Green Builder Media and NFPA announce the publication of a new e-book on wildfire mitigation, Enough is Enough. The follow-up to NFPA’s popular 2015 e-book, Design With Fire In Mind: Three Steps to a Safer New Home, Enough is Enough details what needs to be done to help prevent loss of property and lives to fire.
Between the publications of both e-books, wildfires have continued to make headline news across the country, including back-to-back record-setting wildfire seasons in California, which destroyed more than 25,000 residential structures, took more than 100 lives, and resulted in $24 billion in insured property losses. Enough Is Enough is much more than a rallying cry, it is a practical script for a new era of safe home building in wildfire-prone areas.
ignition-resistant homes
The book analyzes post-fire scenes of some of the major fires of the past four years, and offers detailed suggestions and best practices for how to design and build homes using what was learned from those tragedies, including:
- A holistic approach to the wildfire problem, acknowledging that a single weak link opens the whole system to catastrophic failure
- The ways California’s 2008 Building Code affected how homes fared in recent fires
- The importance of codes and ordinances for property safety and their impact on insurance strategies for rebuilding after a disaster
- The impact of embers and how to design ignition-resistant homes and commercial buildings to stop their ability to spread fire
reduce vulnerability to fire
- The details on how to properly use landscape features, and home materials and maintenance to reduce vulnerability to fire
- The right way to rebuild homes after disaster has struck
- The information about how ignition-resistant homes are the affordable choice for new construction
- The understanding of fire history as well as current risk mapping and why it is important
build safer places for residents
“How we build, design, and maintain homes can make them less vulnerable to a fire, but these efforts need to be supported by the understanding and action of everyone in the community," says NFPA’s Wildfire Division Director Michele Steinberg. "This project has afforded Green Builder Media and NFPA a great opportunity to provide important, actionable steps to planners and developers as they build safer places for residents to live."
“We are proud to work with NFPA to get wildfire mitigation information into the hands of building professionals and homeowners,” says Green Builder Media CEO Sara Gutterman. “NFPA offers clear, practical strategies gleaned from the organization’s comprehensive study of how wildfires work and how the way we design our built environment needs to evolve.”