California Homebuilders Release Statement in Regards to Southern California Fires
October 25, 2007
SACRAMENTO – California Building Industry Association President & CEO Robert Rivinius released the following statement regarding the tragic fires in Southern California and comments that have been made about building new homes in areas with fire risk.
“Over the last fifteen years, homebuilders and policy makers have been working together to make communities safer and to protect our most important investment, our homes. As a result, California today has the most stringent fire safety standards in America. For example, state law requires homes within a high severity fire zone to include roofing materials rated Class A or B, both of which are fire resistant.
Additionally, our industry supported a requirement that a “defensible space” around the perimeter of the structure of 100 feet or up to the property line (Public Resources Code 4291(b)). Moreover, most new and relatively new communities inherently have good defensible space because of the prevalence of greenbelts, parks and roads. This, combined with more heat resistant windows and other code changes makes it much more difficult for embers to spread wildfires into communities.
California is blessed with wonderful surroundings, a bounty of natural resources, and is a great place to live. New housing in well planned communities represents the safest way to blend the American Dream of homeownership with our state’s beautiful environment. We are seeing evidence that the development and building techniques employed today are making a difference and we continue to look for more ways to make our living environment as safe as it can reasonably be.”
Following is an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times regarding new home communities and the fires:
“California cannot avoid wildfires. But proper building techniques have proved to greatly reduce the threat to homes and businesses. Fire safety experts said Stevenson Ranch, and other modern communities like it, have made their own luck. Precautions used there include fire-resistant materials such as concrete roof tiles, double-paned heat-resistant windows and enclosed eaves. A 200-foot greenbelt with fire-resistant plantings rings the property. Additional buffers of stone and concrete culverts were constructed behind properties adjacent to canyons and other open land. When it comes to saving homes and neighborhoods from fire, some developments are more equal than others. The story was the same this week in Orange County, where firefighters kept a raging 18,000-acre blaze from newer planned communities in Foothill Ranch, Irvine and Lake Forest. As fire threatened the newer developments of Portola Springs and Northwood on Sunday, fire officials decided to let residents take shelter in their homes rather than evacuate them, Capt. Stephen Miller of the Orange County Fire Authority said Sunday from near the frontline. ‘If we were not confident they would not be threatened, that we would not be able to save the homes, we would not put them in that situation,’ Miller said.”
Why Some Averted Disaster, Newer Communities Were Built with Fire Resistance in Mind
Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2007
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The California Building Industry Association is a statewide trade association representing more than 7,000 businesses – homebuilders, remodelers, subcontractors, architects, engineers, designers, and other industry professionals. A recent study determined that homebuilding generates approximately $68 billion a year to the California economy and creates an estimated 487,000 jobs statewide. More information is available on the Association's Web site, www.cbia.org.
