There are four approaches to saving a residence from wildfire. Three are preventative measures that can be done by the homeowners themselves — landscaping, building defensible space and hardening the home with certain materials. The fourth approach is the last resort — firefighter response.

None have proven 100% effective against the chaos of flying embers, changing winds and human behavior.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.