Wildfires are no longer rare, seasonal events. They are a year-round threat reshaping communities from California to Colorado, and everywhere the urban areas and development push up against nature. The “hot off the press: Construction Specifier’s December 2025 article, Enhancing Community Safety: Effective Wildfire Mitigation and Building Practices, by Tony Crimi and Antoine Habellion, lays out the science and building practice realities of wildfire mitigation in a way the insurance industry has been slow to acknowledge. It’s a piece every insurance regulator, policymaker, insurance executive, community leader, and policyholder leader should read because it cuts through the mythology and confronts the engineering truth that homes don’t simply burn down from sweeping walls of flame. They burn because embers find weak points.
Photographs in the article, including the Colorado Springs hillside and the remains of entire California wildfires tell the same story. Neighborhoods don’t fail structure by structure. Instead, they fail systemically. One house ignites, then another, then an entire subdivision is gone. That pattern matters because insurers and their underwriting consultants continue to treat wildfire losses like one-off events, not predictable, preventable failures tied to construction choices and community-level vulnerabilities.
The authors explain that the most dangerous force in a wildfire isn’t the dramatic flame front. Instead, it’s airborne embers, sometimes traveling miles ahead of the fire. Those embers work like guided missiles, finding open vents, combustible siding, untreated fences, and under-maintained landscaping. Add radiant heat, wind-driven conditions, and aging building stock, and the destruction becomes inevitable. When you look closely at the article’s figures and photos and study the aerial shot of homes reduced to ash while surrounding vegetation remains patchy and unburned, you see that the homes are often more flammable than the environment around them. Building code officials and the public need to accept this uncomfortable truth. We can do better.
Crimi and Habellion outline three pillars of resilience. The first is defensible space. This creates and maintains a buffer zone that deprives embers of fuel. The second is building hardening: noncombustible exterior walls, ember-resistant vents, enclosed eaves, Class-A roofs, and assemblies tested under the State Fire Marshal’s stringent standards. The third is ongoing assessment and mitigation. This is something many homeowners want but struggle to afford. I suggest that insurers point fingers demanding hardening, but are not partnering on solutions, at least in California.
The article notes that existing codes often underestimate real-world ember exposure and flame spread, something borne out in the test diagrams and wall assembly illustrations on page 36, which show how flame penetration bypasses outdated assumptions. That is a failure of policy, not a failure of homeowners.
A particularly important point, tucked into the technical section, is that even when the exterior walls meet the minimum code requirements, adding combustible outboard insulation can undo the fire-resistant benefits. The same insurers who push policyholders to “upgrade to modern standards” rarely mention that certain widely used materials leave families more vulnerable, not less. If we expect homeowners to take responsibility for mitigation, the construction and insurance industries need to stop hiding the ball on which materials actually perform under test conditions, not just on paper.
The authors also highlight what many of my wildfire clients already understand. Recovery costs rise dramatically and recovery time is significantly delayed when communities are built with no meaningful resilience strategy. The Tubbs, Camp, Palisades, and Marshall fires, all referenced in the article, didn’t just burn homes. These fires exposed systemic failures in planning, building practices, and land-use decisions. Those failures often become insurance disputes when carriers treat these catastrophic losses as isolated cases rather than byproducts of known, repeated risk.
This is why policyholders must insist on transparency. They should know whether the siding on their home fails ASTM E119. They should know whether their vents are ember-resistant. They should know whether their property is scored by insurers as a high-risk parcel based on vegetation and slope. Too often, these conversations happen only after a home is a pile of ash and the adjuster arrives with a reservation of rights letter. They should know in advance, and with clear steps they can follow, how to reduce the fire risk of loss.
Wildfire resilience doesn’t happen by accident. It takes honest engineering, honest underwriting, and honest communication with public leaders and policyholders. Crimi and Habellion’s article is a reminder that experts across disciplines understand what must be done. The question now is whether the insurance industry and public will support these standards and suggest methods to pay for these needed changes, as Florida has done with implementing hardened homes to hurricanes.
For property insurance adjusters, the Construction Specifier is the monthly magazine published by Construction Specifications Institute (CSI). I wrote about this organization and why all property insurance adjusters and estimators worth their salt should thoroughly study and understand building specifications noted in their publications and manuals. I have previously written about CSI in Insurance Adjusters and Estimators—Do You Really Understand Construction Specifications? Learn From the Construction Specification Institute.
Thought For The Day
“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
— John F. Kennedy