Dr. Ian Giammanco, Managing Director for Standards & Data Analytics at the IBHS Research Center, joins Eric to discuss innovative strategies for enhancing home resilience against natural disasters. The conversation highlights how the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety is transforming homeowner approaches to disaster preparedness through their Fortified Home program. Dr. Giammanco explains the importance of building standards that exceed basic codes, emphasizing that these improvements can significantly reduce damage during severe weather events. Listeners will learn about practical measures they can take to protect their homes, from fortified roofs to fire-resistant landscaping. The discussion also touches on the critical role of community-wide efforts in mitigating risks and maintaining neighborhood integrity in the face of calamities.

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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.

Dr. Ian Giammanco, Managing Director for Standards & Data Analytics at the IBHS Research Center, joins Eric to delve into the critical importance of resilience in home construction against the backdrop of increasing natural disasters. The conversation highlights the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety's groundbreaking efforts to revolutionize how homeowners understand and implement safety measures in their properties. Dr. Giammanco discusses the organization’s fortified home programs, which provide homeowners with actionable strategies to reduce the risk of severe damage from windstorms, wildfires, and other hazards.

The episode explores how the fortified roof system is a game changer, emphasizing the role of sealed roof decks, ring shank nails, and edge sealing techniques in enhancing a home’s resistance to high winds. Dr. Giammanco points out that homes built under modern codes, such as those in Florida, have shown remarkable resilience in the face of hurricanes, with no structural damage reported in recent storms. This success is attributed to the integration of decades of wind engineering research into practical building standards that uplift the entire community's safety and security.

Another focal point of their discussion is the increasing frequency of wildfires and the urgent need for better fire-resistant landscaping practices. With wildfires now encroaching on suburban areas, the conversation shifts to the dangers posed by wooden fences and other combustible materials. Dr. Giammanco advocates for creating defensible spaces around homes and shares insights on how homeowners can take proactive measures, like using non-combustible fencing materials and maintaining vegetation, to significantly mitigate fire risks. This comprehensive approach, which includes both structural and landscaping solutions, showcases how homeowners can play a pivotal role in enhancing their resilience against nature's threats.

Takeaways:

• The IBHS aims to enhance home resilience against natural disasters through innovative building standards.
• Implementing fortified home standards can significantly reduce damage and increase recovery post-disaster.
• Homeowners can achieve discounts on insurance premiums by making resilience improvements to their homes.
• Wildfires present unique challenges, and proactive landscaping is essential for home protection.
• The fortified roof program incorporates advanced technologies to improve wind resistance in homes.
• Collaboration among stakeholders is crucial for effective wildfire management and prevention strategies.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Pyramid Heating and Cooling
• Monument Grill
• Huber
• GP
• Malarkey
• Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety
• IBHS
• Fortified
• Wildfire Prepared Home
• Alabama Department of Insurance
• University of Alabama

Mentioned in this episode:

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It's around the House.

As we evolve into these fire resistant landscape designs.

One, they can be aesthetically appealing and there's so many options for folks.

I get that it's a lot of work but I do hope as landscape design companies start offering maybe even like think about packages that are for wildfire resistant.

Like they already have some pre designed sets that you could pick from.

But also as we look at the use of mitigation grant money, around the.

House show is brought to you by by Pyramid Heating and Cooling serving in Oregon, the Portland metro area and Bend, Oregon.

They are your one stop shop for heating and cooling and indoor air quality.

A lot to know.

But we've got you coming.

This is around the House.

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

Thanks for joining me today.

I'm Eric G.

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

If you're looking for a great barbecue under 500 bucks, now's a great time to get it for the holidays.

Check it out@monument.com.

well, we've got an epic episode today because if you're a homeowner out there, no matter where you're at in the country, this one relates to you.

And we've got my buddy Ian here and this is going to be a lot of fun.

He is from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

Welcome to around the House Brother.

Yeah, absolutely, Eric.

It's good to join you.

This is gonna be a lot of fun and I love what you guys are doing.

You guys are testing products and every company goes out and does their own testing of singular products, but you're putting systems together, you're putting homes together, you're blowing them down, you're burning them up and you guys are seeing what works and quite frankly, what doesn't.

Yeah, that's our role at ibhs is to actually look at how the entire building system, whether it's commercial construction or just our homes, our single family homes or multifam family homes, apartment complexes that are built more commercial like, like how does that whole system work together, especially when it comes to things like our weather related hazards, whether that's severe weather, hurricanes, tornadoes, could be snowstorm.

We talk some winter weather today and other things like wildfires as well.

So how does our building system and how those pieces and parts actually interact to give us some of the really bad outcomes we unfortunately see repeatedly, but also what works, and I think that's a big part, is how do we get those practical solutions to everybody out there to start really taking a bite out of some of the damage and just really displacement that we see from these kind of things far too often.

Well, it's funny, people go, hey, it doesn't matter if you're on the west coast or east coast or in the south and north, we all get wind storms from time to time.

And out west here we get some of those that come in here that are just epic, where we'll get hurricane force winds.

But building code sure doesn't address it either.

So it's one of those things that it's up to the homeowner to deal with because most of the building community is still not doing it.

And you'll have people going, oh man, I got this epic roof I put on and I put on the siding and then I go, how about that attached garage door?

What'd you do there?

And they go, oh, it's just a really cool little garage door.

I'm like, is that rated?

And there's so many pieces to this entire system.

And that's what's cool about what you guys are doing is you guys go, okay, here's the weak points and how do we improve that?

And hopefully on the west coast, we'll start dealing with some building code out here that's going to change some of that so we have more stronger homes and stuff like you guys do.

They're fortified.

Yeah.

West coast windstorms, while they're not as frequent as say, we'd see big tropical events on the northern Gulf coast, we do have them.

And I think one thing we've learned is that those events, especially in the western half of the US can expose issues with your roof system.

Whether you have just an aged asphalt shingle and you didn't have a sealed roof deck underneath and all of a sudden you have a leak, right?

Like, windstorm comes along, finally brings us some welcome rain.

But all of a sudden we realize, oh, our roof system has had some issues that we didn' about.

And that's one thing that happens in the western US is they get those big strong low pressure systems that move on shore and often do give us the welcome rain, but wind comes with it.

And we've learned that it is a place where it will expose issues you may have with your roof system.

And often that does manifest itself, unfortunately in leaks.

Oh, yeah, it's that skylight leaking.

It's that valley that you didn't think and it's just driving that rain way up underneath it.

And that 15 pound felt that they used with no ice shield on that roof just doesn't have a chance.

Yeah, that's right.

Like if you're just looking at a typical underlayment without a sealed deck, that water is going to come in when the shingles fail.

Like it's just a given, it's almost a certainty.

And that's one of the things, big things that we advocate in terms of co development is to try to get that sealed roof deck in across the whole United States.

It can work in all sorts of places.

Whether we're talking about the west coast and their windstorms.

We got the central US that deals with thunderstorm wind events and obviously heavy rain and hail that come with that.

And then everybody is finally realized on the hurricane coast, like hey, this can like lop off a lot of that interior water damage that comes through your roof when your shingles fail.

And we have made a heck of a lot of progress over there and getting things like that into code, whereas we still got some catch up to do in the rest of the country.

Yeah, it's amazing.

We just put a roof on my brother's beach house that we were working on out in Cannon beach in Oregon here and it's a block off the water, it's got some good protection.

But they still this time of year in the fall and the winter they routinely have, every other week they'll have 70, 80 mile an hour winds out there and it just happens.

And so we put a new roof on it out there and we basically put ice and water shield on the entire roof surface up there just to make sure that we can control that water underneath it.

And if we did lose shingles, we have half a chance of not having massive water damage.

Now if we would have been resheating it, I probably would have looked at something like gone going on with a system like Huber or one of those other guys out there.

I think, geez, I'm think GP has one too.

But there's more systems like that coming out which just gives you that durability if something bad happens.

Yeah, the Huber zip system is probably the one that people recognize the most from a branding system.

But again it's got the built in tape seams.

We did something similar here in my house.

We built it, we did the ice and water showed as a peel and stick membrane across the whole thing.

And our builder said, hey, like hey, we just Started doing this because it's just easier to do anyway way and that gives us that seal deck protection.

But yeah, you talk about out on the west coast, it doesn't take, especially with an aged asphalt route, 50, 60 mile an hour winds and you're going to start peeling up unsealed shingles and that unfortunate cascade can start.

So all the things we've learned in other high wind areas can actually apply in a whole lot, really across the entire United States.

We just got to start talking about it and telling folks, hey, this is a path.

It's pretty.

This is one of the most economical roof things you can do.

And then when you look at the damage that comes when water comes in through really water that comes from anywhere in our house, you're anywhere between like 4 to 10 times what just the cost of replacing your roof would have been.

And in the worst case, you might even be out of your home for a couple of months while you're having to cut out drywall and almost start over on a lot of the interior.

I have seen some water damage get people out of a home for six months just because of the amount of work that had to be done inside.

And anytime you can do something like that to prevent it.

And quite frankly, if you have a discussion with your insurance provider as well, if you've done some of those steps, they might give you a little bit of a break on.

Oh, okay.

You got any paperwork on that?

Maybe we can.

You're at a lower risk than the house next door.

Yeah, that's right.

Like in a lot of places, the insurance discounts continue to grow and in some cases, some carriers will even provide what's called an endorsement while the to actually help cover the cost of those upgrades to your roof system.

So that's something when you do those steps.

Absolutely.

Talk to your insurance agent and document it.

Right.

We always tell folks, go through our fortified roof program.

That's a great way to ensure that's all done.

But you can.

Some of these elements you can do yourself.

My parents did that in Baton Rouge.

And again, document, talk to your agent because in a lot of places these things will get you a discount on your homeowner's policy.

Yeah.

Especially these days with the storms that are going in there.

Anytime they can see that you're doing prevention, you've got their attention.

And some places like California, where there's plenty of companies down there that when you go to change your policy, they go, oh, and by the way, we just canceled your policy since you're changing.

It yeah, unfortunately we have an insurance crisis that's been developing in the West.

A lot of it's wildfire that threats driven.

We're starting to science is caught up as to what we can do about that.

But from the social science perspective, a lot of times when we start making these updates to our home, we just keep going.

Right.

Like when we start them, you feel really good about it and it often leads you down the road to doing a lot more.

And then you end up in a place where I think about some of our Alabama fortified homeowners that were actually having neighbors who had their homes damaged come stay with them while their homes were being repaired.

And you think about that like you're not only helping your neighbors, you are still in your home with a place to sleep, not having to go spend months in a hotel.

I could start to imagine that with my two giant, really big fox hounds and my seven year old in a hotel.

That's a nightmare.

That's a nightmare.

I don't want to do that.

There's no way I want to do that.

Not a chance.

Not a chance.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Why you talk to people who go through this, they don't want to do it again.

So their whole perception has changed.

But we want to get to the place where you don't have to go through one of these really bad events to take some of these steps.

So always say first steps the best one to get you going, whatever that may be.

Yeah, absolutely.

My roof system here is, it's probably a 20 year roof.

It was on it when I bought the house and I knew what it was when I got it.

So insurance company was like, that's not in its best shape.

But I'm like, yeah, you're right.

I'm going to do some stuff around here first and then I'm going to put a roof on it.

And I've been talking to you guys for years and it's like, all right, I think next year is going to be a fortified roof on my place because I just want to have it done right.

And being a west coast guy with wildfires and windstorms, anything I can do with that wind to help keep things ship shape and looking good, I'm happy.

Yeah.

My parents did the same thing magically.

They got who almost 25 years plus out of their roof in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which made it through a couple of hurricanes too, which is remarkable to be honest, knowing all the data behind a lot of roof damage.

But they did the exact same thing they had saved knowing they're going to have a replacement.

Come and went to one of the Malarkey shingle products, one of the polymer modified asphalt shingles did the.

My dad walked the roofer through the sealed deck process and yeah, he was really.

And my mom, it's funny, my parents are in their late 70s.

My mom's talking about.

My mom is a PhD in music.

She was a band director for everybody.

She's PhD in music.

So I get that.

Yeah.

She's talking about how good their roof is and I'm sitting there like wow, you clearly have taken some pride in the new roof mom.

But kudos to my folks.

They took all the guidance we have at ibhs.

We put a lot of that into our home here and it can work.

And for them it was actually affordable.

Like it didn't really change much of the cost from what they would have.

They just had to shop it around a couple of different contractors.

I now need to come up with a product to stop these 132 year old fir trees that are under feet tall to protect my home.

Because that's going to become the next one.

Because I tell you what, there is a house.

We had an ice storm with wind here last January, February here in the Pacific Northwest hit us.

We had like an inch of inch of ice and then we had the heavy winds on top of it and a house two blocks away.

This happened in February.

They just moved in back in two weeks ago.

And it got hit with trees coming newer build there was.

Everything was held up.

It was framed correctly.

It had all the Simpson or Brandax ties that were holding everything together.

And when one big tree came down, caught the eaves of the roof, it lifted the roof system up, trusses and everything and put it back down askew because it just only drop £5,000 of tree onto a on a two by fours.

There's mass is going to win on that.

Yeah.

We look at what just happened this year with Hurricane Helene when it moved inland.

The biggest issue really came down to trees.

And in the southeast us we're tons of pines, love our big oaks and they come down like we talk about.

Trees are good until they're not.

And there is a place where you can use dense tree canopies as an advantage to actually as a windbreak.

Right.

We know that from centuries ago.

But in the instance where they are so close to your home they can be detrimental too.

And we saw that with Helene where the inland impacts because of this not just we had catastrophic flooding.

We had clearly well enough wind to Knock down trees.

And that became the story rather than the immediate coastal impacts which occurred in an area of Florida, which it's one of the few places where very few people live.

Yeah.

And that's crazy.

Like here, it's not even like that root ball tipping up that you see where it was a root issue.

I saw stuff that broke off two feet above ground, and it took a 36.

Around 36 wide tree, snapped it off at the base and dropped over.

And it's like, there's no preventing that.

And the other problem is all these trees are protected.

And so even if you've got something that an arborist says, hey, probably should take that down, because it's not healthy, there are hoops and permits and inspections and all this stuff you have to get through.

And unfortunately, I love protecting trees, but at the same point, a lot of homeowners struggle because they're like, wow, okay, that's gonna be $12,000 to take that tree down by the time we get through the arborist reports and the permits and everything else.

And now a lot of homes still have trees around them, but with today's economy, they can't afford to take that down.

And the insurance companies, at the same point, aren't really interested in that level of prevention sometimes.

So it's tough.

Yeah.

There's where I think when we get down to that kind of granular stuff, you're going to see the carriers.

That's just a level of detail that I don't think right now insurers are going to really focus on.

They can log information on our structures more readily.

It may change, who knows, as technology and machine vision gets better.

But I think you hit a good point.

Like, we're in a place where we have to look at this from a balance.

What is the true balancing act?

We can't tip the scale one way, all the way to the other, either way, but we have to look hard at it, especially as we're dealing with more and more of these events.

And we also know we need houses.

We have to build.

We need.

We have a housing crisis in the United States.

And so we need to do this with all this stuff in mind and find that nice balance in the middle.

But, yeah, this year was one of those where you guys deal with the big windstorms on the West Coast.

Conifers are just going to snap.

We see that in pines in the southeast U.S.

and then, of course, we have the wonderful live oaks that just.

The entire whole thing just tips over and.

Exactly.

Yeah.

There is no roof system that's going to withstand that.

And it's a, it's.

To be honest, it's probably a bridge too far from an economics of building.

We just got to start thinking about how do we do this, how do we use vegetation across the board as one.

Some of the benefits that you get from it.

But also keeping that in mind that hey this might.

We don't want to introduce a vulnerability as we plant a tree, not realizing it's going to end up 40ft tall and 6ft in diameter right up against our home.

Yeah, so very true.

And it's funny as I've been remodeling my place, I was took out a closet and I moved it and put the master bedroom bed up against that.

And when I framed out the soffit for the lights I put up there, my wife was like why are you putting a beam up there?

I'm like well that's a roll cage up there for us.

Just in case.

I built it 10 times stronger than what it needed to be.

I didn't need a header up there but I headed across the entire room up there just to give myself a little more protection in case we had something come down.

Yeah, that's actually really smart to think even to that level deep.

And I actually had a friend of mine who works for the National Weather Service in Slidell do exactly the same thing.

Was really even thought about the trees on their property.

My parents, they have a huge pie.

They still in the house I grew up in and they'll during hurricanes go sleep in another bedroom because certain wind direction, this massive pine, it's going to come down right on top of where their bedroom was.

And that's.

I would encourage folks to think about stuff like that.

Yeah, we look at it here as well like this.

We had that bomb cyclone coming into us here last week or so and taking a peek at that and I'm like okay, that's coming from the east and the winds.

So that grove of trees on the property is at risk.

The ones in the back aren't coming my way.

But then I'm like okay, but that's the younger weaker ones compared to the 351.

350 year old one that's in the back that's made it through everything it's had thrown at it.

That's a healthy tree.

So you have to weigh those risks.

And yeah, there's times that I go ah, let's, let's go sleep on the living room couch.

It's safer down there.

Yeah, yeah.

It's something we, you have to think about occasionally, especially the.

When we deal with frequent windstorms or even think about ice storms too, we.

You can have the exact same thing happen in a winter weather event for sure.

Yep.

It was interesting.

I learned a lot about this as a kid.

I was 19 years old, living in an apartment.

We had one of those big windstorms when I was growing up in eastern Washington, way away from the coast.

And it took the trusses off a lot of the apartment complex because it was built in the 60s, so it didn't have any of the ties in there.

Right.

And when I was sitting in my second floor apartment and I watched this sheer crack go diagonally from the top down across a 20 foot wall in the living room dining room into the kitchen, and I'm watching the drywall snap and break at a diagonal, I was like, okay, we're getting ourselves in trouble here.

This building could come down when we see that breaking on the inside.

And it didn't.

But it really brought me to that thing of like, oh, this we need to build better for that.

Because I witnessed it as a teenager and it was crazy to see it was.

There was.

After the windstorm, I walked out in the parking lot and there was 18 inches of roof shingles and plywood on the parking lot of the apartment complex.

And siding, metal siding, it peeled it right off.

And it's just fascinating to see how much damage just a little wind can do.

Yeah, it is.

And it's a cascade that starts too.

Once it begins, you start whittling away at the different aspects.

And when like any other hazard, it's looking for that weak point and you hit something.

If we look at sort of the eras of construction, we go back to like really the 60s, 70s, 80s.

We started to fix this in the 90s with improved codification.

But that's the thing I'm looking for.

Say we're doing a hurricane damage survey.

You're going to see far more like gable in wall failures in that era of construction just point blank because just how we did it and we didn't have the proper sort of codification standard to account for the loads we needed to at the time.

So I always tell folks, you are, if you have those homes in that era, that 60s, 70s, 80s, maybe the early 90et, you're the perfect candidate for any of these roof retrofits.

The fortified roof program that we talk about, that's for you.

And it's a great time if you're re roofing to go ahead and do something to strengthen that.

Say you have a home built under the modern codes, you're going to have an awful lot of protection already built in, especially if you're in some of the coastal areas.

You mentioned the West Coast.

We still got to.

We had some work on the design level and just some of those loss prevention factors that have made it in the way into the hurricane prone coast codes.

But a lot of that we look at it was Hurricane Ian.

We looked at about 450 some odd homes built under that modern Florida building code.

Yeah, we've almost eliminated that because we've taken all this knowledge and put it into practice.

So can we do that elsewhere?

I think that's the message.

I tell you what, when I first met you guys, it was probably five years ago or so somewhere in that time I was out as the host at the Southeastern building Conference on the demo stage.

And I was the kind of the host of that stage and was helping with all these different things.

And I know a lot about building construction.

But looking at what coastal states over there have to do to meet current code back then, I'm like, this was so foreign to me when we first started having conversations.

I'm like, you're tying the top plate into the concrete with cables.

Coming up.

And strap.

Wow.

Okay.

It was, it was a whole new world from a west coast guy.

And I know the rest of the country that doesn't live or build down there would be doing the same thing going, wow, okay.

That's a whole new level of construction that I think would make a difference whether you're in an earthquake or if you're in a hurricane or a tornado or anything else.

How many times do we see.

And I love old houses.

I have no disrespect to them.

And a lot of people will go, hey, they sure don't build them like they used to.

And it shows the house out in the middle of the street from when the tornado hurricane came through.

And I'm like, yeah, the house wasn't attached to the foundation, so it's out in the street.

And the one that was built 20 years ago is still sitting there.

There weren't engineers back in the 20s building these houses and signing off on plants.

Yeah.

And we could.

The load path from a tornado perspective has become like one of.

It's the most critical aspect.

And I think about when the city of Mo in Oklahoma put in their building code following like their fourth violent tornado in two decades.

There was the same sort of response like, hey, what is this?

Like, what do we do?

And then if you go look at a couple of the tornadoes that Hurricane Milton caused, we had one of these modern Florida homes where the tornado deposited a construction dumpster on the roof system.

And it was structurally okay.

Like there was obviously some damage.

But from you have a home to come back to after a tornado dropped a dumpster on top of your house.

That was not a small dumpster, by the way.

Oh, it was huge.

That was not a little convenience store dumpster.

That was something out in front of a job site.

Yeah, you could imagine that could have been a vehicle easily.

It was kind of a very interesting proof point to that.

But you saw how these things can perform if we just take that, translate that knowledge over to some of the other hazards.

And you mentioned seismic.

That's one of the more successful retrofit programs too, especially in the state of California, some of the seismic retrofits.

But if you rewind the clock like way, way back.

And I was noticing this was at the Smithsonian, the Museum of American History.

And they have an early colonial house that's actually reassembled inside the museum.

And I'm looking at of course, all the connections, right?

Like, sure, 13 years ago when I started IBHS, I wouldn't go stare at this stuff readily.

Oh, now you're geeking out.

But yeah, but the way with the type of connections back then, you created a natural load path.

But as we progressed all the way to when mass production of homes started, we got away from a lot of that because on some of its highly skilled carpentry kind of work, sure, I wouldn't even attempt to do that.

But now we've caught up with modern techniques that do save on the labor and that kind of thing to be able to accomplish the exact same thing like we were doing a century plus more than that now these days ago.

But it's just these factors that can actually keep us structured together.

That to be honest, if we put them together like the doom and gloom, they don't cost that much in the grand scheme.

But we've hit it like there's some retrofits that we have and we have to.

Folks in that era of construction, you are the candidates for.

You can make a big difference with just a.

When you re roof going to something like the fortified system, you get a good shot to do something really good to your home.

Oh yeah, my house was built in 77.

It's a perfect candidate.

And I am happy though.

And when I Got into it and looking around, I'm like, oh, cool.

Trusses are clipped down to the top plate.

I'm like, somebody went the extra mile at the time.

Yeah.

I was surprised when we bought our house in South Carolina, our first one, and we saw one, they actually did the trust to walk in action clips.

Missed one.

Of course.

My wife, who's also an engineer, makes the calls.

The builder.

We weren't the first owner either, but we were able to actually get the original builder to come out and deal with it.

But a typical homeowner may not know what they're looking for in that inspection.

So as we improve codes, bringing that side, the inspection process along is just as important.

Jordan.

Yeah, no question.

What do you see in.

I'm out in the west coast here and now we're seeing this in the Northeast now, too, with wildfires.

But I know you guys have been really diving in head deep into wildfire situations where I know you were working on the local stuff, even, which was the hurricane stuff.

But wildfire is a whole other different beast.

It is.

But really it was the.

I say the focus got put on it from an insurance and loss perspective, because for the very first time, you started having wildfires that moved into our suburbs that created loss events that are on par with hurricanes.

Yeah.

Of course, when we're looking at how we manage risk across the United States, that's going to make anybody who's insuring that risk step up and look at it like, whoa, what have we done?

And you realize over some of it was.

Dates back to our policies of wildfire suppression.

So we weren't telling folks that this really was a threat.

We started building our typical suburban neighborhoods into these wildlands that already had fire as part of their ecosystems.

Like fire was meant to be there.

Vegetation had evolved to use fire for benefit.

And now we've built neighborhoods where we put houses that have very little exterior fire resistance to them.

And then we connect them with fuels, whether that's plants, whether that's our wood fences.

I was doing some work even this morning looking at the Marshall fire in Colorado, and you had one of the neighborhoods, like 96% of homes were actually physically connected by wooden privacy fences, because we like them.

But it was the dominant source of fire to each home.

In fact, each of these homes, from a defensible space perspective, was actually pretty good.

They didn't have a lot of vegetation that connected them.

But guess what?

Fire found that path through the fence.

And so we're looking at what are the ways One, we can do better on the exterior.

Two, how do we landscape to reduce that fire pathway of fire going structure to structure?

Because right now there's places where if you just put fire into a neighborhood under those wind conditions like you guys just dealt with and put in a drought and that's going to be a catastrophe, the outcome is almost certain.

So how do we stop that?

And that's been the focus of our work.

Just looking at what do we got to do from that fuel management perspective and also how fire moves from building to building to building.

It's so true.

And I've been putting up steel fence around my place.

I've got steel panel fence that I've been putting up and getting rid of my cedar for that exact reason.

Yeah, I've seen some folks really doing the five foot retrofit gates now which is fantastic.

And we want everybody to do that.

Yeah, some of the products are actually one aesthetic at least from my perspective.

I really like some of the aesthetic of these.

Yeah, they're going to be a little bit more expensive.

But you have broken that chain of fire to the and that's what we want to see.

I do think there's some hope eventually as codes and ordinances start to catch up that we're going to see some of those things put in place.

But it goes into if you're going to do something.

Luckily most of us these days have a class A fire rated roof.

Unless you're in a wood shake, which a lot of places are starting to do away with that by code.

You're going to have an asphalt shingle, you're going to have a concrete clay tile.

You're going to have a metal roof.

Those are all great.

And now you've taken the roof and put it way down on the weakest link chain.

Well, the next one that comes up is that five foot zone that surrounds your house.

And the fence is part of that where it connects to your home.

But that's where you just want to keep things that can move fire to your home.

The combustible stuff outside of that.

And then after that it's about spacing those fuel elements.

Whether that's like your kids play set or just your landscaping.

Don't have complete chains of fuel to fire magically it will find those chains.

There's Like a textbook that talks about all the buildings close together and we put in all this fuel, all the small like carts and shanties in between the buildings and what do you know, fire went building to building under wind and drought.

So that's what we've been after.

It's been a say we're integrating that science faster than I've seen in the other perils, which is really encouraging because we're trying to short circuit really.

What's a multigenerational kind of communications problem?

I tell folks I grew up, when I was five years old, I could probably tell you what you could do about a hurricane.

Hey, board up your windows.

All the prep steps.

Right.

But you talk to folks about wildfire and you don't get that answer.

So we've got a multi generational sort of communication issue too, to just tell people what are the steps you can do and that'll start that chain toward mitigating the problems.

Yeah.

Even if you can't afford to do a whole metal fence system around your house, even if you take where it comes up to the structure and take the first 10ft away, you've done a huge difference.

Right.

If you just go any 20ft of fence.

Yeah.

Five foot gate that makes on both sides that can make or break or even just say, hey, I've got a shed and I can move it away from my house.

Those little things are those steps that really do start to make meaningful impacts.

Especially as you put two or three together, you can start to really change it.

And I used to say, I think wildfire from a retrofit standpoint is one of the most mitigatable hazards we have.

And I don't know if that's actually a word, but we just made it that.

Yeah, we just made it up.

But because of those facts are mostly around doing things to the exterior and your landscaping.

So you can put in some of that sweat equity to get to a really good place.

And I think we're going to have to get there because right now, as I mentioned, the fires that turn into these big loss events that are on par with some of the other catastrophes we see.

If you're the ones with the financial dollars behind that risk, you are absolutely going to be paying a lot closer attention than maybe 30 years ago where those were.

They're not in the tens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifty billions.

They were in like the single digits.

Billions in the worst case.

But now we have a different story.

I have friends that are firefighters.

I know of new developments in areas around here where they are trying gonna try to contain that house fire.

Not talking a wildfire, I'm talking about a house fire.

It's a success if they can contain it to the block.

Oh yeah.

And they're worried about it getting to the next block.

And that's a house fire because there's six feet in between houses and they didn't really do 15 years ago any real fire protection.

Vinyl siding on the outside, you see all these things that are just ready to go.

And unfortunately those are some of the more affordable housing developments and the people least likely to have the right insurance and you know, the cost effective way to even handle it themselves.

And so it's pretty tough.

And I think it's one of the biggest risks we see out there.

One thing that we see in the Pacific Northwest here, which is super local and I think it's one of the biggest mistakes is in these same neighborhoods and anywhere else we have this wildfire risk.

And in July, August, you drive around and because we have such wet winters, people don't water their lawns.

And so you go by in the grass is mowed, but it is white like hay.

And a cigarette could catch the block on fire flipping out of somebody's car.

And just a little bit of water would go so far in just reducing that risk because that grass comes right up against the wood.

Bark goes right up against the juniper bushes that are half dry sitting there and all of a sudden you got a heck of a fire.

Yeah, just vegetation that's in a dormant or dead state.

State by itself is just a huge fuel element.

But I think you hit a topic like if when you do that, when you landscape, if you can have those gaps with something non combustible in that path where the grass leads up to your home.

And so I was just out with Ventura county fire, following the mountain fire in Ventura County, California and we saw like, it was remarkable.

Every like flower bed with mulch lit up.

There was some evidence that an ember fell in there and ignited it.

So.

So when you do those things, it's about making sure there are gaps, solid gaps.

But to the point about grasses, there's what you do if you're going to have them and you're in a higher risk for fire, make sure they're maintained.

Because we even saw some dormant Bermuda grass still spread fire to a mulch bed.

Fire went through the mulch bed.

Luckily this homeowner had done that.

Really?

And I love these.

The decomposed granite pathways.

Oh yeah.

And guess what it did.

It stopped the fire from getting to the house.

They didn't have the full non combustible, say zone zero or that first five foot that I would teach.

But for their purpose in that event, it was enough.

And it made the difference probably between that home becoming a total loss.

Right.

And in a wildfire scenario, when you're combating multiple blocks of ignitions, you're.

It's a coin flip.

If you're going to get intervention, the fire service, they have a bigger, more dangerous problem to deal with.

In those environments, it's often binary.

If you get an ignition, chances are you're going to have a total loss.

Other than just random chance that an engine company happened to drive by, maybe saw your fence on fire, quickly hopped out, knocked it down and then you're in.

See what else happens.

Yeah.

If you had a cedar fence and you were getting evacuated, I hate to say this, it's probably smart for you to go out there and take the first two sections down with the sawzall, drag them out of the way as you're loading the car up to get out of there, because you've just reduced that risk.

Yeah, I've thought about the exact same thing.

Even though living in the eastern US we are generally wetter, typically and don't have.

But we do have flash droughts that are getting a lot more frequent out here.

Yeah, look at New Jersey right now.

We had fire.

Even one of the parks in Brooklyn, the fire that was right around the New Jersey border moving toward the New York City metro.

I think I'd hop out there with the sawzall or my chainsaw or my rakes and just yank everything out those pathways for fire and.

But those who live with this risk in a almost year round now, these are the things that you should just think about, hey, I'm going to do them.

So I don't.

They're just there.

And we call them passive protections or passive mitigation.

They just sit there and they work.

As long as you maintain them, they're going to work for you.

And that I'm using for landscaping around my house that I have a couple miles from here, a recycling company that takes in concrete, granite, marble from all the different like fabrication shops that make countertops.

And it goes in there and they crush it down into like inch and a half pieces.

Well, part of it is glossy.

It looks beautiful.

It's polished like a concrete, like a countertop or something.

So you've got blues, reds, greens, all the different granite colors.

So it looks really pretty, but it's big Inch and a half stuff.

And so it looks really good with this color.

It's not just like crushed concrete sitting there and it looks awesome.

But it's also that fire resistant landscaping material.

Oh for sure.

We did a help sponsor a landscape design competition for actually a lot of the university's landscape design programs in the Western U.S.

participated and I was just blown away by just looking at these designs and that's like a hobby of mine is I'm a wannabe landscape designer because I just love that's my get my hands dirty and go do some manual labor and turn the brain off for a little while.

Some of the use of pathways and and the love the recyclable material as your non combustible path.

I did that in our garden and I'm just sitting there like this is right up my alley.

So I hope as we evolve into these fire resistant landscape designs one they can be aesthetically appealing and there's so many options for folks.

I get that it's a lot of work but I do hope as landscape design companies start offering maybe even like think about packages that are for wildfire resistance.

Like they already have some pre designed sets that you could pick from.

But also as we look at the use of mitigation grant money that should be in the cards is how to deal with Your own Zone 0 and get your landscape in a form.

You should be able to get a grant for that to become fire resistant.

And as we learn more I think we will see it because we'll have actual targeted things.

We can start pointing to that, hey, our dollars are best spent here.

And then when we do this, not just on 10 homes but 100 homes to 500 homes now we've made a really big difference.

Yeah, it's such an interesting one.

I totally agree with you there.

And wildfires out here in the west coast, one of our biggest problems is we need to get all the interested people at the same table talking about land management out here because mother nature would come through, burn up those combustibles every five to seven years or whatever the wildfire rate was and nobody was stopping it.

So it would burn through and then you would have all these small wildfires.

And unfortunately we've got all this state and federal land out here that's maybe being managed differently where they hurry up and put the fire out.

But then the combustibles keep getting in bigger and now we have these massive fires that really didn't happen 200 years ago because the smaller fires went through and did its own Little prescribed burn.

And I think we got to really get that dialed in from a state and federal level as well.

So we don't get these big fires that we've been having recently.

The big blow up that occurred out in Montana, Idaho, which was really timber.

The railways were out there.

This started the policy of extreme wildfire suppression.

They called it the 10am policy.

So the idea was to suppress and take care of every single wildfire by the 10am the next morning.

We were still functioning under that general policy philosophy, which.

So now we're looking at the better part of almost a century trying to undo a century of policy decisions that were centered around suppression in environments that needed fire as part of their ecosystems already.

And we've over a century.

Think about how we've built cities of the United States over a century.

This was a problem in the making that I hesitate to say.

We didn't stick our head in the sand.

It just, we forgot about it.

We just forgot and thought we had solved it.

We've done so much work on urban fires and our building codes have done so well on interior fire, we just, just forgot.

And then now throw in a little bit of the climate element too, and this happens.

And unfortunately, we humans start most wildfires these days.

There's more people, we've spread out.

And you now have these fires that really want to propagate through those ecosystems, but they're closer to our communities.

And then throw in the volatile conditions and this is what you get.

So we got some work to do for sure.

Oh yeah, 100%.

Well, we're going to run out of time pretty soon.

I know we got to watch out for that, but I wanted to talk more about fortified home a little bit here and really get a bow around that for the people out there because we were teasing about it earlier, talking about wanting to do it.

But let's give people a little bit more information on that because I think it's such a great thing that you guys are doing.

You guys have such an amazing testing facility where you're really just testing out materials and.

And I gotta get down there one of these days and check it out because anytime I can watch you guys build homes up in a wind tunnel and try to blow them down, I'm interested, if you know what I mean.

Oh, there's definitely a cool factor and there's always like five months of work for like five minutes.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

That was crazy.

But yeah.

So our Fortified program is and I'll give a shout out to our wildfire prepared home program, which is these are what we call our designation program.

They're building standards that go above the building code and are designed for resilience.

For Fortified is around windstorms and then also wind and hail.

Fortified has three different levels you could build to and the first one is roof, which is the best option if you are re roofing and you want to make your roof better and stronger for the next storm.

Fortified roof is the deal and it's got its system of protections.

The cornerstone is the sealed roof deck.

Deck making sure that the deck seams are sealed as we talked about earlier, that wind driven rain can't get through there and amplify all that interior water damage.

The next piece is adding ring shank nails to the decking.

So you're going to improve the uplift resistance of your deck.

That's something we've known for several decades in wind engineering.

And then lastly, there's some details around how the edge shingles are sealed down.

That is the peak area of uplift.

So shingles don't age that well from a wind resistance perspective.

But this is the one spot where we try to mitigate some of that at the edges where there's the highest uplift.

So that's roof.

Then we move on to silver, which is the middle ground where you add opening protection around windows, garages, chimney, reinforced chimney connections, things like that.

But really the gold, and I say gold because it is called fortified gold.

It is.

The gold standard is the biggest for a new build and it's the full.

You get the components of fortified roof, impact resistant windows, wind rated garage door and the full load path.

We tie the roof to walls, wall to found.

It is the gold standard for construction.

And I mentioned earlier the Florida building code in most, in about a third of the state.

The code now mimics fortified gold.

It's come up so much that's awesome that some places where you're building you are basically getting the protections of a fortified gold home.

It's one of the biggest windstorm resilient success stories in the United States.

So that's taking decades of wind engineering science putting it into a standard and turn it loose.

So we've eclipsed.

I could actually pull that up.

We are in 50,000 plus designations these days.

Wow.

And it's growing rapidly.

Alabama, coastal Alabama started all this momentum.

They've even put Fortified into their codes themselves.

And a lot of those jurisdictions, Louisiana's coming up.

North Carolina is a second.

So they're hot on the heels of Alabama.

Louisiana started their grant program this year.

And I will tell you, in most states these days, there are insurance incentives tied to Fortified.

If you have that roof designation or gold or silver designation.

So check out Fortified home dot org.

And we're doing the same thing for Wildfire.

The program is called Wildfire Prepared Home.

Same thing, set of code, enhanced protections that are meant for mitigation.

The Wildfire Prepared program just has two levels.

It's what we call our base level, which is really about protecting against ember attack.

And then we go to plus, which brings in not only ember attack, but we talked about it, the flames, radiant heat, building, the more hardened structural materials to give you a more comprehensive set of protection.

So those are the designation programs of trying to bring science put into a practical standard that can be executed on.

And it's been.

Fortified has been an amazing ride.

Started slow, but now we are definitely cranking away.

That is awesome.

Yeah.

And you guys are just really changing it.

And what I think is cool is that there's always been a pushback from some of the building community out there of, well, we're trying to make houses more affordable.

And at the same point, you're going, how are we making houses more affordable if we're having to replace them in these areas so soon?

And the insurance companies, who are a business themselves, have to be able to be profitable so they can stay in business and not be like in California, where they're dropping everybody's plans down there because they literally are going to go out of business if they stay there.

So.

So we gotta find that happy medium.

And you guys are just doing such great work of finding where that is and the things that we can do as part of now.

Standard building practices.

And I think the more we do of elevating the rest of the community, because quite frankly, building code is the minimum out there.

And if we can get that minimum a little higher to make these things be able to withstand more, everyone wins.

Yeah, I think you hit it.

Absolutely.

Fortified really is.

It's such a great model for success.

And it is that middle ground.

Right.

If you look at the amount of material we're unfortunately replacing over and over again with damage, those dollars have just got out of control.

And if we look at our system in the United States, this isn't sustainable.

And if you look at the spectrum in the insurance industry, the Carriers that are going to feel this first and already are or a lot of the smaller regional carriers that don't have giant footprints like the big names we see on super bowl commercials.

But they're having to manage this.

And the loss part has become unsustainable because we just have to replace so much material these days.

We can do better.

We're figuring out how fortified has been a place where we've shown what that middle ground actually looks like.

Where you got a great retrofit option that doesn't cost a whole lot more and you also got a great option for new construction that really does deliver.

It was remarkable.

We looked at some of the Hurricane Sally loss data with the Alabama Department of Insurance and University of Alabama.

Fortified homes that yeah they, they'll.

You can have damage it, it happens, right.

But you look at existing, your non fortified construction is that big old fat exponential growth and damage ratios.

And there's fortified just humming along the bottom.

Yeah, you get a little damage here and there but not into that big old fact curve that takes off skyrocketing as the event severity gets worse.

And you sit there, look at it man.

That's the story right there.

Yeah, we see it on the news.

You see the hurricane footage of the helicopter or the drone going by and you're like how come those four houses are three blocks back in piles of rubble in this house here has some damage to the siding.

Yeah, we can't stop all damage but man, we can do a heck of a lot to take a chunk out of it.

And also so at the end of the day you're going to have families that do have a home to come back to and that when we do it in mass you will have communities that stay intact rather than places that have been so decimated that people just have to sell their homes because they can't hand the financial burden is too much.

Even if you had insurance, you may not be able to handle the financial burden of what that means.

And I think when we do this in mass, that's what changes.

We keep those communities intact.

Whereas today far too often we see them come apart for those reasons.

Well, and then it just exponentially grows because if the first row of houses comes apart now that debris hits a second run of houses and it's just like an avalanche.

Right.

I mean you've got, you've now got what was tree debris or anything like that was from mother Nature.

Now you've got exponentially more going and causing more damage.

So the more we talked about wildfire, right it's the ultimate example.

Example.

We can do a lot on our parser our lots to help reduce that risk.

But when we tag team 100 of them, we actually can stop an entire catastrophe from unfolding.

And so that's the message to fire across all these perils has that dependency the most.

And when you do it all together, we can't stop the tornadoes and hurricanes because in reality our buildings don't contribute to what they are.

But fire's different, right?

Our houses are a fuel so that no question, we can absolutely stop a catastrophe from unfolding.

It's pretty remarkable.

It is.

Well, we're running out of time.

Ian, what's the best place for people to find out more about you guys and all the different things you do?

Dr.

Oh, yeah.

Please go to ibhs.org for the information about all the research programs we get.

Follow us on Social too.

All the different channels you can find and see all the great images that come from the test work we do.

And we mentioned the Fortify program.

So that's fortify.org and then wildfire prepared, which is wildfire prepared.org but just.org will take you there to see all the great science that we do.

And please check it out and give a look like we've talked about.

If you're ready to make some changes to your home, that first step is always the best one, no question.

Thanks for coming on today, brother.

I'm Eric G.

You gotta check these guys out.

You've been listening to around the House.