Why Home Hardening Matters

What the Research and Fire Agencies Say

When wildfires hit, it’s often embers, not just flames that destroy homes. According to CAL FIRE, home-hardening is the process of using fire-resistant building materials and defensible landscaping to reduce a home’s vulnerability to embers, radiant heat, and direct flame. Without these protections, even a modest ember shower can find a gap in vents, under eaves, in siding cracks and ignite a home long before flames arrive.Hardening your home isn’t just about upgrading materials. It’s about reshaping the way your home interacts with fire risk: using ember-resistant vents, fire-rated roofing, noncombustible siding, sealed eaves, and defensible landscaping creates multiple lines of defense.

Recent research published in 2025 demonstrated that combining home-hardening measures with defensible space dramatically increases a structure’s chance of surviving a wildfire, potentially more than doubling survival compared to unprotected homes.

More specifically, just clearing the first 0–5 ft around a home (what many regulations refer to as “Zone 0”) and removing combustible mulch, wood, debris, and clearing vegetation has been shown to reduce structure loss by roughly 17%.

Fire safety organizations such as CAL FIRE emphasize, as a baseline, the importance of maintaining a 100-ft defensible space (often broken into zones) around a home, combined with structural hardening. This approach not only reduces the chance of ignition, but also gives firefighters a safer and more reachable perimeter if they need to defend the structure.

Why It’s Necessary — Especially Now

Wildfire patterns in California and other fire-prone regions have been intensifying. With drought, climate change, and expanding wildland-urban interface zones, many homes find themselves increasingly at risk. Without proper mitigation, a single ember storm traveling far ahead of a fire front, can spark multiple structure fires at once.

Because of this evolving risk, home hardening is no longer optional “extra protection”, it’s a critical part of wildfire preparedness. Upgrading vents, sealing gaps, installing ember-resistant materials, and establishing defensible space are often the difference between a home standing or burning.