Fire Marshal Protects Home From Ember Storm Using Wildfire Defense Mesh

When I went to get remediation work done on my house, I had about $100,000 worth of damage to my house. When they crawled up into the attic to look at the insulation and see what got in there, it was very little em- uh, embers had gotten in there. They were kinda confused about the fact that there was no debris in the attic, and that's because it was the mesh had stopped those embers. So my name is Rich Schneider. I was a 36-year career fire marshal and fire captain with the fire service. Once I retired, I started a company where I would do wildfire risk and mitigation, and followed up with addressing that mitigation with different, different home-hardening techniques, including the use of wildfire defense mesh for vents and under porches and, and decks. When I was looking for solutions for home hardening, you know, one of the key components of home hardening is vents. And 90% of the structure loss in a wildfire is from the embers hitting the house. So in addressing vents, um, there are different ma- manufacturers on the market, um, but there are key things to look at was the look of the vent, the ease of installation, and probably most important that people don't think about is that net-free area and being able to ventilate the attic. We still need to provide ventilation. And looking at wildfire defense mesh and seeing its success rate in Australia, um, yeah, it was kind of a no-brainer, and the, the fact that you can, you know, customize a vent and have that little minimal impact on that free, net-free area was important. So the night of the Eaton fire, I was at home with my wife and my grandson, and I was actually working on a PowerPoint on wildfire risk and mitigation for residential structures at the time. [laughs] So I evacuated all of my neighbors. I got my wife and s- grandson in the car, sent them out two doors away. A fire started next to a fence, quickly got into the garage, got into the house, and then I had ember cast, millions of these red-hot, bright embers bombarding my neighbors' houses, including my own. I didn't think our neighborhood was gonna, was gonna make it. So during that fire, you know, my nephew was in the backyard, and he's not a firefighter, and as I'm talking to him, there are embers just hitting everywhere, and all I could think about was my vents, you know, my attic. Um, it wasn't until the next day that I saw the embers that were stacked up against the mesh, and they hit the mesh, and they fell right down to the ground. We can fight the embers. We can, we can definitely harden a home from embers. The difficult part is if your neighbor's home is within, you know, 30 feet and their home is burning, that's a lot of heat for a long time. And what we saw in the Eaton fire, those, those 9,000 structures and the structures that were lost in the, in the Palisades fire, that was structure-to-structure spread. It is a community solution. One person doing what's right, if your neighbors don't, their homes can still set your house on fire. So it starts with you, and then you work your way out. So working with Wildfire Defense Mesh was, was so easy. Um, I, I had met the owner, James, probably 10 years ago at a fire prevention conference. He was so easy to talk to, and at first, I was curious as to how simple the solution was because over the years, in the last 20 years, when we dis- when we discovered home hardening was so important and these different manufacturers were coming out with different vents that had baffles in them and different-- which worked very, very well, this was simple, but it works. Uh, it's cost-effective. It's customizable. Um, you know, when you've got certain vents and you have to order from a manufacturer, and they have to manufacture a vent that's perfect, if you didn't, if you didn't measure right, it may not work. This is mesh, and you customize it to your vent. So we all saw what happened, uh, in Southern California in, in 2025. I, I, I, I don't think we need to, uh, try to convince people anymore. You know, we saw what we saw, and homeowners are discovering the importance of vents being protected. Now more than ever, we need to get it done, and once you come to the realization you have to do it, the next step is, "How do we get this done?" Well, you can hire a home-hardening company that can come in and, and do what needs to be done, or you can do it as a homeowner. Um, but it's important that it be done and it be done with a, uh, a tested, proven system.