Rebuild:LA Episode 036 - How Difficult Is It to Harden Your Home? We Asked Two Fire Chiefs How They Hardened Their Own

This week Cameron Barrett sits down with two Fire Chiefs who have just completed projects in their respective homes to give them the best chance of making it through a wildfire. Chief Frank Bigelow is CAL FIRE’s Deputy Director of Community Wildfire Preparedness and Mitigation. Chief Jose de Jesus Lopez is a retired Assistant Chief for Los Angeles County Fire Department, and currently serves on the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. Bigelow and his family have just moved in to a newly built home outside of Fresno, where he and his wife have made exacting decisions to build a home that is both state of the art and fire resistant. Lopez has come at it from an entirely different angle, taking a house built in 1960, and retrofitting it to be fire resistant. We recorded this week’s episode right in Lopez’s backyard, which overlooks El Prieto Canyon and the Angeles National Forest. Lopez is one of the lucky ones. His neighborhood is in Altadena, but is a California Fire Safe Council, and survived both the Station Fire in 2009 and the Eaton Fire in January. Find out what decisions they made to protect their homes.

Resources:

• Wildfire:LA
• State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection
• Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety “Wildfire Prepared Home” Standards
• National Institute for Standards Technology’s Hazard Mitigation Methodology
• CAL FIRE Home Hardening
• CAL FIRE Defensible Space