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Give Your Home a Fair Shot Against Wildfire | SERVPRO® of Cudahy/St. Francis
7/29/2021 (Permalink)
If your home is damaged by fire or any other reason, SERVPRO of Cudahy/St. Francis is ready and able to repair any damage.
One of any home or business owner’s greatest fears is seeing their property engulfed in flames, and wildfires are a more frequent cause of property loss than you might realize. Wildfires are ravenous, and with so much of our world made of material that’s combustible, it’s quite a feat that we can even manage to contain them.
But there are some ways we can be proactive in protecting our homes from wildfire, aside from the simplest and most impactful, which would be simply being more careful.
Let’s talk about “defensible space.”
It’s not an Atari game—“defensible space” is a series of buffer zones you can create around your home by getting rid of brush and dead trees that fuel fires, adding gravel and flame retardant plants near your house, pruning your plants to prevent spreadability, and keeping trees and shrubs at a safe distance from one another.
Think of it as a protective barrier (aka defense), designed to safeguard your home in the event of a wildfire by choking off the fire as it comes nearer. Defensible space also gives firefighters their best chance of stopping a wildfire before it breaches your home’s perimeter.
Defensible space isn’t required by law in Wisconsin, but it’s a good fire safety principle to consider all the same.
You may think of wildfires as a West Coast problem, but they can happen anywhere. There were over 59,000 wildfires across the United States in 2020.
Even taking California and its multitudinous 10,000+ fires out of that number, the average number of wildfires per state in was almost 1,000. (Wisconsin suffered 781 wildfires last year, destroying almost 1,800 acres of land.) And the first half of 2021 has seen a 25% rise in the number of fires nationally compared to 2020.
We should avail ourselves of any methods we can to prevent the start or spread of wildfires, and defensible space is one more way we can make a difference.
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.