The City of Austin is offering a Wildfire Mitigation Evaluation for residents, and being a couple houses (and a road) away from the Great Hills Greenbelt, it seems like it could be a useful piece of information. So I scheduled one.
Two people came out, Marco and Lauren (?) came out. Marco walked around the house with me, pointing things out and explaining them, while Lauren went on ahead with a tablet, taking pictures and making her own notes for the report. They produced a report on a City website after a couple of days which listed properties of the house and it's landscaping, with some identified as priorities to fix, and others as "Resilient Items" where we are doing things right. The report was available the next day, but it took a couple days for all the pictures to be uploaded and appear on the web site. The web site wanted me to create an account, but allowed me to just view it -- although the amount of info you have to provide to just look at it makes it more efficient to just create the account, if you want to look at it more than once.
And the website would also generate a downloadable PDF of the report (33 pages!) .
Overall we are in pretty good shape. The house itself is almost all stone exterior.
The roof is asphalt shingles, The roof was installed in 2023 with "CertainTeed Landmark Series Resawn Shake (Model/SKU 620401) fiber glass asphalt self-sealing shingles" which Google says is "Fire Rating: UL Class A fire resistance".
And they liked that the deck is Ipe, which has a Class A fire rating -- " one of the highest natural resistance levels to flame spread and ember ignition among all natural wood decking".
They didn't like that not all the house is stone. We have stoned-up the two triangles of siding on the South and West sides of the house, but we still have wood siding over the kitchen (on the East) and the garage (on the North. And then the windows have these large wooden beams along side and siding below and above them.
The basic rule they have is that there should be a 5 foot wide zone all around the house of stuff that won't burn. What with the stone sidewalk, the deck, and the River of Rocks, we do pretty well there. There are two native flowering bushed planted next to the house. One by the back bathroom
and one by the kitchen
If we had known about the 5 foot rule, we could have run the stone sidewalk and the River of Rocks closer to the house and planted the bushes further out.
The other main issue they had was with the fence. The fence itself is okay since it is mostly away from the house, but there are the two newest sections of the fence, with the gates, on the East
and the West
which go right up to the house, so that the dog can't get out. They suggested a chain link or wrought iron fence for the sections from the house to the perimeter of the lot, but I think it would look better to do a stone fence for these two short sections. There is a house over on Floral Park that did that.
There were a couple of other issues that the report brings up that are misunderstandings on the part of the inspectors. Basically it seems to be partly caused by Lauren going out on her own and not discussing her findings with Marco or me before committing them.
They complain about leaf litter and debris on the roof and gutter along the garage.
and suggest that I should get gutter guards to prevent it building up in the gutter. But, in fact, we have gutter guards here -- you just can't see them under the leaf litter! We haven't had significant rain in months, and the crepe myrtles right over this gutter (and the one on the other side of the garage), drop their little leaves which then harden into a layer of debris right on top of the gutter guard. I got a ladder out and just brushed this off with my hands to expose the gutter guard.
The other misunderstanding was underneath the back deck. The deck itself is Ipe, so that's not a problem, but they are worried that under the deck is exposed and leaf litter can build up, and then be ignited and burn from below to take down the deck, and the house.
They suggest "Enclosing the underside of the deck is one method to reduce the risk of ignition". But the underside of the deck is enclosed. On 3 sides by the foundation of the house, and by a stone wall on the other side. We did leave this one "crawl space" type opening so that we can get under there as necessary to clean and maintain it. We have a screen that we put over this opening in the Fall, to prevent leaves from accumulating, and in the Spring we go under to rake and vacuum any leaves that do get under. But most of the area under the deck is rock and stone; it won't burn from below.
And they wanted us to get rid of our doormats, since they could burn. We're not going to do that. They may need to be replaced, but the risk of them starting a fire to burn down our house seems really small and while I looked at "metal or rubber" replacements, it's just not the same.
In summary, there are issues that we could have addressed in construction, and landscaping:
(1) less wood trim and more stone for the exterior siding.
(2) trees (particularly the crepe myrtles and the elm and Chinese pistache further from the house.
But unless the house is significantly damaged, and must be rebuilt, these are not likely to be fixed. The elm, crepe myrtles, or Chinese pistache may die from age or weather (others of them have over the past 40 years) and if so, we will replace them with the fire zone in mind.
And there are major improvements that can be made over time as parts of the house need to be repaired or replaced. When we get a new fence we can replace the two sections with stone. When/if siding needs to be replaced we can use a non-combustible replacement, around the windows and for the remaining siding. If the two plantings that are too near the house die because of heat, drought, freezing, or something, we can re-route the River of Rock and move any replacement plantings further from the house.
There are on-going maintenance that is needed to trim the plantings, and rake up the leaves, but that is always the case.
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