The owner of a red-roofed house on Maui, which made headlines for surviving a historic wildfire, believes the home’s survival in the ash area helped it survive an unlikely small event. explained in detail.
Last week, a stunning aerial photo of the undamaged land circulated online, along with an outrageous conspiracy that the localized devastation was a targeted laser attack from space.
But owner Dora Atwater Millikin attributes it to several routine changes during recent renovations, all of which survive a disaster like this. It wasn’t intended to.
“Since the house is 100% wooden, it has not been treated to be fireproof,” said a landscape painter. told the Los Angeles Times.
Atwater Millikin and her husband, Dudley, a former portfolio manager, said they didn’t have wildfires in mind when they renovated the 100-year-old former bookkeeper’s house they owned for three years.
“We love old buildings, so we just wanted to pay homage to them,” said Atwater-Mirikin. “And we didn’t make any changes to the building, we just restored it.”
One of the decisions that may have unwittingly survived the worst wildfires in more than 100 years in the United States was to replace the asphalt roof with a heavy metal roof, she said. told the LA paper.
At the time of the fire, she told the LA Times, “There was a 6-12-inch piece of wood burning and it was mostly floating in the air with the wind and stuff.”
“They will hit people’s roofs and if they are asphalt roofs they will burn. Otherwise they will fall off the roof and set the leaves of the trees around the house on fire.”
There, too, they unknowingly increased the viability of the site by arranging stones on the ground up to the drop line of the roof and cutting leaves from trees that were touching the outer walls.
It wasn’t put in place to protect against fire, but to keep termites at bay, but that’s according to experts, says Susie Kotcher, a forestry adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension Division, who co-authored a guide on how to protect your home from fire. It is said that it is almost completely consistent with the guidance. Forest fire.
“If you have shrubs or shrubs, especially combustible shrubs, right next to your home and embers ignite them, the heat can burst through your windows and enter your home through there,” Kocher told the LA Times. told to
The red-roofed house may also have benefited from not being too close to neighboring land, which is a major source of fires, but instead being surrounded on three sides by the sea, roads and open land.
The house had sprinklers installed, but most of the neighboring properties also had sprinklers, and power outages prevented the system from working when needed, Atwater-Millikin said. However, most of the combustible material had been removed from the underdeck area, which also faced the sea.
Kochel said the house has many qualities that help it survive such disasters.
“People generally think that a house on fire is a large wall of fire, but in many cases the mechanism is embers,” she says.
“So the embers could be coming from a burning front some distance away.”
That erroneous belief has also spawned unsubstantiated rumors as to why some areas remain undamaged when everything around them has been destroyed, she said.
“I think conspiracy theories can thrive when you don’t understand how things happen,” Kochel said.
Atwater Millikin and her husband plan to return to Maui soon to open up their space to their homeless neighbors.
“We lost a neighbor over this and a neighbor lost everything,” Atwater Millikin told the California newspaper.
“So many people have lost everything and we need to look after each other and rebuild. Everyone needs to help rebuild.”
