1 minute readIt’s one of residential construction’s combustible topics.
Brian Potter is a structural engineer who writes here on
He concludes:
Overall, it seems like wood construction does somewhat increase the potential risk of fire, mostly by allowing fires that do occur to be somewhat deadlier and more destructive. However, this effect is mostly swamped by other factors such as what state and city you live in, or whether you live in a house or an apartment. For a wood apartment in Salt Lake City, the risk of fire is vanishingly small; for a wood single family home in a tiny town in Arkansas, it’s much larger.
The most important factor for fire risk in a home is whether or not it’s sprinklered. Fire sprinklers reduce the risk of fire by an enormous amount, and sprinklered wood construction seems to perform about as well as sprinklered non-combustible construction. And sprinklers are cheap, costing about $1-2 per square foot (much less than it would cost to say, change a wood house to concrete).
For wildfires specifically, we see something similar – construction details such as fire protected eaves and class A roofs, along with things like community density, matter far more than whether your home is wood or steel.
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