Nov 11, 2025
In even the most destructive wildfires, some structures survive
untouched while everything around them is incinerated. It begs the
question: What factors are most responsible for determining if a
home is destroyed or survives during these events? A team of
researchers spent years trying to answer that important question.
They gathered massive troves of data from California’s most
destructive wildfires, then used artificial intelligence machine
learning to analyze what factors make the biggest difference in
home survivability.
On today’s podcast, we talk to wildfire researcher and study
co-author Michael Gollner about what the team found out, how they
did it, and how this valuable information will be used. We also
discuss whether AI is changing the way we study and think about
wildfire.
LINKS:
Read the
wildfire research paper we discussed in this episode.
Read the NFPA Journal article about this project
Learn more about the
Firewise USA program at NFPA