Home and Fire Insurance Clearing

How To Prepare Your Home and Land For Insurance Inspections

You'll want to implement a number of recommendations to comply with local regulations, which will also increase the likelihood of your home being approved for insurance coverage.

Wildfires use vegetation to jump across properties and from home-to-home. Some flames can get as high as 50 feet, and fire can spread rapidly across dry and dense vegetation. The El Dorado Fire Safe Council, along with local fire safe councils in your town or city, recommend creating a defensible space around your home. This means reducing the amount of vegetation fuel around homes and structures.

Understanding defensible space zones is important to creating proper fire fuel mitigation and meeting the rigorous standards expected by your fire insurance company and homeowner's policy provider.

• Zone 2: Within 100 Feet of your home
• Zone 1: Within 5 feet to 30 feet of your home. This is called the "lean, clean and green" zone.
• Zone 0: Within 5 feet if your home. It is called the ember-resistant zone. It is not legally required but plays a significant role in reducing fire spreading directly to your home.

Here are some key tips for creating effective defensible space mitigation that will make the feasibility of obtaining insurance coverage more likely.

Brush Removal, Clearing, and Mulching

With so much lush vegetation in El Dorado, Amador, Placer, and Nevada counties, dense brush is a common occurrence.

• Assess vegetation in Zone 2 and your broader property on a yearly basis.
• Forestry mastication and mulching is one of the most efficient methods for reducing fire fuel and creating a protective, moist layer above the soil.
• In some cases, if the brush is large or includes thicker tree limbs or stumps, other strategies like brush removal, stump grinding, or wood chipping may be better options.
• Trim grass annually to a height of no more than 4 inches
• Weed abatement should be a top priority. This can be done with a weed eater on smaller properties, but may require field mowing on larger acreage parcels.

Remove and Trim Trees

Your insurance company may find trees or large tree limbs hanging over your home to pose a danger.

• You'll need to either remove hazardous trees or cut limbs to a suitable distance from your home if they are in Zones 0 or 1.
• Be sure that tree branches and limbs are six feet above the ground.
• Maintain a distance of 10 feet between the limbs of trees around your property.
• In Zone 2, look for trees that appear to be dead, dying, or infested with beetles or other insects.
• Depending on the size of your tree(s), the amount of trees requiring maintenance, and the potential danger they pose, you may want to consider professional tree service to clear them from your land.

Clear Vegetation Under Decks and Patios

Vegetation and brush under decks and patios could rapidly fuel wildfires or even fires restricted to your immediate area.

• Check for and clear dead grass, leaves, weeds, wood piles, dry debris, and other fire hazards in and around Zones 0 and 1.
• Consider minimizing patio furniture and other potentially flammable materials.
• Some flammable materials like firewood and lumber should be moved to Zone 2.
• Check your roof and gutters for flammable materials regularly and remove them.

Space Your Plants

Properly spacing plants, shrubs, trees, and other vegetation plays an important role in helping to slow the spread of wildfires.

How much space you put between plants depends on various factors such as the type of vegetation, the size of the plant, and the slope of the land on which it is growing.

• Spacing should consider both, horizontal distance and vertical height
• As a general rule of thumb, trees should be spread so that there is 10 feet of space between the ends of the limbs.
• There should be 6 feet of clearance between the ground and the first branches/limbs
• Shrubs should be twice as far from each other as they are high. For example, if a shrub is 4 feet tall, it should be 8 feet away from its neighbor.