"The team collected weather reports, topographic data, G.P.S. records from fire engines, photos, videos, and property-damage reports. They debriefed more than two hundred witnesses, mostly first responders. After a hundred and fifty "technical discussions," Maranghides finally met two firefighters from Northern California who were able to explain the miracle at Hot Springs Court. Their crew had parked their fire truck there and, for an entire night, had hosed down the four houses. (A fortuitous change in the wind helped, too.)"
"After a catastrophic fire, speculation about "miracle homes" is almost irresistible. "Unless you have video footage and firsthand information, when you see a home that's standing, you cannot say why," Maranghides told me. In multiple studies of such disasters, his team has found that, on average, ninety per cent of damaged but standing houses were saved not so much by savvy design and construction choices but instead by firefighters' actions."
"Scientists have identified more than fifty ways that houses can ignite. It's possible to defend against all of them-but it's arduous, and homeowners can't do it alone."
Houses can ignite in more than fifty different ways, and defending against every ignition pathway is possible but difficult and requires more than homeowners alone. In June 2012, the wind-driven Waldo Canyon Fire consumed hundreds of homes in Mountain Shadows, Colorado, yet four houses on Hot Springs Court survived. A National Institute of Standards and Technology reconstruction collected weather, topography, G.P.S., photos, videos, damage reports, and witness interviews. Firefighters who parked a truck and hosed the four houses all night largely explained their survival. Observational inspection alone cannot reliably identify why a given house survived; firefighter actions saved about ninety percent of damaged-but-standing homes.
Read at The New Yorker
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