The FireHard system — including the WER rating, technical documents, and design guides — is a voluntary framework based on current best practices from wildfire research in Canada, the United States, and Australia. It is not a building code, regulation, or mandatory standard.
Your home was designed to not kill you in a fire. It was not designed to survive one. That distinction matters more than most people realise.
When people picture wildfire risk, they imagine flames racing through forest toward their home — and fire trucks arriving to save it. That picture is wrong in almost every way that matters.
In a major wildfire event, your local fire department is overwhelmed within the first hour. Mutual aid from neighbouring departments takes hours to arrive — and they are often overwhelmed too. During the 2023 Kelowna wildfire, some neighbourhoods burned with no suppression response at all. Not because firefighters didn't care, but because there were 200 structures threatened and a handful of trucks.
The math doesn't work. Your home must be able to protect itself.
This is not a criticism of firefighters. It is a description of physics, infrastructure, and math that no amount of courage can overcome.
Your local fire department is designed for one structure fire at a time. A typical rural or small-town department has 1–3 engines and a roster of volunteer or part-time firefighters. They can mount an effective defence of one or two homes simultaneously.
In a wildfire event threatening a community, there may be 50, 100, or 200 structures at risk in the same hour. The department must triage. They protect what they can reach with the resources they have, which means most homes receive no direct defence.
Mutual aid — calling neighbouring departments — takes hours to mobilise and those departments may be dealing with their own fires. During the 2023 wildfire season in BC, mutual aid requests exceeded available resources across the entire province simultaneously.
Provincial wildland firefighters (BC Wildfire Service, Alberta Wildfire, etc.) are trained and equipped for landscape-scale fire suppression — containing fire spread across terrain, not defending individual homes. Their tools are bulldozers, helicopters, air tankers, and hand crews building fire guards.
Wildland crews are not equipped with structural firefighting gear. They do not carry the hose, nozzles, SCBA (breathing apparatus), or training to enter or defend a burning building. When a wildfire reaches a subdivision, wildland crews typically pull back to defensible positions and focus on preventing fire spread at the landscape scale — not defending homes.
There is a critical gap between the wildland fire agency (which fights the fire in the landscape) and the structural fire department (which defends buildings). In many jurisdictions, coordination between these agencies during a fast-moving fire is limited.
Municipal water systems are designed for domestic use plus one or two fire hydrants flowing simultaneously. When a wildfire threatens a community and multiple hydrants are opened — for engine supply, sprinkler systems, and residents wetting their properties — water pressure drops, sometimes to zero.
Many wildfire-interface communities are on well water, gravity-fed systems, or small-capacity reservoirs that cannot sustain firefighting flows for more than minutes. Some rural properties have no hydrants within reach at all.
During the 2021 Lytton fire, the community's water infrastructure was destroyed in the first minutes of the fire entering town. During the 2023 Kelowna fires, some neighbourhoods experienced significant water pressure loss as demand exceeded system capacity.
Many wildfire-interface communities have one or two roads in and out. When evacuation orders are issued, those roads fill with outbound traffic. Fire trucks trying to reach threatened homes are driving into the evacuation flow — often on smoke-obscured, narrow roads with vehicles on both shoulders.
In some events, fire departments cannot physically reach threatened neighbourhoods because the access route is cut by the fire itself. Fallen trees, downed power lines, and abandoned vehicles block roads. The homes at the end of a single-access road are, for practical purposes, on their own.
A wind-driven wildfire in dry conditions can advance at 5–10 km/h through forest and 15–20 km/h through grassland. Spot fires from ember transport can ignite structures kilometres ahead of the main fire front. The time between "fire visible on the horizon" and "fire in your neighbourhood" can be minutes, not hours.
Even if a fire department has time to deploy, they face a fire that is simultaneously threatening structures across a front that may be several kilometres wide. There is no scenario in which a small-town fire department can defend every home across a multi-kilometre fire front arriving at 10 km/h.
This is not a failure of the system. Firefighters are doing extraordinary work with limited resources. But the system was designed for individual structure fires in communities with hydrants, roads, and time. Wildfire breaks every one of those assumptions simultaneously. The only reliable defence is a building that doesn't need a fire truck to survive.
Wildfire threatens your home through three distinct mechanisms. Each requires different defences. Understanding them is the first step to effective protection.
Burning fragments — some as small as a fingernail, some the size of a fist — carried by wind kilometres ahead of the fire front. They land on your roof, in your gutters, against your walls, and in any opening they can find: vents, gaps around pipes, cracks in soffits.
A single ember in an unscreened attic vent can ignite your home from the inside while the fire is still a kilometre away. Ember attack is the most common — and most preventable — cause of home loss.
A large fire radiates intense heat in straight lines. This energy can crack windows, ignite cladding, and melt materials at significant distances — without any direct flame contact.
At 30m from a burning structure: >12.5 kW/m² — standard glass cracks in minutes.
At 10m: >40 kW/m² — untreated wood ignites.
When fire physically reaches your property — from burning vegetation, a fence, a deck, or a neighbouring structure — flames directly contact building surfaces. This is the most intense exposure and requires the most robust construction response.
Defence requires fully non-combustible exterior assemblies with demonstrated fire resistance — not just fire-resistant surfaces.
Here is the fact that changes everything: a burning house is a worse fire exposure than a burning forest.
A structure fire burns at 800–1100°C for 1–4 hours. A vegetation fire front passes in 5–15 minutes. A burning house produces sustained, concentrated radiant heat and a continuous shower of burning debris that can ignite everything within 6–10 metres.
In most Canadian subdivisions, houses are 1.2 to 3 metres apart. Even in rural-residential areas, lot sizes often put homes within 10 metres of each other. The vast majority of Canadian homes in wildfire-interface areas are close enough to their neighbours that structure-to-structure ignition is not a theoretical risk — it is the default condition.
In subdivisions and rural-residential communities, this is how wildfire becomes catastrophic. The fire front ignites one or two homes. Those homes become sustained heat sources that ignite their neighbours. Those neighbours ignite their neighbours. Hours after the wildfire front has passed, houses are still catching fire from the house next door.
This is why FireHard includes the Close Neighbour Exposure Level (CNEL) Guide as a core component. If your home is within 10 metres of another structure, the CNEL system tells you exactly what to harden on the facing wall, based on separation distance and your neighbour's condition. It is one of the highest-impact investments you can make.
One side of the gap hardened — both homes benefit
Both sides hardened — probability of structure-to-structure ignition drops dramatically
Entire street hardened — neighbourhood-scale loss probability drops by an order of magnitude
Every home that burns becomes an ignition source for its neighbours. Every home that survives becomes a fire break. NIST investigations of the Camp Fire and Marshall Fire both documented that survival was strongly correlated with neighbourhood-level hardening, not just individual home hardening.
This is why every FireHard guide is free.
If your home meets building code, isn't it already fire-resistant? The short answer: your home is designed to not kill you. It is not designed to survive.
Building code fire requirements are about life safety during evacuation:
Code assumes fire starts inside the building. Code assumes fire department response. Code does not address external wildfire exposure.
The Canadian Building Code is a life safety standard. A 1-hour fire-rated assembly is designed to give occupants time to escape and firefighters time to respond. It is tested from one side, in a furnace, under controlled conditions. If it holds for 60 minutes, it passes. The building may be a total loss after — and that's acceptable under the code, because everyone got out alive.
During a wildfire, that 1-hour rated assembly may perform exactly as designed: it buys time. But fire arrives from outside on all sides simultaneously — through unscreened vents, combustible cladding, standard glass that cracks under radiant heat, and gaps around every penetration. The rated wall assembly can be completely intact while the rest of the building burns around it.
Code = life safety. Get people out alive. FireHard = property protection. Keep the building standing. These are different objectives, and they require different construction approaches. FireHard builds on the code — it doesn't replace it.
Hardening addresses external attack by embers, radiant heat, and flame, arriving simultaneously from multiple directions, during a wind event, with no suppression response.
Hardening works from the outside in:
The bottom line: A code-compliant home may have fire-rated wall assemblies between units. But it may also have unscreened vents, standard glass that cracks under radiant heat, combustible vinyl cladding, combustible decking, and gaps around every penetration. Hardening addresses all of these, systematically, based on your specific exposure level.
The FireHard system is a voluntary framework whose WER rating matches hardening measures to actual wildfire exposure, based on current best practices from wildfire research in Canada, the United States, and Australia. It is not a building code or regulation. Four levels, each building on the one below.
Ember attack. Seal, screen, maintain. Mostly free. Weekend work with basic tools.
WER-2Embers + radiant heat. Targeted upgrades to vulnerable components. $5K–$30K.
WER-3+ potential flame contact. Full non-combustible envelope. Serious investment.
WER-4Direct flame zone. Engineered, P.Eng.-designed fire resistance. Or reconsider the site.
Hardening your home does not mean you should stay in it during a wildfire. Hardening and evacuation are not alternatives. They are complementary.
When an evacuation order is issued by your local authority — whether that is the RCMP, your regional district, your municipality, or the BC Wildfire Service — you must leave. Evacuation orders exist because conditions have been assessed by professionals with real-time information about fire behaviour, wind, and suppression capacity. They know things you do not.
What hardening does is allow you to evacuate with confidence that you have done everything within your control to give your home the best chance of surviving while you are safely away. A hardened home does not need you in it to function. The screened vents, the sealed gaps, the non-combustible cladding, the tempered glass — all of these work whether you are there or not. That is the entire point.
Hardening is not wetting down your house with a garden hose or sprinkler. Garden hoses deliver a fraction of the water volume a fire engine provides. Residential water pressure drops under community-wide demand. Smoke reduces visibility to metres. Radiant heat can cause burns at distance. Embers arrive from every direction.
People who stay behind during major wildfire events die — not because they were careless, but because the conditions exceeded what any individual can manage.
Harden your home before fire season
Prepare an evacuation kit
When conditions deteriorate, follow evacuation alerts and orders
Leave early. Trust the hardening you have invested in.
Come back when authorities say it is safe
Housing in Canada is already expensive. Adding $5,000 to $40,000 for wildfire hardening is a real burden — we do not pretend otherwise. For many homeowners, especially in rural and northern communities, these are significant sums.
But Canadians are already paying for unhardened housing. We pay through insurance premiums that increase every year as wildfire losses mount. We pay through taxes that fund disaster response, evacuation, emergency housing, and community rebuilding. We pay through uninsured losses when coverage is denied or capped. And increasingly, we pay through the inability to insure our homes at all.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada reported over $8.5 billion in insured catastrophic losses in 2024. Insurers are responding rationally: premiums are rising, deductibles are increasing, coverage is being restricted, and in some areas, policies are being cancelled entirely. This is not a temporary correction. As wildfire risk grows, the cost of insuring unhardened homes will continue to rise — and for some properties, insurance may become unavailable at any price.
Hardening is an investment that pays for itself in multiple ways: reduced insurance premiums (as programs develop), maintained insurability, increased resale value, reduced personal risk, and the knowledge that your home can protect itself when you evacuate. The cheapest hardening investment is the one made during initial construction or during a renovation that was happening anyway.
Mostly maintenance. Vent screens, gap sealing, debris clearing. Weekend work.
Targeted upgrades. Most cost-effective when done during planned renovations.
Full non-combustible envelope. New build adds 8–15%. Retrofit is significantly more.
Engineered. New build adds 15–40%. Retrofit often impractical — vegetation management may be the better investment.
The question is not whether hardening is expensive. It is whether hardening is more expensive than losing your home, losing your insurance, or watching your neighbourhood burn because no one invested in protection. For most properties in wildfire-interface areas, the math strongly favours hardening.
We will never tell you your home is safe from wildfire. No building is fireproof. Wildfire is an unpredictable natural hazard influenced by weather, wind, fuel, terrain, suppression response, and factors beyond anyone's control.
What we will tell you is that hardening works. It works probabilistically — it shifts the odds, sometimes dramatically. A hardened home has a significantly higher probability of surviving a wildfire event than an identical unhardened home. A hardened neighbourhood has a dramatically higher probability than a hardened individual home.
The goal is not certainty. The goal is the best achievable outcome given the physics of fire, the reality of suppression limitations, and the economics of residential construction.
Find your WER level in 30 minutes. Get specific, actionable guidance for your exposure level. Free, always.
Wildfire resilience is a community problem. Share this page with your neighbours, your strata council, your regional district. The conversation starts with understanding why wildfire is different.
Every guide, every specification, and this website was built by volunteer professionals on evenings and weekends. No one has been paid.
If this work has value to you and you'd like to help it continue, email info@firehard.ca for information on how to contribute.
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