Residential Structure Survivability to Large Wildfires in the United States

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Wildfire impacts on United States (US) communities have escalated in recent decades, highlighting the need to better understand factors that influence wildfire outcomes. We find that 462,069 homes were exposed to wildfires across the contiguous US during 2001–2020, two‐thirds of which occurred in the western US. Residential structure survivability—the percent of structures within a wildfire perimeter that were not destroyed by the fire—remained stable in the eastern US in the past two decades, but declined by 12% in the West coincident with a sixfold increase in the number of homes exposed to fire. Survivability was explained by structural age, fuels, and fire weather. Survivability to large fires in the West was lower for homes built pre‐1990 (84%) compared to post‐1990 homes (90%). Survivability was lower in forests compared to grasslands and shrublands. Finally, survivability was markedly lower for fires coincident with extreme fire weather. Our results suggest that modern building codes, fuel management, and proactive planning are pathways for strengthening wildfire resilience of the built environment.