3D interactive: How to protect your home to survive a wildfire in California

The fast winds, stray embers and ample trees that helped fuel 2018’s Camp Fire created what can appear to be a random path of destruction in Paradise, Northern California. But some homeowners benefited from one important factor that had nothing to do with the fire itself: The year their homes were built.

A McClatchy analysis of fire data showed that homes built before California’s 2008 landmark building code burned at a much greater frequency than those built after.

Slightly more than half of the 350 single-family homes built in compliance with the mandated fire-resistant roofs, siding and other safeguards in the fire’s path were undamaged. In comparison, only 18 percent of the 12,100 homes built prior to 2008 escaped damage.

Oney and Donna Carrel fled their home in Paradise the day of the Camp Fire and expected to return to a destroyed home, but that wasn’t the case. The home, built after 2008 and with fire safety and the new regulations in mind, survived with just a few warped window frames, a partially charred down spout and a lingering smell of smoke inside.

“I knew we were in the middle of the forest,” Oney said during a visit to Paradise with Sacramento Bee reporter Dale Kasler. “Why wouldn’t you do everything you could to make it last?”

This photorealistic 3D model of the Carrell family home was created using a process called photogrammetry.

A photographer flying a drone captured hundreds of photos of the house from many angles and perspectives. Afterwards, the photographs were loaded into specialized software to arrange the photos into a 3D model. The model was then optimized for visual clarity by cropping out artifacts and excess parts. Finally, the file size was reduced to load and perform faster on mobile devices.

This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 5:00 AM.