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- Fire-resistant architecture and defensible open space around homes is credited with saving some homes from the devastation of the Palisades and Eaton fires.
- In some cases, no amount of defensive measures can save a home.
They’re calling it the miracle mansion of Malibu.
The beachfront house stands tall amid piles of rubble, still smoking from the Palisades fire, in an iconic image splashed around the world by news outlets.
But David Steiner doesn’t credit his home’s survival to supernatural forces. The sturdy concrete structure has a fire-resistant roof and tempered, double-paned windows. Firefighters stood on his balcony to hose down his and neighboring properties.
“I tell people it was great architecture, brave firefighters — and maybe a dash of miracle,” says the retired CEO of Waste Management.
As stories emerge from the Palisades and Eaton fires of harrowing escapes, tragic loss and widespread destruction, others about homes surviving through some combination of fortunate timing, a lucky wind shift and — according to experts, modern approaches to architecture and landscaping — are coming out of the burn zone.
Hurricane-force winds that rain down millions of embers result in a higher likelihood of home ignition in general, said California Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant. Still, research from past fires has shown that fire-hardened homes with good defensible space have a double-digit increase in their chances of surviving, he said. “Home-hardening efforts are absolutely critical.”
The idea is to keep flames and heat away from a home and reduce the likelihood of embers finding a weak spot to enter and burn it from the inside. Measures can include anything from choosing fire-resistant building materials to adding mesh screening to vents and chimneys and closing gaps around exposed rafters. Clearing vegetation and debris from around a home is also key, Berlant said. These efforts don’t have to be expensive, he said, pointing to a list of low-cost retrofits from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Some residents in fireprone areas have chosen to take more drastic steps.
Jim “Taz” Evans is no stranger to wildfire. After the artist’s Malibu home burned down in the Old Topanga fire of 1993, he and his wife Nancy rebuilt a fire-resilient fortress with steel-reinforced walls and a metal roof. There are no eaves or roof vents that could otherwise trap heat or allow embers to inside. The walls are trimmed in cinderblock to protect from flaming debris blowing up against the seam where wall meets ground. Gardeners come each week to clear brush.
“We built with one idea in mind: this nightmare was going to come back,” Evans said.
That became reality last week, when the Palisades fire engulfed his street along a tree-lined canyon. The fire singed Evans’ yard and destroyed many of his neighbors’ homes, but his survived. That’s despite the fact that firefighters were unable to beat back flames in the area, leaving the fire to rampage through unchecked, he said.
“If you’re going to do a crime scene analysis, it looks like the fire took advantage of anything it could get,” Evans said. “Every little bush in the yard is burned. But it wasn’t able to get in the house — there’s nothing for it to get ahold of.”
Sometimes, however, no amount of preventive measures can save a home.
In 2019, Steve Yusi and his wife dropped $75,000 on a fire suppression system for their home on Anoka Drive in Pacific Palisades. The system boasted heat and flame detectors, fire retardant, a 2,500-gallon sprinkler system to soak the property and humidify the air for an hour, and autonomy from the power grid.
The house burned down anyway. A couple of sprinklers were clogged and at one point he fell on his retardant-slickened driveway, but Yusi says the home’s position on a canyon edge exposed to flames racing uphill simply proved too much for his defenses.
Another reason: Other homes on fire that spewed red-hot embers of plastic, fabric and other materials into the wind, spreading flames house to house. Even a concrete-hardened neighbor’s house burned, he said. Unless everyone takes the same approach to hardening their property, there’s no hope of avoiding a future disaster, he said.
“Community immunity. It’s like a chain — the weakest link,” Yusi said. “Our neighborhoods would look the same, but I’m not against it. They all look the same now — ashes.”
Miriam Schulman, one of Yusi’s neighbors, said her house was spared. She credits measures she took that included new air vents resistant to embers and painting the eaves with fire-resistant coating.
“The house was tight as a drum,” she said.
Though Schulman is confident her fixes did the trick, she also said a woman posting about the fires on social media defended her home with a hose and a neighbor stayed behind into the weekend, defending it and the two others remaining on the street. Yusi said at least one of those homes wasn’t hardened for wildfire, adding to the puzzle of why some homes burned and some didn’t.
Arthur Coleman is at a loss to explain why his Altadena home withstood the Eaton fire, which destroyed virtually his entire neighborhood, along with his garage. Heat cracked some of the windows, along with the side of the house. The roof is probably compromised. But the structure itself stands incongruously amid the blackened remains of the rest of the block, the furnishings and other items inside untouched.
Since the engineer purchased the 1950 home a decade ago, the only improvement he’s made is to paint its exterior, he added. “We didn’t try to protect it, so how it got protected is beyond me.”
Some Altadena residents returned to find their homes standing, while others are left reeling from the immense loss.
A preliminary report from Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety calls the Palisades and Eaton fires a textbook worst-case conflagration scenario in which volatile winds aligned with major roads, pushing flames along privacy hedges and fences that connected properties. Most of them were built before codes were updated to require fire-resilient features, the report notes.
The early findings support taking a comprehensive approach to fire-hardening buildings, said the institute’s senior director for wildfire, Steve Hawks. “You can’t just do one or two mitigation actions and expect that during a high-intensity wildfire, your home will survive,” he said.
Yana Valachovic, a fire scientist at the University of California, said some of the spared houses were tucked away from prevailing wind currents so that embers didn’t hit them. Some of those still-standing properties even have cardboard boxes left over from the holidays awaiting recycling collection, untouched, said Valachovic, who is in the field studying why some homes withstood the Palisades and Eaton fires.
In other situations where combustibles were close to homes, embers likely ignited those materials and created spot fires, or entered open windows or vents, she said.
What Valachovic has seen so far is consistent with other wildfires that have reached built-out areas: the Lahaina fire on Maui, the Marshall fire near Boulder, Colo., the Camp fire in Paradise and the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, she said. “We don’t fight earthquakes, but we mitigate them — we strap water heaters to walls, harden structures. Wildfires aren’t that different, really.”
A Pacific Palisades home became an example of that ethos last week.
Santa Monica architect Greg Chasen had designed the property with fire resilience in mind: Fire-rated walls, no vents, spare landscaping.
The homeowner had taken steps to prepare for the approaching flames, clearing away trash cans and leaf litter. He’d even left the gates propped open, knowing that they could otherwise act like candle wicks, guiding fire closer to the house.
But a neighbor had left behind a vehicle in the adjacent driveway. The car caught fire, burning so hot its aluminum wheels melted. The heat broke the outer pane of a tempered glass window, but the inner pane held, Chasen said.
“If that last pane of glass had exploded on that side, we might have a different story today,” he said. “The moment the glass cracked, you would have wind-driven sparks in the interior of the home, which includes flammable furnishings and rugs that can easily set a house alight.”
The home is still standing. Chasen estimates that of the roughly 120 houses that once dotted the street, all but three burned.
