 Today, more and more people are escaping the pace of city life and moving to the country. They enjoy being closer to the serenity of nature, but with nature's serenity comes nature's risk, including the risk from wildfire. Our desire to be closer to nature and our desire to preserve nature actually leads us to be more vulnerable to wildfire. If you describe your house as a little house in the woods, then you have a problem. It's a scenario that we call the wildland-urban interface. It's where nature and man come together. Don Connolly, a Florida homeowner, is retrofitting her home to protect it from wildfire. And it's certainly something that we thought about over the years, never knew really how at risk the property was. We live in the middle of the woods. We're surrounded on three sides by a state forest. I just feel like if a wildfire were to start in the state park or even in a surrounding yard, my home just has no chance. So Don has decided to make her home fire-wise. With a few easy-to-do modifications to her property, she'll make her home able to withstand a wildland fire, even without the help of firefighters. Through landscaping, proper design and maintenance of our homes, we can still enjoy living in the woods, living in this interface without necessarily requiring the fire department to respond to us in a wildfire situation. Don is taking her family's home and safety into her own hands. A fire-wise retrofit begins with a basic fire risk assessment. Here, local fire chief Will May is evaluating many things, including the frequency of local wildfires, the land's topography, and most important, its condition. The Connolly property is not unusual. This is what you see throughout Northern Florida. It's the kind of environment that really thrives in a wildfire condition or a prescribed fire condition, and the fact that this home was built here in this area without the usual protections that you would normally see, which is a large setback, makes it a really prime candidate to be destroyed by wildfire. A risk assessment requires seeing property as more than a yard and home. It's also potential fuel to feed a devastating fire. In Don's case, the fuel has virtually taken root on her doorstep. It's not hard for forestry professionals Don West and Jim Harrell to anticipate a wildland fire scenario. We've got a site that's got all the characteristics of what you don't want to have if you're concerned about fire entering your home from outside the home. There's plenty of fuels that are volatile that have chemicals in them. They've got ladder fuels where they go from the ground up into the canopy. And should a fire get started in here, it would easily burn into the house. Some of the more dangerous things from the fire standpoint are the dense clusters of palmetto and the brush and shrubs that have what we call needle drape of pine needles. It would be very flammable. So one of the first things and most important things for us is that homeowners think about defensible space around that home. Something to break up the continuity of that fire when it approaches the house. The job of redesigning the yard with a defensible space falls to fire-wise landscape helper Jane Chiquetti. There's no reason why you can't make your landscape fire-wise and at the same time aesthetically pleasing. In talking to the homeowner, one of the first things I wanted to point out was that the wooded area is too overgrown and the landscape plants are just kind of scattered all over. Our biggest goal here is to clear out and open up the area around the house. Jane has drawn up a new landscape design that divides the Connolly yard into three fire-wise zones. The size of these three zones varies from house to house, depending upon the kind of terrain and vegetation specific to each property. The first zone is the most critical because it's nearest to the house. In Dawn's case, it extends roughly 30 feet from the home. On other properties, this area could reach 100 feet or more. This is where you will have low-growing shrubs and try to be very careful about which plants are chosen to be here so that they are not too flammable. We want to put in sod and grass areas, which would be good for fire prevention, and also make the house look more attractive. The good news is that being fire-wise doesn't require wholesale stripping away of vegetation. Jane's goal is to create a buffer or a defensible space that will prevent fires from coming right up to the house. It also gives firefighters plenty of room if they need to defend Dawn's home. To accomplish this, Jane will follow fire-wise guidelines. She'll thin out the trees and plants and install a well-irrigated lawn. She'll also plant indigenous shrubs in small clusters to create a series of fuel breaks, and she'll carefully select a mulch for the garden. During wildfires, cypress mulch and other very light, very flammable mulches actually increase fire spread to the home. By using those types of mulches that are not prone to that rapid fire spread, we can still landscape with natural materials providing a very aesthetic view around the home, but do not contribute to flame spread. Jane suggests replacing the existing combustible mulch driveway with a paved one to act as another fuel break. But the price tag becomes a sticking point and the decision is postponed until later. Dawn is also debating whether or not to replace her wooden fence with a more expensive, non-combustible one. These will be the first of many cost versus safety decisions that Dawn, like all homeowners, will have to make. It's all part of the learning curve. Just beyond the defensible space is zone 2, which extends out another 20 feet on this particular property. This area may contain more vegetation than zone 1, but it too has to be thinned out. And in Florida, that means clearing out a particularly annoying and ubiquitous plant. We have the sawpalmetto here, which is highly flammable, and we're trying to move that back and this would be another way of opening up the landscape. The resin in sawpalmetto makes it especially volatile. Florida isn't alone in this regard. Every region has similar resinous vegetation, from long leaf pines in the south to ponderosa pines or Douglas fir in the west. In each case, deciduous plants or succulents with high moisture content provide lower combustibility. Sawpalmetto, however, isn't Jane's only headache. What a nightmare, all these trees, especially pine trees in the leaf litter, they can cause. What we are going to do is go through the trees and one by one selectively thin out the trees. Some of the trees will need to be removed for other reasons, they're hazardous, they're half dead. Here, the landscaping crew is spacing the trees at least 10 feet apart and cutting away dead or dying limbs. This should halt or slow a fire's advance. At the same time, it will improve the health of the remaining trees. They're also pruning any branches within 6 feet of the ground to prevent the dangerous ladder fuel effect of a ground fire climbing into the tree crowns. The final zone is an outer ring stretching 50 to 100 feet beyond Don's house. The third zone, which is more or less a transition into the natural landscape where we can have is probably as much planting as we want or the native surroundings. The landscaping crew is only thinning out the dead trees and plants. While they work, Chief May has identified one of the easier improvements homeowners can make. What we need to do is just make sure that we build a protective cover for the pump and the well head. So if we can protect the well, we will probably have a continuing water supply here that could support something like a yard sprinkler system that could keep wetting the area down around the house so that the vegetation more than likely would not burn. Fitting a property makes a dramatic difference, but it is not a one shot deal. It requires an ongoing commitment to upkeep. Don will continually trim her plants and remove pine litter. Fortunately, Jane's firewise design will make Don's home safer and a whole lot easier to maintain over time. Landscaping isn't the whole story. Even as Jane was developing her landscape design, a local contractor began making firewise improvements to the house. The most perfectly designed firewise yard can't prevent burning embers from landing on or near a home. And a quick look at the siding on the house indicates a fire risk that needs attention. This is a cedar plank. It is very lightweight and burns very easily. All it takes is for a fire to transmit across the ground or through fuels from bushes or plants to this structure. And it's exposed to this and the exterior of the home will ignite. The crew is replacing the cedar plank with a non-combustible concrete composite siding. Ron Peebles, the contractor, has determined that the existing fire-resistant soffits from Don's house don't need to be replaced. It's just a, I believe it's 26-gauge aluminum and it does have striations in it and it's penetrated so that the air travels freely through it and it vents the attic area. These are not fireproof, but they are a much more fire-resistant material than a standard wood soffitin fascia. The windows will also be kept, but for a different reason. New tempered glass windows that won't fracture when exposed to the heat of a wildfire would clearly give her home superior protection, but they're not cheap. We're not going to be replacing the windows. They are a standard single-strength window, which is a non-insulated glass, not tempered just a standard single-glaze window. Offers some protection against fires, but not the best. New window screens, however, are affordable. The existing nylon screens would melt quickly if hot embers touched them. The new metal screens won't. Don has decided to spend money instead on the most vulnerable part of the home, the roof. We're going to be replacing these standard shingles with a class A fire-rated shingle, which will offer a greater protection. From the surrounding vegetation, if they had a tree-to-tree fire, it would dump copious amounts of lit sparks and burning embers onto this surface, which would easily ignite in this condition, but the new shingles will prevent that. That's why it's absolutely critical to install fire-resistant roofing. Ron's crew is also replacing the plastic skylights. This is an aluminum frame, which is fire-resistant, but the plastic dome is not. The intense heat of a fire could easily melt the plastic and allow embers into the house. The new one will have a tempered glass window, which will be very, very fire-resistant. Back up on the roof, Ron is replacing the old cladding around the chimney with the new non-combustible siding and adding a spark arrester. This 12-gauge metal device will prevent embers from floating up or down the chimney. In a matter of weeks, the crew has finished and Don is thrilled with the results. She's particularly pleased that she went ahead and installed the safer driveway and a new metal fence around her property. My two favorite things, and one I did not think I was going to like at all, was I liked my paved driveway. It's really wonderful. And the wrought iron fence. I was very, very skeptical about replacing my picket fence, and I absolutely love it. It's one of my favorite things. The sense of openness, particularly around my home and the grass, is just so beautiful. And the idea that it's more safe to boot is just really such a plus. It just is absolutely gorgeous. We now have a structure here where the fire department can come in and protect this. If you were to have a wildfire coming in and approaching and threatening this particular development, this community, this is a home where we feel fairly certain the fire would not get to. Improving a property to make it fire-wise involves making many decisions. Most homeowners, like Don, can't make all the upgrades they like. As we've seen, through improvements to landscaping, siding, roof, and windows and skylights, Don made great strides in making her home fire-wise. With every improvement you make, no matter how small, your home is more likely to survive the next wildland fire. I feel so much more at ease now in my home. I never believed that making a home fire-safe would enhance the appearance of it to the extent that my home has been enhanced. I feel like even if there were a wildfire surrounding me, that my home would be perfectly safe and that's a great feeling.