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Wildfire Protection by Smart Landscaping | SERVPRO® of West Milwaukee
7/29/2021 (Permalink)
If your home is damaged by fire or any other reason, SERVPRO of West Milwaukee is ready and able to repair any damage.
One of the scariest notions for any homeowner is the thought that their home might be threatened or even destroyed by a spreading wildfire. Wildfires are incredibly difficult to quench, and with so much of our everyday surroundings being made of flammable material, it’s a wonder that we can find ways to contain them at all.
But there are a few things homeowners can do, aside from the simplest and most impactful act of being more careful, to make homes less susceptible to wildfires.
Let’s look at a technique called “defensible space.”
It’s not a new sci-fi movie—“defensible space” is a series of buffer zones you can create around your home to slow the spread of fire before it reaches the building. Your home can be less likely to catch fire if you prune and plant with fire safety in mind, use hardscaping to create a protective moat around your perimeter, and regularly remove flammable brush and dead trees.
Think of defensible space as putting a protective barrier in place that deprives a fire of fuel sources as it comes near. If a fire has no fuel, it can’t continue forward.
Defensible space also gives firefighters their best chance of stopping a wildfire before it breaches your home’s outer wall.
Defensible space isn’t required by law in Wisconsin, but it’s a helpful fire safety practice to consider all the same.
Fires out West get most of the media coverage, but they happen all over the country, year-round. There were over 59,000 wildfires across the United States in 2020.
Even if we statistically throw out California’s 10,000+ fires, the average number of wildfires per state in 2020 was almost 1,000, and every state experienced at least some of them. Wisconsin suffered 781 wildfires last year, destroying almost 1,800 acres of land.
And 2021 has seen an increase in the number of fires, with the country experiencing 25% more so far this year than last.
We should do anything we can to make it harder for wildfires to reach our property, and defensible space is a reasonable step to take that could yield home-saving results.
If your home is damaged by fire of any sort, wild or not, SERVPRO is ready and able to repair the damage caused. Get in touch today to get the pros on your team.