This training covers concepts and best practices related to assessing and mitigating structure ignition potential from wildfire, including how wildland-urban fire disasters occur, how to assess a structure’s ignition potential, which factors increase home ignition potential, the role of the home ignition zone (HIZ), and how to identify and effectively recommend mitigation options.

This training covers concepts and best practices related to assessing and mitigating structure ignition potential from wildfire, including how wildland-urban fire disasters occur, how to assess a structure’s ignition potential, which factors increase home ignition potential, the role of the home ignition zone (HIZ), and how to identify and effectively recommend mitigation options.

Course Objectives include

Module 1: Introduction and Overview 
Upon completion of this module participants should be able to:

• Establish a historical context of wildfires associated with home destruction
• Establish an ecological context of wildland fire occurrence
• Appropriately define the WU fire problem to guide an effective approach for preventing WU fire disasters

Module 2: Wildland-Urban Fire Characteristics
Upon completion of this module participants should be able to:

• Show the residential patterns resulting from extreme wildland-urban (WU) fire conditions
• Describe how WU fire disasters occur
• Discuss the implications of how home destruction occurs and the opportunities for effective WU mitigation

Module 3: Home Ignition and the Home Ignition Zone (HIZ)
Upon completion of this module participants should be able to:

• Understand the basic fire science of how home ignitions can occur
• Given an understanding of ignition, fire, and heat transfer, assess home ignition potential

Module 4: Preparing for the HIZ Assessment
Upon completion of this module participants should be able to:

• Organize the HIZ to systematically evaluate structure vulnerabilities
• Learn about how home ignitions occur from actual examples

Module 5: Conducting the HIZ Assessment
Upon completion of this module participants should be able to:

• Examine structures to identify and assess wildfire ignition vulnerabilities
• Develop recommendations for mitigating ignition vulnerabilities and reducing ignition potential during extreme wildfires

Module 6: The Benefits of Ignition-Resistant Structures
Upon completion of this module participants should be able to:

• Discuss benefits due to ignition-resistant homes for fire protection, life safety, wildfire suppression costs, and proactive fire management

Who will benefit

• Homeowners
• Business owners
• Whole communities
• Fire and life safety educators