New Preservation Brief: Wildfire Adaptation and Historic Buildings

From NPS:

Wildfires destroy thousands of buildings each year, and historic buildings in at-risk areas are in danger of being damaged or lost without preemptive action to adapt them to be more resilient. Wildfire code requirements and checklists produced by government entities, trade, and industry groups can be helpful, but they were not developed with historic buildings in mind and can often conflict with preserving a building's historic character and features if applied without careful planning.

The National Park Service (NPS) has issued Preservation Brief 52: Wildfire Adaptation and Historic Buildings that provides guidance on how to assess wildfire vulnerabilities of a historic building and its site and develop a property-specific wildfire protection plan that can help reduce wildfire risks and preserve the property's historic character.

Wildfire resilience requires a comprehensive and layered approach to treatment planning: creating defensible space around the building, hardening the building itself against ignition, and maintaining these measures over time to ensure that the adaptive treatments remain sufficient to the risks.

This new Brief fills a significant gap in wildfire adaptation guidance for historic buildings, providing a framework for planning and implementing a wildfire risk-mitigation strategy consistent with The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. Detailed tables identify feature-specific wildfire risks, common adaptive site and building treatments, and preservation considerations for each.

As with other NPS guidance on natural hazards such as flooding and seismic risks, this Brief recognizes that wildfires can often result in total loss. At-risk historic buildings and their sites and surroundings may therefore require greater adaptive treatments than would normally be acceptable in other preservation contexts.

NPS Technical Preservation Services reports that they will be scheduling webinars on the new guidance in the coming weeks. Subscribe to their mailing list to be notified.

Michelle Thompson, M.S. Historic Preservation (she/her)
CLG Coordinator and Main Street Design Specialist
[email protected]
(360) 890-2617