Your Land as Wildfire Defense | SERVPRO of Marietta West

7/26/2021 (Permalink)

If your home is damaged by fire or water loss event, SERVPRO of Marietta West is ready and able to restore your property to preloss condition.

No homeowner wants to think about the possibility of seeing their home destroyed in the mouth of a raging wildfire, but it has to be considered. Wildfires are more common than you might realize. And considering the rate at which they spread and the heat with which they burn, it’s a wonder fire crews are able to quell them at all.

But we do have a few methods for fighting wildfires that don’t require a fire hose, apart from the painfully obvious, which would be starting fewer fires by being more careful. For one: Let’s talk about “defensible space.”

What Is Defensible Space?

It’s not about fighting off invaders from Neptune—“defensible space” is a series of buffer zones you can manage at certain distances around your home. By planting and pruning smartly, removing extra things for fires to consume, and enlisting areas of hardscape or inorganic materials, you can make your home less vulnerable should fire threaten your land.

Think of it as a safety barrier (aka defense) intended to slow the spread of a fire as it comes near by depriving it of the fuel it needs to keep going. It also gives your local firefighters a better chance of stopping a wildfire by giving them room to work while the fire is being rebuffed.

Why Defensible Space Matters

When you think of wildfires, you may think about blazes in the West Coast, but the fact is they can occur anywhere. There were over 59,000 wildfires across the United States in 2020, and almost 1,700 of them were here in Georgia.

Even removing California’s 10,000+ fires from that national state leaves us with an average of almost 1,000 fires per state in 2020, with every state having at least a few. And the number of fires in 2021 has been 25% higher so far.

Defensible space isn’t required by law or building codes in Georgia, but it’s a good fire safety practice all the same: Anything we can do to prevent or stop the spread of fires, we should do, and defensible space is one more way we can make a difference.

*If your home is damaged by fire of any sort, wild or not, SERVPRO of Marietta West is ready and able to repair the damage caused. Get in touch today at (770) 428-5467 to get the SERVPRO of Marietta West pros on your team.