Home Hardening Cuts Wildfire Losses in Half. The Hard Part Is Measuring It.

In Altadena this past January, the Eaton Fire left behind the image that has come to define the modern wildfire: one neighborhood reduced to ash, and right in the middle of it, seemingly untouched, a home that survived.

A lone home stands among residences leveled by the Eaton Fire in Altadena, Calif., Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

Now, it turns out, the difference between destruction and survival comes down to more than just luck. And we now have the data to prove it.

Over the past year, a remarkable run of research has converged on the same conclusion: the physical condition of an individual property, what the roof is made of, what’s growing in the first five feet, and whether the vents are screened, are the strongest determinants of whether that home survives. Home hardening and mitigation work, and the science behind it is now hard to argue with.

This raises a new question: if survival comes down to parcel-level physical detail, can we actually measure that detail at scale? Because most of the tools the industry relies on today cannot.

Read the full article on Substack: https://omnigeo.substack.com/p/home-hardening-cuts-wildfire-losses