DENVER — There's an effort to make more Colorado homes more climate resistant.
Features to make a home more climate resistant are metal roofs, fire resistant siding, thicker glass windows that can’t shatter in the heat, and changing the air flow.
“A passive house design is one where there is very little intake of air into the house,” Kelly Moye with Compass Real Estate said, “Because when there are all these different places where air can come through, then embers can get through and your house can burn down. So what they do is they actually seal the house in a way. There's only one single intake of air that if a fire were coming, you could actually close off that one single intake and keep the house safe from the inside.”
Moye is working with families rebuilding after the Marshall Fire. She said one of the major obstacles is costs, since climate resistant materials can typically cost about 10% more. That’s on top of building materials an costs already going up.
“If a house was, say, $800,000 worth that before it burned down, to rebuild it and potentially even use, you know, the new codes and fire resistant materials, etc, that home was costing more, like $1.2 or $1.3 million,” Moye said. “So you can see the problem. People weren't insured enough to cover that, and if they didn't have the money to cover the excess, a lot of them decided not to move back and just sell the lot and give it to someone else to build something new.”
Moye said families find themselves in a bind because of insurance coverage, either inadequate coverage, loosing insurance or having a hard time getting it again.
"Sometimes after a disaster the insurance didn’t cover the replacement cost and additional cost to build a house," Moye said.
“So as people rebuild, and they use these climate resistant materials options on their house. I think they have a better shot at getting insurance, and insurance has been the underlying problem,” Moye said. “The ones that have those attributes may have an easier time actually getting insurance.”
Moye said she’s mostly seen the insurance issue play out in areas where there have been catastrophic fires.
She also noticed with older homes, people are replacing roofs and decks with more fire resistant materials. They're also changing changing how basements are built and finished after major flooding events.
Related coverage:
- Boulder Fire Rescue offers free home assessments and reimbursements for fire-resistant home upgrades
- 'Cutting edge': Inside a fire-resistant home built in the Marshall Fire burn area
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