> Having numerous houses between the fire and your place just means the firefighters are already busy. The response to this is a combination of building materia

> Having numerous houses between the fire and your place just means the firefighters are already busy. The response to this is a combination of building material selection and landscaping. I generally agree with everything you stated, I think we're just talking about different scales. Instead of several houses, I was talking about having several subdivisions ("500 houses") between your house and the open space. It has happened, but it is not the average fire that starts in an open space and burns through several subdivisions. Structure protection is often the highest priority in those cases and the fire doesn't usually get too deep into a subdivision. When that does happen, there is almost no prep you could have done to save your house, because as you mentioned, the natural forces that create that kind of situation are virtually unstoppable -- as we recently saw in Colorado (Marshall), or California in 2018 (Woolsey), and Ft McMurray in 2016. My point was, for your average fire that can be fought with enough water/phos-chek/etc, being as far away from that open space is your best protection. That's obvious to us now, but I didn't think about it when I first moved to California, so I wanted to put that on OP's radar.