Weather 
As the wildfires in Los Angeles left hundreds of homes in ruins, one family that lost everything in the worst wildfire in Colorado history says there’s a better way to rebuild.
Three years ago, Erik Ela, his wife and his now 4-year-old son, Alex, lost their two cats and their home in the Marshall Fire. It was two days before Alex’s birthday.
“We’ve experienced something that I never thought you’d experience and I’m ready for it to happen again,” Ela said.
When it came time to rebuild, the father from Superior, Colorado, wanted to make sure his new home was protected against fire — so he chose a design concept called Passive House.
In a traditional house design, embers typically get sucked inside the home through roof vents during a fire. It’s one of the reasons why homes in Los Angeles are burning from the inside out. In a home built using the passive design concept, there are very few places for embers to get caught, according to Johny Rezvani, a Passive Home material supplier.
Compared to the roof vents on most houses, a Passive House has just a single air intake. A powerful filtration system is installed to control the flow of air, which helps keep embers out.
“And in an extreme weather situation, what you would do if you had to evacuate is you would close off that intake,” Rezvani said.
In Los Angeles, where the historic Palisades and Eaton Fires were fueled by intense Santa Ana winds, one home that followed the passive building principles was the only one still standing in its neighborhood.
Despite a higher chance of surviving a fire, the reason not all new homes are built passively is the cost. It can be up to 7% more expensive to build a passive house compared to a more traditional one, according to the Passive House Network.
Just six of the 300 homes that have been rebuilt in Superior are passive. Although a new Colorado state law aims to change the way homes most threatened by wildfires are built.
“I was shocked that we don’t require building standards,” Democratic State Senator Lisa Cutter said. “If your house isn’t well-protected and you don’t do everything you can and mitigate for fire around the property etc. Then you’re putting your neighbor’s house at risk.”
Cutter pushed for the creation of Colorado’s Wildfire Resiliency Code Board. It will identify areas with the highest wildfire threats and, for the first time, enforce mandatory wildfire construction codes. In Colorado, a million structures are built in places that meet or mix with natural areas where there’s a threat of wildfire. A third of all U.S. housing is in a high-risk area — that’s 44 million homes.
As climate change contributes to windy and dry conditions ripe for amplifying the risks of rapidly spreading fires, the time has come for some to rethink how they live with it and how they rebuild from it.
