One of the most common ember hazards homeowners create is the placement of firewood stacks next their home. If a wildfire is approaching and there is no time to clean out the debris, plug the rain gutter down spout with a tennis ball, or something similar so that the down spout will be plugged, and fill the rain gutter with water.Keep your ladder handy and check your rain gutters throughout the fire season, cleaning them out as necessary.Over the winter, debris often accumulates in them. Remove all dried leaves, pine needles or other materials from your rain gutters before fire season.To keep your home safe, we suggest that you: Rain gutters made of vinyl will melt and drop into flower beds, igniting plants next to the house and maybe even combustible siding. Even houses with fire rated roofs are vulnerable to this type of ember attack. Burning embers can land in the gutters and if they are filled with dried leaves, pine needles, and twigs, a fire can start and possibly ignite the roof, roof sheathing, and fascia. Rain gutters attached to the edge of your roof are perfect for catching embers during wildfire. Although this can be expensive, it may well be the one thing that saves your home when the embers arrive.

We recommend replacing wood shake or shingle roofs with a rated, fire-resistant roofing material, such as asphalt composition shingles, metal, or concrete or clay tile. Unfortunately, there is no effective, inexpensive long-term solution to the ember threat to wood roofs. The embers come from pieces of burning material that can be lofted high into the air during a wildfire and travel a mile or more from the actual fire. During the hot summer months, the shakes or shingles can be nearly bone dry and easily ignited by embers.

Using wood shakes or shingles for roofs in high fire hazard areas is like stacking hundreds of pounds of kindling on top of your home. Houses with wood shake or shingle roofs are many times more likely to be destroyed during a wildfire. The most reliable way to predict which houses will survive a wildfire and which will be destroyed is by looking at the roof.

Ember meaning