Wind, Fire, and the Future of Our Homes: A Closer Look at LA, Colorado, and Maui

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By Craig Maierhofer

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A month ago, I was enjoying the start of dry January with a Ginger Ale on the rocks as the sun set with an orange glow over the Rocky Mountains. As I scrolled through my phone’s weather app I noticed the forecast for Los Angeles, which was calling for potential 100 mile per hour winds. The song, Here You Come Again, immediately crept into my mind and I tried to fight off the uneasy feeling that LA was about to experience something similar to what we experienced in Colorado with the Marshall Fire. Even though it is winter, the conditions in LA were ripe for fire because of drought, just like they were in Colorado in December of 2021.

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My (and many Coloradan's) first thought that evening was, will LADWP shut off LA’s power before the winds arrive? Why do we ask that question, en masse? Because Excel Energy took partial credit for starting the Marshall Fire and is being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars as a result - 298 lawsuits representing about 4,000 separate claims. Minus a downed power line, the Marshall Fire might never have happened. That is a slippery slope, and Excel now takes zero chances when it comes to windstorms. It shuts the power off in Colorado (and Texas) whenever it blows over 40 miles per hour. We now have ‘wind days’ in Colorado to accompany our famous ‘snow days.’

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The Growing Threat of Wind-Driven Fires

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What happened in Colorado and Maui, and now LA, is frightening on many levels, and if conditions are right that type of fire can happen anywhere in our built environment. Smart humans have spent a lot of time and energy studying hurricanes, earthquakes and other ‘natural disasters,’ but based on the current trajectory I would say the most potent natural disasters facing the human race today are all centered around wind. For example, last fall Hurricane Helene devastated the Southern US and North Carolina in particular, recording 40- to 90-mph winds in Western North Carolina and 100 mph-plus winds in the Carolina mountains. Last May, Texas was hit by a damaging, new type of wind storm known as a derecho, which features long, sustained gusts over 100 mph. The winds that fueled the Palisades fire were over 100 mph.

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My heart goes out to the residents in Los Angeles. Their loss is at least ten times the scope of what we experienced in Colorado, and many of those victims are personal friends of mine. It has taken a full three years for the Marshall Fire victims to start moving back into their new homes, and it could take much longer than that to rebuild LA. Some parts of that city will never rebuild, just due to the difficult nature of building in some of its canyons and hills. Those that decide to stay and rebuild are going to be inundated with building options that are not only new, but perhaps a bit confusing as well. Thankfully, the passive house building community is already providing LA residents, and anyone else that is interested, with webinars and other forums designed to help support the rebuild once the fires cease.

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A Defensive Way Forward?

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I attended a webinar sponsored by the Passive House Network (PHN) in late January that featured two guest speakers, Andrew Michler and Birgitte Messerschmidt. Michler is a passive house architect based in Colorado and Messerschmidt is the Director of Research for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). Each represents the tip of the spear from an informational perspective because they possess so much experience in relation to the topic at hand. Michler built the first passive house in Colorado in 2016, and his learnings are deep. During his presentation Michler showed off that experience and stated (I’m paraphrasing) that your home ‘could be made from cement, but if the windows fail and the fire gets inside the house it won’t matter what your walls were made of. The house will burn down.’

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Messerschmidt shared a wealth of interesting fire data, and her sources for that data, with the audience. Some of it was new to me as someone who has a bit of experience with this topic. The most interesting point she made (again I’m paraphrasing) was that not every home in a neighborhood needs to be built passive in order to increase the odds of that neighborhood surviving a fire like the one in LA. If one out of every five homes in a neighborhood were built with fire prevention in mind, for example, it would limit a fire’s ability to spread. During a fire event, preventative homes serve as defenders of the entire neighborhood.

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Suffice to say, the Passive House Webinar was worth the hour it took to listen in, and for convenience I have included the video in this post so you can watch it right here. In the immediate aftermath of the Marshall Fire, PHN engaged the Colorado community with similar webinars, which really signaled the start of the rebuild process. As people rebuild their homes and neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the two points curated from the experts in the LA Fire webinar above should be taken into consideration. Residents committed to rebuilding should understand that they don’t have to build back passive, which is slightly more complicated and expensive, but can build back in a fire preventive mode. And that by doing so, they are also protecting their neighbors’ homes and neighborhood. 

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