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Steven Snyder stood by his bedroom window, gazing out as his neighborhood burned. Waves of red and orange flames and plumes of black smoke swallowed everything in sight — yet, remarkably, his house stood unscathed.
By then, it was too late to evacuate. As the fiery chaos raged outside, Snyder felt a sense of calm. He trusted his family would be safe. When he had built his home in Camarillo in 2024, he had taken every precaution to fireproof it, a practice the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is increasingly encouraging homeowners to do.
Since climate change has helped create the most flammable Earth in human history, every new wildfire season brings new reminders resilience is everything. It determines which communities burn to ashes and which ones survive.
Homeowners like Snyder, living in wildfire-prone areas, are being urged by the Cal Fire to “harden” their homes, preparing them for the threat of wildfires.
It can be achieved by retrofitting key parts of the home, including roofs, chimneys, vents, windows, walls, decks, patios, garages, fences, driveways, gutters, and, perhaps most importantly, clearing out a defensible space around the home. A defensible space is a buffer between the house and the surrounding area that slows and stops the spread of fire.
“Our experiences, as firefighters on the ground, we see which homes are able to be saved and which ones are destroyed,” State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant told CNN. “The research we have done really has led us to be science based in the ability to say that if you do these mitigations, you are significantly more likely to have your home survive a wildfire.”
“It only takes one ember to destroy a home.”
Cal Fire’s warnings follow a devastating wildfire that ravaged Southern California’s Ventura County on Thursday, igniting dozens of homes and consuming thousands of acres in just hours. The fast-moving blaze prompted authorities to issue more than 14,000 evacuation notices.
The Mountain Fire began early Wednesday near the small community of Somis and, driven by winds gusting over 60 mph, soon damaged or destroyed homes in the nearby Camarillo area, some 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles, Cal Fire said. The flames have scarred more than 20,700 acres of land, according to Cal Fire. As of Saturday evening, the fire was 17% contained.
At least 104 properties have been destroyed by the fire, while 22 have been left damaged, Ventura County Fire Department officials said in an update Saturday evening.
Despite fire officials ordering the evacuation of thousands of homes, 250 residents chose to stay, according to Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff. Some wanted to defend their homes, while others, like Snyder, had fireproofed their homes and felt confident in their chances.
“It was quite a thriller, looking out the window and seeing everything is lit up in the sky, and the trees are just bent over and stuff is blowing through us. You can’t see anything, it’s just orange,” Snyder said. “My wife and my daughter, they were a quite a bit shaken, crying ‘Oh my god, oh my god’ but I wasn’t worried, I did a lot of the work on the house and I was really confident the way it was built.”
During his home’s construction, Snyder installed fireproof roofing, siding and eaves. He also installed sprinklers throughout the house, including in the attic, closets and bathrooms. The windows are also fire-rated and the front door and garage doors are steel.
“There’s nothing around the house that was going to burn, whatever blew over, ashes and embers and stuff can land on the concrete, the dirt, on the roof, it wouldn’t hurt us.”
How to harden your home to be fire-resistant
Since 2008, California has had stringent building construction requirements for homes in wildlife-prone areas to ensure they are built with more ember- and fire-resistant materials, Berlant said. Homes built before then are unlikely to have protection against wildfires and need homeowners to replace the materials themselves.
The most affordable and critical component of hardening a home is by clearing all dead and dry vegetation and other flammable materials to create a 100-foot defensible space around the home. Removing vegetation, firewood, and other combustible materials from on top or under decks is also crucial in protecting a home from wildfires.
Even then, most homes destroyed in wildfires are ignited by embers traveling long distances, sometimes over a mile and land on weak spots, like leaves in the gutters or underneath garage doors, resulting in the home catching on fire.
Here are the main ways homeowners can harden their homes, according to a guide created by the US Forest Service and the United States Department of Agriculture:
• First priority: Install a Class A-rated roof such as asphalt fiberglass shingles or metal panels. Clear leaves, pine needles, and other flammable material from the roof, gutters, and areas near fences. Install flame and ember-resistant vents.
• Second priority: Replace wood or plastic fences attaches to the home with noncombustible metal fencing. Enclose low decks and areas under bay windows with mesh screening or ventilated noncombustible material. Remove branches overhanging the roof and gutters.
• Third priority: Replace at least the lower foot of wood or vinyl sliding with fiber cement, stucco, brick, or stone siding. Enclose open eaves with noncombustible soffit material. Use dual-paned, tempered glass in windows and doors. Replace wooden decking with fire-rated composite material, metal, or lightweight concrete.
Cal Fire works in alignment with the insurance industry in California, Berlant said, to require homeowners to take mitigation to decrease the risk of their homes being affected by wildfires.
But it’s not so simple, Snyder says, as highly flammable homes in areas at high risk of experiencing wildfires can cost more to insure than the homes are worth. He pointed to a neighbor, whose home was luckily undamaged, who lost insurance coverage just before the fire.
Homeowners who want to harden their homes will have to face the costs to replace roofs, fences, and windows, and some simply won’t be able to afford it.
Adding extra wildfire safety measures beyond California’s existing building codes can increase construction costs by 2% to 13%, according to a report from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.
The cost of reinforcing existing homes against wildfires can vary significantly, depending on the extent of protection needed and the size of the home, but will likely range between $2,000 and $15,000, and full hardening could cost as much as $100,000, according to Headwaters Economics.
To assist these families, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, in partnership with Cal Fire, have developed a state home hardening initiative which “focuses on high social vulnerability communities and providing financial assistance for home hardening activities to low- and moderate-income households.”
Homeowners who need assistance to retrofit, harden, and create defensible space for their homes at high risk to wildfires can apply to the California Wildfire Mitigation Program.
Cal Fire also released a low-cost retrofit list to help homeowners focus on the most critical priorities needed to harden their homes.
‘We feel kind of guilty that we’re surviving’
In 2024, more than 7,500 wildfires burned over 1,040,525 acres of land in California and destroyed over 1,708 structures, not including those destroyed in the Mountain Fire.
The cause of the massive fire remains unknown, according to Ventura County Fire Captain Trevor Johnson. Ten damage inspection teams have been deployed to inspect structures along the path of the blaze.
Damage inspectors are collecting data about “every single building that was not only destroyed, but also still standing,” Berlant said, which will allow Cal Fire to analyze the data and improve its building standards to increase the odds of homes surviving wildfires.
Berlant said he was on the ground walking through neighborhoods affected by the fire and saw homes still standing where it was clear the homeowner “had invested the money to harden their home.”
“One of the themes we continue to see and work on, is that first five feet noncombustible zone,” the fire marshal said. “The state has been working to add requirements to reduce or eliminate anything combustible around a home, so there is still work to be done.”
On Saturday, Snyder wandered through the ruins of his neighborhood. Charred vehicles sit in driveways of homes reduced to ashes. The trees, now blackened, stand like ghosts, transforming a once lush, vibrant area into a smoldering shell of its former self.
“We feel kind of guilty that we’re surviving,” Snyder said. “I just can’t imagine what they are going through.”
Amid the devastation, a few fortunate homes like his remain standing. But for the families who have lost everything, the difficult journey of rebuilding and determining what comes next now begins.
“Sadly, in California, we have experienced entire communities destroyed by wildfires, and that’s not just the loss of somebody’s property,” Berlant said. “The emotional toll of a fire is really hard to capture in words.”
