Viewpoint: Pricing Wildfire Risk Is Not the Same as Reducing It

Driven by powerful winds, three wildfires burned rapidly through neighborhoods in Spokane, Wash. Crossing natural and constructed boundaries, the fires damaged or destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, leaving families homeless and the community with years of recovery ahead. First responders prioritized evacuation and life safety, but once again, the demand for suppression eclipsed their capacity.

One of the moments that changed how I understood wildfire came when I saw fire move through a supermarket parking lot. At first, it seemed counterintuitive: There was little vegetation across the pavement, yet the fire kept advancing. The cars, plastics and other materials surrounding the buildings had become the fuel. It clarified a lesson I had been learning since I began creating defensible space around Western homes in 2001: Vegetation may carry wildfire into a community, but once structures and everyday objects ignite, the community carries the fire.

What unfolded in Spokane — a community historically exposed to wildfire and a leader in developing and implementing Firewise practices — was far from anomalous. The 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, the 2024 Jasper fire, and the 2023 Lahaina fire unfolded in different landscapes. Still, they followed a recognizable pattern: Extreme fire behavior and wind-driven embers caused simultaneous ignitions, strained structure protection and suppression capacity, and turned the built environment itself into fuel.

An Overlooked Fuel Load

These fires began in vegetation and rapidly transitioned into the built environment. As flames, embers and radiant heat moved through neighborhoods, homes, sheds, fences, decks, vehicles, RVs, delivery packages, plastics and the combustible contents of everyday life became fuel. Once a neighborhood is burning, the challenge is no longer simply preventing vegetation from igniting a structure; it is preventing one burning property from igniting the next.

Most homes have several objects that create significant fire risk, including:

• Home batteries: A lithium-ion battery mounted against siding creates a zero-standoff exposure. If it ignites, the fire burns directly against the wall assembly and can produce intense, sustained heat. Tests of fires burning against walls have measured exposures from 40 to 120 kilowatts per square meter — more than five times the level at which wood behind noncombustible siding can begin to smolder.

• Cars and electric vehicles: Using peer-reviewed data from six full-scale EV fire experiments, Frontline modeled the exposure from a midsize EV burning 5 feet from a wall at 58 kilowatts per square meter. That is nearly 30% above the heat flux at which even two panes of tempered glass — the strongest glazing configuration the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety requires — have failed in testing.

• Fences and everyday fuels: At the five-foot setback IBHS permits, Frontline modeling estimates that a burning wood fence can expose siding to nearly twice the heat associated with the onset of wood smoldering. A burning deck, outdoor furniture, boat, hot tub cover, firewood stack or pile of delivery packages can further increase the intensity and duration of the exposure.

The Limits of Passive Hardening

Hardening remains essential. But that cannot become a polite preface that prevents us from saying what the evidence shows: The IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home standard is not enough.

IBHS is an independent nonprofit research organization funded by property insurers and reinsurers that uses full- and small-scale testing to study how buildings and construction materials perform when exposed to wildfire and other severe weather. Its work has helped establish an important baseline for wildfire-resilient construction. Ember-resistant vents, defensible space, proactive fuel removal and fire-resistant building materials all reduce ignition risk. Homeowners and communities should continue using them. But the science underlying the certification does not fully account for the dynamic, realistic fuel environment surrounding modern homes. Its recommendations therefore cannot be treated as a complete protection strategy.

At setbacks IBHS permits, common fuels can produce more radiant heat than hardened components have survived in testing. For some assemblies, IBHS provides no applicable performance rating at all. The standard evaluates individual parts of a house against prescribed exposures. Wildfire tests the entire property against whatever is burning around it.

Current fire data points to an unavoidable conclusion: Prevention, risk analysis and response must evolve. For properties in fire-adapted landscapes, wildfire exposure should be assumed. Risk analysis must account for how direct flame, radiant heat and embers will interact with a home when that exposure occurs. Hardening improves the baseline, but it has no responsive capability when conditions change or when wind-driven embers ignite the fuel package around a home.

The Case for Active Wildfire Defense

Fires move fast. During community-scale events, crews cannot defend every threatened structure while also managing evacuation and life safety. As fire events grow larger and fire seasons lengthen, mutual aid and outside support are increasingly strained.

That reality requires a fundamental shift in how we think about structure protection. Firefighters cannot be stationed at every home. Technology can extend proven firefighting tactics to properties where no crew is present.

Firefighters have long deployed external, standalone sprinklers as temporary protection during wildfires, and they have been remarkably successful. During Minnesota’s 2007 Ham Lake Fire, 98% of the structures protected by sprinklers survived, according to an April 2008 University of Minnesota report prepared for the Firewise Program at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Temporary sprinkler systems are also routinely deployed by the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, as well as in British Columbia.

A structure needs to defend itself, and it cannot do that with passive mitigation alone. Intelligent active defense systems build that capability into the property. They can monitor real-time fire and weather conditions, respond before embers arrive or ignition occurs, and target vulnerable surfaces and surrounding fuels. They use controlled, strategically timed water delivery; continue protecting a structure after occupants evacuate; and can operate through disruptions to power, communications or municipal water.

Active defense can prevent an ember or radiant heat from causing an ignition in the first place. No single layer of mitigation guarantees survival, but passive and active defense together can materially improve community resilience during large-scale, wind-driven fires.

Making Risk Reduction Measurable and Insurable

When an intervention such as intelligent active defense materially changes a property’s vulnerability to wildfire, the property no longer represents the same risk. Traditional modeling relies heavily on regional hazard and historical loss. Emerging physics-based models can more accurately evaluate how a specific property may interact with fire.

Through physics-based modeling, the risk-reduction value of intelligent active defense can be isolated by comparing the same property under the same exposure conditions with and without the system operating. Once that difference can be measured and quantified, insurers can price it.

The insurance industry should not reward technology simply because it is new. It should reward interventions when credible evidence demonstrates that they substantially reduce expected loss. Consistent evaluation standards should require sound engineering, testing, real-world performance data and clear operational requirements for reliability, maintenance, backup power and water availability. That would allow insurers to lower claim frequency and severity, improve asset protection, and provide more sustainable access to coverage in wildfire vulnerable communities.

Years of fuel reduction work and Firewise practices gave Spokane meaningful protection — and perhaps the appearance that the existing approach was enough. But when powerful winds drove fire into neighborhoods and firefighters could not be present at every structure, homes faced exposures that passive measures were never designed to withstand.

Wildfire cannot be removed from fire-adapted landscapes, nor should that be the goal. But we do not have to accept that every ember becomes an ignition or that every ignition becomes a conflagration. Insurers have an opportunity to measure meaningful risk reduction and price it. When they do, they can shape a market that rewards prevention, reduces losses, preserves coverage and makes living alongside wildfire increasingly possible.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire Pricing Trends