nowadays are being built to resist some 115 miles an hour.

Fortified starts at 130, which is like an EF1 low grade EF2.

And then we provide those critical details like the design pressure and all that really does.

It adds about maybe five to $600 to the cost of the door.

If you're gonna upgrade a door that you've already, that's going to be put in and you're going to take it from where it is to an upgraded door.

But when the.

But the performance that you get and the peace of mind that you get that, hey, that garage door, once it's closed and locked, it's going to be able to withstand an awful lot of pressure and protect the rest of the house.

Because again, I bet you most people don't know the majority of houses in the US are designed to be fully enclosed.

That means no exterior openings open.

So all the pressure can be exerted on the outside of the wall.

But once that an opening Gets breached, especially one as large as the garage door.

Now you have pressure acting on both sides of the wall and the roof, and that's when things start to really fail, because they're just not designed to do that.

And especially when you're starting to deal with homes that are built before the 70s or even 60s in most areas that those walls to the garage aren't even attached to the foundation.

They're just sitting there.

The weight of that garage, which really isn't that much on an attached garage, is just sitting on top of that.

And we're not even talking seismic.

We're just talking wind.

Yeah, we're just talking wind.

Wind can push it off, it can overturn it.

It can do a lot of things.

And that's another one of those things where as a normal homeowner, if I walk up to a wall that's just being held down with gravity, Chances are I can't push it.

I might be able to make it move a little bit, but deflect a little bit, but I can't push it off the foundation.

But you'd be surprised at how little wind it really takes spread out across a large area to actually get things to start moving in the wrong direction.

So, yeah, gravity is not a solution.

There really should be positive connections.

And you'd mentioned it before, we have the roof level designation, garage doors opening protection, gable and roof bracing.

That's in our silver level.

And our third and final level of fortified is the gold level.

That's where we deal with something called a continuous load path, which is roof to wall connections, wall to floor connections, and then floor to foundation.

And that floor to foundation connection is what you just described.

That's what's going to keep that garage wall firmly attached to the slab or the stem wall or whatever the foundation system is below.

Yeah, it's absolutely amazing.

And this was probably, gosh, four or five years ago, Time flies.

And being a west coast guy, I was out there at the southeastern building conference, and I think that's the first time I ran into you guys out there, and I was emceeing the stage, and I'm watching them talk about the stuff down there, and I'm like, why aren't we doing this?

I thought we were on top of this.

And it's something that it really shows the rest of the country how far the Gulf coast states really have come along in attaching that top sill plate all the way down to the foundation.

And it's just so common sense to me.

It's like, why isn't this building code across the states yet?

And I know it increases costs, but the amount of safety and resilience is way different with just a little more metal, a little more cable and some more fasteners.

Yeah.

And really you can, with the right information, you can make smart decisions and you can get lots of value for the modest increases that you might have to pay to get those things into your house.

But that's really, at the end of the day, looking at the overall life span of your roof, that's really a modest investment in superior performance.

And then as far as these other things that are being done down at the Gulf coast, those are hard lessons learned that storms like Hurricane Andrew, hurricane Katrina, even Milton that came through Florida last year, Milton was a hurricane over in Tampa.

I'm on the east coast of the state.

I got nothing but tornadoes over here and it ripped through my community.

And we've been building hurricane resistant structures in this part of Florida for a long time and still had some challenges, particularly with older building stocks like you say, Eric, it's just really important to be intentional about what you want to do, make sure you have a plan.

There's really good resources.

We have some.

@fortifiedhome.org There's a bunch of free checklists and the fortified standards are available there.

On IBHS.org we got our hurricane or ready guide, our thunderstorm ready guide.

And that can really help homeowners, whether they're getting ready to build new or they're maintaining an existing property, start to put their plan together so that they're not just throwing money out there without really knowing what they're going to get for it.

Because every dollar we have these days, it needs to be spent intentionally so that we can get maximum value because it's things are expensive and it's hard and we got other priorities like bills to pay.

So you want to make sure that if you're going to invest in doing something to make your home perform better, that you're choosing the right Things and doing them in the right order.

And that's how we can help.

Yeah.

And then cool thing is, with the Fortified program, you can give that to your insurance company, it could result in lower bills, which helps to offset, of course, the cost of that.

It's not like we're paying, for most people at least your house insurance, your homeowner's insurance is usually way less than what your car insurance is.

So there's a little bit less of a percentage when you take money off of that.

But really anything helps and it helps offset that.

Yeah, I think one of the things to be aware of is that as severe weather increases and we have more of the built environment in harm's way, premiums like we have at the coast, three, four or $5,000 is not an unheard of level of property insurance down here.

We're starting to see premiums like that in high tornado prone areas and hail prone areas like Oklahoma.

Out in the Great Plains, in the Midwest, insurers are looking at this and they are, they are suffering massive multibillion dollar underwriting losses every single year.

And when you're having those kinds of losses, you have to start figuring out if I'm going to stay in business, what am I going to do?

And basically what they're trying to figure out how to do is transfer some of that risk in the form of higher deductible, depreciating the replacement costs, raising premiums, or maybe not even offering coverage.

But one of the things that we can do as homeowners is if we're paying attention to these kinds of details, especially the roof, we can use a program like Fortified to present a certificate that says, hey, I did smart things to my house, take a look at my house.

Because I think it's a better risk.

And that can translate into greater availability and affordability in those tough markets in particular.

Yeah, absolutely.

I just.

Really smart.

I love what you guys are doing with that and the testing that you guys are doing.

I wanted to talk before we run out of time of wildfires and what you guys are doing with that.

And there's so much we can be doing as people are going out this spring all across the country doing those landscaping, fence, building projects, whatever, as we're going out there.

There are so many smart things that we can be doing on top of the remodels that we're already doing to make smart decisions to get us so that we're going to be more resilient in case of a wildfire.

And as we're seeing now and we talked about earlier, they're happening in just about any place in the country now.

Yeah, we have a sister program to Fortified now called Wildfire Prepared.

Similar structure.

It's got a whole bunch of upgrade mitigation techniques that you can use to reduce the risk of wildfire in your home.

And there's a lot of good guidance there.

The 0 to 5 foot zone is really important.

That means no combustible materials within the five feet of your house.

So paying attention to do you have a wood fence, do you have a wood gate that connects to your house?

That's something called ladder fuels.

Fire can start well away from your house, but it'll just burn down the fence until it comes into contact with your house.

We've seen that having a plan to move, say recycling bins or garbage cans from the driveway into the garage on those red flag days so that embers can't accumulate.

We saw unfortunately in la, embers that would accumulate on top of those plastic cans and get their way through.

And then once they get into the combustible, fuel inside, it ignites and it's a, it's fire right up against the contact of the house and it burns up from there.

And then we talked a lot about maintenance and how maintenance can make a big difference in how your roof performs.

Same thing goes for your house.

If you are staying on top of your annual maintenance, keeping things out of that 0 to 5, looking for gaps in the caulking and stuff around your doors and windows.

We're trying to find, or we're encouraging people to try to find ways to keep areas from those embers, being able to get in contact with that combustible material and then also being really careful about where you store things like propane tanks and like and the like, making sure that there's not things that, that if flames, if the radiant heat gets close enough, it ignites and then you've got something really close to your house that could, that can lead to a bad outcome too.

So all kinds of good guidance in our Wildfire Prepared standard and important thing for people to know is you're not powerless.

You can really reduce your risk, but it does require you to take action and you need to, need to pay attention to details that are important.

California was such a good example to me and I was watching as it started to come up.

And I'm very familiar with the area down there.

I'm down there at least once a year, so it's something that's close to me.

But great example.

Pacific Palisades there where my buddy David's house was, across the five lanes of the highway there on the beach.

There was a big parking lot.

There was sand, there was a walkway, and there was a concrete block building there.

That was the maintenance shed for the.

For the lifeguards there.

And there were vans out there in the fenced in area that transported them around.

Had a flat roof.

And yes, that building burned down because those embers got into some places and of course, caught the building on fire and then caught the vans on fire.

And it was hundreds of yards, and I'm talking probably three or four football fields away from the nearest structure.

And those embers still got it.

Yeah.

So really, it shows how that preparedness can really change the outcome for anyone.

Yeah.

And the scary thing is that when the wind starts blowing like they had out there, and you get those embers up into the wind field, they can travel a mile or more.

It'd still be volatile.

And that's to your point.

3, 400 yards away seems like a far enough separation, but with it, with the right level of wind in the right direction, it can carry embers across pretty significant distances and find a hospitable place to land and reignite something that you just didn't think it was going to happen.

And that's why diligence is so important.

And then there were some great examples too, though.

There were some positive examples out there where you would see everything decimated.

But there's two homes sitting there, right there that have some char marks on the outside, but maybe some smoke damage on the inside, but the building is still standing.

It's still.

It still fought the good fight and won and.

And survived that.

And so it really shows that how we build things, how we maintain them, can really change the outcome.

And especially as we're out there doing remodels, outside of even new construction, there's a lot of fair choices we can make that are fairly minor, like putting up that metal fence instead of the cedar one.

Those are big things that you can do that'll just not change the fire path.

Because I saw dozens.

I was streaming the CBS channel down there on online and watching it and just watching the firefight.

And you could see all these news reporters out there and you could just watch it.

It was like the cartoon and they lit the dynamite for Bugs Bunny.

You could see that flame going right up to it.

It's here we go again.

Yeah.

And it was just a fence.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And to your point, you don't really even have to replace the Entire cedar fence.

But it's that last four to six feet where you have the gate, that's, that's where you pay attention.

And spaces at a premium out there.

So you've got a lot of these accessory dwellings or additional dwelling units that are on properties that can get close and paying attention and knowing that, hey, if I have structures that are this close together, they can become ladder fuels, they can create radiant heat and they can overwhelm things like vinyl window frames.

Right.

Vinyl window frames can melt, the glazing falls out and now you've got contact and radiant heat.

Getting to the more combustible stuff like draperies and things like that, those details are all super important.

And a lot of times it just takes knowing, okay, these are the things I need to be paying attention to so that my home doesn't face that risk.

Or at least it's a lot lower probability.

Yeah.

One of the things I'm starting to work on here out on the west coast, in my area especially is that we have a lot of tree laws which I love our trees.

I've got huge 350 year old fir trees, but I've also got some that are five, six, seven feet away from the house as well that are serious concern.

And so I'm going to start leading a campaign here of let's think about maybe planting trees a little bit farther away from some of these residents to replace them.

I'm working on a program out here where we can start that conversation because it can take me three or four years to remove a tree that's right next to my house, that one is causing damage and two in a wind event or a fire event, I've got some serious concerns with that.

That could literally do some damage.

Yeah, once, once a significant tree limb breaks apart and falls, you don't want to be anywhere close to that.

Houses aren't designed to resist the impact from that.

And no matter how good it is, really, I think you're right.

That's again, that's one of those things where you can get two for or a three for.

You're looking at how do I maintain my landscape, Do I trim it back, do I remove it and can I, by doing so, do I reduce my fire risk, do I reduce my wind risk?

And potentially some life safety concerns from a tree that might have a branch that comes off and if you're walking around outside, that could end up being a real bad day.

I tell you what, I had a house here in our wind event, we had a wind ice storm event.

That was, oh, 16 months ago.

And down my street here, maybe 10 houses.

So not far up against the natural park there.

So it had all the trusses were tied in with hurricane brackets, all the normal stuff that you would see with current building code here.

And three trees came down and they hit the eaves of the house just like karate chop.

And it took the whole roof system, trusses and all.

And when it hit it on those angles, it ripped those brackets out of the top plates, ripped the top plates off.

And it basically made it like it was a lid that was offset on a pan and you hit the edge.

It lifted the whole roof system off and dropped it right back down again on top of it.

Campy Caddy wampus, they had to reframe the entire top of the house.

And it wasn't against the fasteners, but again, it was just those loads were so crazy.

On the point of the corners of the eaves, it just lifted it off like it was a toil.

It was like a kid's dollhouse.

And you ripped the roof off of it.

Yeah, those limbs can be thousands of pounds.

And those connectors that you're talking about, they're just not rated for that.

And especially when you get a real concentrated point load like that, it's not hard to overwhelm those things and it becomes what's the weakest leak in the chains.

Yeah, you've got some great stories there about the devastating things that weather can do.

But people should know that you don't have to just be waiting for that bad thing to happen.

You can take proactive action and you can really reduce the likelihood that you're going to be on the wrong end of that.

And whether it's following some of these annual preparation guides or when it's time and you've got resources to reroof or replace your garage door, you're making smart investments along those lines.

You can, you can do a lot to manage your personal risk, which can change the outcome pretty significantly.

Yeah, and that's a great point, Fred.

So one other question for you here before we run out of time is you guys are always working in the future.

You're always looking ahead.

What are some of the exciting things that you guys are working on right now or what are some of the things we haven't discussed?

Yeah, I think, you know, we continue to dig into how roofs are aging and how different materials work.

We're looking at emerging technologies like solar shingles.

We're looking at different building systems like ICF or 3D printed houses.

All of those things that are starting to emerge and looking to be responses and answers to a variety of different, different needs out there.

Whether it's energy efficiency and the like.

We're just trying to make sure that people don't have to choose one or the other.

Can you choose something that's going to, that's going to be an energy efficient choice but also a really durable choice.

So those are some of the things that we're working on here at ibhs.

And as we study things like wildfire or wind or hail, if we can devise different techniques or changes to existing standards, we're going to lean in and do that.

But one thing you can really count on is that as we get that good science, we'll put it into one of our designation programs.

So get it out there so homeowners can have access to it.

Because it's, it doesn't really do any good to learn all those great lessons and then keep it all to ourselves.

We wanted to get it out for people to use it.

You guys do such a great job with that.

It's something that's always great to see what you guys are doing and, and how you're changing the building industry and making it so much safer for people out there to, to greet homes are going to be more resilient.

And you guys do such a great live testing program and, and really the only people out there doing this which is so fun with what you guys are doing with the wind tunnel and how you can create real life situations in basically your own laboratory.

Yeah, we've got a one of a kind wind tunnel.

If people haven't seen it, check us out@ibhs.org or go to YouTube and look at IBHS wind or fire.

You'll see our research center.

It's, it's a pretty impressive site.

We've got a, we've got a fan array of 105 fans, 350 horsepower piece.

We can create up to 130 mile an hour winds, 8 inches of rain per hour.

We've figured out a way to create realistic hail in a laboratory environment so we don't have to rely on things like steel balls.

And we know how to shoot it at houses.

We did one hail demo that had 10,000 stones in it.

And we have a wildfire capability like nobody else does.

And what that does is it allows us to build full size structures and then look at how they interact and how the hazard is putting stress on all the systems, so we could really understand how the house is going to work as a complete package and then we can engineer and look for ways to solve those weak spots.

So that's.

It's pretty cool.

We're all the only place in the world that can do some of that stuff.

Yeah.

That is amazing.

That is amazing.

So, Fred, just so people know, where do people find more information for you guys?

Because again, I know we gave the website out, but let's do it one more time so people can find out more information if they're looking to put a new roof on or they're trying to do more to fortify their home against mother nature.

Sure.

Great place to start is to check out our Thunderstorm Ready guide.

You can find that@ibhs.org and if you're ready or you're thinking about like you are, if you're getting ready to put a new roof on, you can check us out@fortifiedhome.org and we got a lot of great free resources there.

We're all about trying to help people be safer and stronger.

And we give a lot of our knowledge away for free.

And it's all available for you.

There's.

All right, Fred, thanks for coming on today and all the updates here.

It's always great to have this discussion, especially around current events of what we're seeing, what we're learning and all the work you guys are doing out there.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Eric.

Appreciate the time, baby.

Always.

Always.

I'm Eric G.

And you've been listening to around the House.