When Rich Fairbanks built a remote home on Sterling Creek Road two years ago, he had fire on his mind. Live in the sticks, the retired forester and firefighter knew, and the trees around you some day are likely to burn.

But Fairbanks decided then that fire didn’t have to burn his house as well. He built the two-story structure to present a smooth face to an approaching inferno, using the least amount possible of wood and other flammable material and minimizing sills, decks and eaves. Fairbanks calls the approach "fire-permeable" building. Fire may permeate the area, his theory goes, but because there’s no fuel near the house and its surfaces are flat and fire-resistant, it leaves the house itself alone.

"If the homes are more fire permeable," Fairbanks says, "then we don’t need to pump (fire) crews in where they shouldn’t be."

It’s a logical approach, says Brett Fillis, chief of Fire District 9, which covers the Applegate, although he noted that a rural home in the trees never will be entirely safe from fire.

"As long as you’ve done your fuel treatment around the house and have your eave vents screened, you’re in pretty good shape and you won’t get radiant heat building up under overhangs," he says. "But you have to temper that with the understanding that you’ve increased the likelihood of your home’s survival up to the 95th percentile. There will always be factors — weather plays a great role — that despite all you’ve done, you can still lose your house.

Advertisement

"You can never guarantee 100 percent safety from fire."

Fairbanks has reason to know something about the subject. Before retirement, he worked for three decades for the U.S. Forest Service, including as leader of a team working on a recovery project on the 500,000-acre Biscuit fire in 2002. He recently launched a business as consultant on backwoods fire safety.

On any forest home, he says, the first line of defense is the roof, where sparks inevitably land during a fire. Using a shake or wood-shingle roof, he says, is "asking for it."

Better are metal, tile or synthetic roofs that have earned a class A rating from Underwriters Laboratory Inc. Fire-resistant roofs are mandatory on new construction and reroofing jobs that affect more than 50 percent of a structure, notes Fillis.

Fairbanks’ house has a handsome copper roof, whose slick surface sheds leaves, needles and forest debris that can harbor sparks long after a fire has passed.

Eaves, he adds, should be metal and must be cleaned of tinder-like debris — often a spawning bed for fire that takes the whole house.

Although overhangs keep a house cooler and save on summer energy bills, Fairbanks recommends avoiding them as they allow extreme heat to collect underneath and present an easy edge for fire to catch on.

His own house, however, does have overhangs.

"I didn’t have the strength to argue with the architect and my wife on the overhangs," he says, "but I do have a high-pressure pump on my well and a great firehose I got off eBay that connects right to it."

House vents, says Fairbanks, should be screened with the tightest mesh — eighth-inch is what he uses — to keep "ember wash" from flowing in under roofs, finding tinder in the shavings most builders leave behind.

Windows should be double pane, which fails far less often than single pane in fires, says Fairbanks. This is critical because, "once your windows go, the embers are in there on your sofa, and your house is gone."

Deny fire toeholds by smoothing facades, eliminating sills and trim that would look nice on an urban house but only create problems in the woods.

People love decks and shady pergolas, but they only invite fire. If you must have them, suggests Fairbanks, make them of stone and blocks. If you must have wood, use larger stock, which takes longer to burn.

Fillis says rural homeowners seem more knowledgeable about fire safety than they once did. A survey of dwellings in his area last year showed 87 percent had cleared the land around their homes. This year, that had risen to 93 percent.

"When these fires burn, we do triage and put efforts into what we can save without danger to us," says Fillis. "If it’s not safe, we’re going to pull crews out of there and those homes are going to have to survive on their own or not at all. We see a lot less unsafe homes now. People are on the bandwagon."

Applegate homeowner Matt Epstein counts himself among that group. After clearing vegetation around his log cabin, he focused on the house itself, replacing a shake roof with Class A composition shingle.

The moment of clarity came for Epstein during the 2002 Squires fire, when three engines stood guard in his driveway.

"Their first question was: What kind of roof do you have?"

The new roof was no small investment but "it created a house that would be safe for 35 years in an area of frequent fires," says Epstein. Along with it came a regimen of cleaning gutters of flammable detritus several times a year.

Overhanging limbs were cut back, an under-porch area was screened, the woodpile was moved 150 yards away from his home, the chimney was capped with a screen and growth beside the driveway was cut back 25 feet so fire crews would know they could turn around.

Materials can make all the difference