Country Life

"One of the first things that Cohen did was to listen to emergency dispatch tapes from the day of the fire. And as he listened, he began to notice a pattern. People were calling in about houses on fire long before the fire front ever reached their neighborhoods."

"The houses were not burning because a wall of flames was racing through the community, destroying them. It was something else: embers. As wildfires burn, they generate embers that are lofted downwind ahead of the main body of the fire. And Cohen realized that most of the houses that burned had one, extremely problematic feature in common: the embers were accumulating in the crevices around their dry wood shingle roofs, and setting fire to the houses from above.

"Across the street, in a development without wood roofs, most of the houses had survived. The problem was that some houses were built to burn."

"It wasn’t a huge revelation that wood roofs were flammable — people had known that for ages. But for Cohen, it was a big moment. Because when he shifted his focus to the design of the homes, suddenly he found himself wondering if we were framing the whole problem of wildfire in the wrong way. Cohen wasn’t the first to have that thought, but he was the first to do extensive research into exactly how homes burn in wildfires."