There are a number of considerations for prepping your house for a potential or approaching wildfire… Time is your most crucial consideration, but the three important areas of house prep are:
- Landscaping and removing flammable material as far out from the home as you can.
- Setting up hydration by putting a sprinkler on the roof, exterior decks and other key areas, and
- By sealing your house on the outside and then prepping on the inside.
For this quick installment, we’ll focus on sealing the exterior of the home to protect it from some of the many hazards associated with an approaching fire.
There are many dangers that come with a wildfire. You have extreme radiant temperatures, heated particulate smoke and other gasses, winds generated by the heat and thermal exchanges with the immediate environment, falling trees, small debris being blown about by the winds, and embers galore that will be cascading down on your property.
Here are but a few things you can do to protect your house before a wildfire:
- Think hurricane. Since winds and debris are an issue, you’ll want to prep your house almost like you would for a hurricane, but without as much structural bracing (though you should think about structural bracing anyway as protection against any number of other disasters).
- Fire resistant storm shutters would be the best thing to protect your windows from heat and flying debris, but if don’t have them or want them, please don’t think you have no options. Next best thing would be plywood shutters that were pre-cut, painted with a fire-resistant coating, and labeled as to which window they covered. Pre-drill them with holes at the top (and have small hooks over each window pre-installed) and drill finger holes so that one person can lift and hang the plywood sheets for faster installation.
- Have covers made for crawl space openings and any other opening that would allow heated gasses or embers access to the inside of your house. For some smaller openings such as soffet vents, you can cover them with a couple of layers of aluminum foil held in place with metallic HVAC duct tape. (The fabric tape we think of when we hear "duct tape" is actually flammable and not very suitable for outdoor application in a wildfire scenario).
- Save some metal cans (like large soup cans) to set over your plumbing vent stacks. You don’t want to seal them, but you want to temporarily prevent embers from falling in them and to protect them from catching fire since the vent stacks are usually made of PVC pipe.
- If you have a chimney and can reach the top safely enough, you might want to loosely cap the chimney opening with a metal five-gallon bucket or something similar. If you choose not to do this, or can’t, be sure to leave the flue open and the protective fireplace screen closed. You want to do this so that if an ember falls into the chimney it’ll fall on into the fireplace where fire is supposed to be, and not linger in a creosote-coated chimney that could catch fire and then set fire to your house.
To read more about the other steps associated with wildfire preparation, stop by and read our larger wildfire article at http://www.disasterprep101.com/wildfire.htm.