Inside the carefully crafted home were sensors and a few cameras the site’s manager said will “give their life for science.” Outside are nearly $1 million of other cameras and instruments in a fireproof building nearby and scattered around.
As wildfire danger increased in recent years, they sometimes turn the six-story tall wall of 105 fans stacked on top of each other to blow out of the wind tunnel’s massive doors and spread fire.
“We crash test houses,” said Roy Wright, the president of the institute.
Drought across much of the United States — especially in the West and Southeast — is at record severe levels for this time of year. Add to that record heat and unheard of levels of low moisture in the West for the first three months of 2026 and it looks like this upcoming fire season will be extraordinarily bad, unless late spring or early summer rain somehow bails out the country, said UCLA climate and fire scientist Park Williams.
As important is taking care of the outside. Creating a 5-foot (1.5-meter) buffer where any material that burns easy like pine straw, a hot tub, a wooden fence or overhanging branches is an important line of defense.
The fire testing makes that clear. Researchers at the test site set fire to wooden blocks that look like Jenga towers within the buffer zone. The simulated winds, which in a recent test purposefully fluctuated between 30 and 55 mph (50 to 90 kph), continually pushed the flames toward the home.
Once the windows and walls are breached, all the combustible things inside like couches, furniture, clothes and plastics quickly erupt and begin sending large showers of dangerous burning embers lofted by heavy wind, setting new fires a block or two away.
But fire standards can only help so much. “Under really severe fire conditions, especially those involving very high winds, they probably are of more limited value,” Syracuse University fire researcher Jacob Bendix said.
Fire prevention tools and techniques are becoming a big business.
Allen compares it to how people up north get ready for winter.
“It’s kind of like if you live in the snow, you have a snow shovel, you have scrapers, and you know that you have to take certain preventative steps in order to live in an environment that, hey, sometimes snows,” Allen said.
The test fires by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety are carefully controlled. The homes are made to be as similar to regular houses as possible without electricity or plumbing.
The attention to detail and safety is exacting. The institute likes spring fire testing at its site about halfway between Charlotte, North Carolina and Columbia, South Carolina, because while summer temperatures in the South can nearly match those in the fire-prone West, the swampy humidity in July is a bad approximation to a mountain canyon.
High winds delayed last week’s fire for more than six hours with anxious workers worried they couldn’t wait for the next day because an outdoor burning ban was starting after an unusually dry and hot spring.
Tarps and machines heat the houses to summer levels just before the fires are set on a huge concrete pad just outside the giant hanger where the fans line one wall and the hurricane testing takes place.
Elsewhere at the site, researches have started looking into hail and how it can damage homes. Another part of the campus has dozens of roofs just sticking above the ground as the shingles freeze and bake and are soaked by Mother Nature sometimes for more than a decade for more testing.
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Borenstein reported from Washington. Associated Press journalist Erik Verduzco contributed from Richburg, South Carolina.
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