Wildfire Resilience – What Survivors Teach Us About Building Fire-Resilient Homes – GreenBuildingAdvisor

By Karuna Eberl | January 7, 2026

Hydrologist Debby Martin was out of town, taking her son to college, when she learned that a wildfire had destroyed her home. It was a shock, but not a huge surprise. For decades, she and her husband had been aware of their wildfire risk, especially after part of their neighborhood was lost to a wildfire in 1989.

As such, they’d undertaken extensive mitigation work, including fire hardening the house and removing excess fuel from the landscape — Debby even volunteered on a wildfire mitigation group. Still, the Martin’s house was one of the first to ignite when the 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire broke out in the mountains just west of Boulder, Colorado.

“Wildfire is quite capricious,” she said. “In our case the winds were so significant, they stopped trying to fight the progression of the fire. The crews even had to leave behind a fire hose to just get out of there because it was a very, very dangerous situation.”

In all, the Fourmile Canyon Fire burned 169 homes. Landscape designer Marion Mackay lives just up the road from the Martins. She watched the event unfold while visiting her son in Holland.

“It was surreal,” she said. “Friends sent me photographs of the area, and you could see all the houses around mine were burned to the ground. It felt miraculous that our home could have been spared.”

Mackay assumed her house would be lost too, especially considering its cedar-shingle siding (a choice that felt okay in when she built it in 1981, but which is unthinkable today). Even though the fire actually singed some of those shingles, remarkably, her house survived.

Firefighters credited that partly to a series of pea gravel terraces that Mackay had created on the downhill slope of the house (the direction from which the…