Building a home with future fires in mind
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How do you build fire resiliency into new homes?
How do you build fire resiliency into new homes? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Just over a year ago, the most costly wildfires in history hit L.A., destroying more than 10,000 homes in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, including the home of Marketplace's David Brancaccio. He's now in the arduous process of rebuilding, using a fire-resistant material called CLT, cross-laminated timber.
You can get lumber from sustainably farmed forests, and they press this wood into these laminations about as thick as my arm or as thick as my thigh, depending on what the structural needs are for these big panels. And they're fabricated at a factory off-site. And they ship these panels flat like an Ikea kit to your location. And your house can get enclosed in sometimes just a week. Now, you can't live in the house after a week. It's not a total prefab. On the outside, is it wood? No. Over the outside is mineral wool insulation. which is a premium product that does not burn. Over that, we're going to put stucco, which is kind of concrete. So it's going to be really hard for a future fire to get through the walls and destroy absolutely everything.
So there's a dormitory. at Colby College in the east, actually my hometown in Maine, where a European company called KLH is building that dorm out of these materials. A company called Mercer is doing the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in South Dakota out of the stuff. And Megan actually went up to the factory in Spokane and took the tour about how they make this. And here's Mercer's Nate Foster.
We're doing a lot of the front-end work off-site in our manufacturing facilities so that when this product shows up on site, it's picked up with a crane, dropped into the correct location, and we're able to continue moving. We're sometimes seeing, you know, 15%, 20% savings on schedules on some of these projects.
Schedules for building these things. So it's particularly interesting for two reasons. The affordability issue in America, you could get more houses up quickly with the stuff using a potentially sustainable technique. If a single contractor could frame in five houses in the same time with the same labor as one... you could replace a neighborhood much more quickly. So it's fascinating to entertain the notion that this traditional technique would, using newer technology of pressing these smaller boards together, And with that lamination, you get a very strong chunk of wood that gets put into place quickly. So that's just one technique. But it's not the only technique I'm seeing in the Altadena neighborhood where we lived.
What materials are being used for fire-resistant homes?
Other people are trying different things.
We'll be right back.
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How does cross-laminated timber enhance fire resistance?
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You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Marketplace's David Brancaccio. Tell me about some of the alternative materials that your neighbors are using, kind of high-tech stuff to resist fires.
Well, there's a lovely woman named Heidi Lewis. She worked in Hollywood as a scene painter and has done a lot of other cool creative things. And I went over to her site and it looked like a big pile of very white Lego that had arrived off a truck.
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