The Getty Villa is one of the most luxurious properties in the Pacific Palisades.
It’s a sprawling estate and museum featuring a replica of an ancient Roman villa that was buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
Now it’s one of the sole surviving properties in its neighborhood after the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history, the Palisades fire, tore through in January.
Since then, wildfires also have ripped through South Carolina and Long Island. It’s as good a time as ever to brush up on protecting your home, and the Getty’s survival offers a few lessons.
The villa is owned by the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has the largest museum endowment in the world at more than $8 billion in 2023. Needless to say, it has more resources than the typical homeowner.
Still, the anti-fire measures at the Getty follow basic principles that people can apply in their own homes: fire-resistant construction and defensible space.
First thing’s first: The Getty Villa is made of concrete and travertine.
Those materials are virtually fire-proof. Essentially, the villa was “built like a vault,” Les Borsay, the facility’s emergency preparedness specialist, told Business Insider.
Of course, most homes aren’t pure concrete, but consider it when you’re building a driveway or fence.
In urban conflagrations like the ones that ripped through Los Angeles in January, a wood fence or mulch landscaping can be the fuel that brings the fire to your house.
A fire-resistant roof can make a huge difference too, since embers accumulate there.
At the Getty Villa, roofs are made of tile. Wood shake or shingles, of course, are the most flammable roofing material. An ideal fire-resistant roof is made of asphalt, clay tiles, or concrete tiles, according to the California state fire agency, Cal Fire.
Then there are the openings into a home: windows, doors, and vents.
If enough embers get in through openings, or if a window breaks from the heat, fire can easily start inside the home.
That’s why double-pane windows are the choice of fire-resistant construction experts like Clark Stevens, an architect working with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains.
The Getty Villa has fire-rated doors, but homeowners can up their anti-fire game by installing a good seal around their doors.
Don’t forget the garage door, too.
“It’s bigger than any window in your house, usually, so these edges are really important,” Stevens told BI as he showed off the garage-door seal at a model home he’s built in the Santa Monica mountains.
Since people often use garages as storage spaces, they’re also often full of flammable items. They can be a huge vulnerability if they’re not properly sealed.
Vents into the Getty Villa’s buildings are fitted with mesh to prevent embers from flying in.
Installing metal mesh screening with 1/8-inch spacing — or, better yet, 1/16-inch — can prevent embers from accumulating inside an attic or crawlspace and starting a fire inside your home.
The Getty Villa has a fancy water-supply system that’s not a realistic option for most homeowners.
It involves a 50,000-gallon tank of water deep underground, a system of pipes and fire hydrants, and sprinklers throughout all the buildings on the property.
However, simple, cheap measures also helped save the villa, like trimming low-hanging tree branches.
According to Borsay, the groundskeeping team regularly cleared tree branches up to six feet above the ground.
On the hillside where fire traveled down toward the villa, in this photo, you can see where flames burned up the trunks of trees, but not into their leafy crowns. That helps prevent fire from jumping tree to tree, spreading more quickly.
“Nine out of 10 times, this boils down to two words: yard work,” Pat Durland, an instructor for the National Fire Protection Association, told BI in 2023.
Flying embers can ignite plants or leaves in the yard or a roof gutter, which can then ignite your home. That’s where defensible space comes in.
Experts recommend maintaining a five-foot zone around your house that’s free of dry vegetation or other highly flammable materials.
The forest “may be showering us with embers, but what’s burning our homes down and forcing us to run and evacuate is human fuels,” Durland, who has 30 years of federal wildfire management experience, told BI after the Palisades fire.
“It’s bark mulch, it’s ornamental grasses. It’s structures that are readily flammable” — all things humans can change.
That applies to other fuel sources, too, like cars.
A vehicle that goes up in flames can quickly ignite nearby structures, such as a car in a driveway helping fire spread to a house’s outer wall.
Cal Fire recommends keeping vehicles at least five feet away from the house.
At the Getty, staff simply didn’t want their cars to burn, so they moved them into the underground parking garage.
The Getty Villa has lots of vegetation, but staff keep the gardens well-watered and spaced apart, at a distance from the building itself.
After the five-foot no-fuel zone, Cal Fire recommends homeowners maintain a 30-foot “lean, clean, and green” zone.
“You are where the rubber meets the road. The things you do on your house and around your house are going to make the difference,” Durland said.
That’s certainly on display at the Getty Villa. It’s still standing after the most destructive fire in the region’s history because of its builders’ construction choices and diligent groundskeeping.
The post Photos show 2 key strategies that saved the Getty Villa from fires — and what homeowners can learn from them appeared first on Business Insider.
