RICHBURG, S.C. (AP) — It took less than three minutes for wind-whipped flames to go from licking the side of the house to shattering a window and working under the eaves to burn everything inside. Weeks later, another house in the exact same spot was burning — again in the name of science.
That home went up in flames slower because it was fortified with better materials. Add moving vegetation, mulch, wood fences and hot tubs with their highly flammable insultation several feet away and experts said you can protect houses from the increasing danger of wildfires on a warming planet.
The research is being done by workers at a remote site in South Carolina. They have set fire to 13 houses because scientists need to burn to learn.
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.
The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety is a nonprofit created by insurers to make houses and other buildings more resilient. The institute’s 100-acre (40-hectare) site in Richburg, South Carolina, started to study hurricanes and heavy wind and rain.
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.
Wildfires are Worsening, Costing More
From 2016 to 2025, wildfires in the United States on average burned an area the size of Massachusetts each year, slightly more than 11,000 square miles (28,500 square kilometers). That’s 2.6 times the average burn area of the 1980s, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Canada’s land burned on average for the last 10 years is 2.8 times more than during the 1980s, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
In the United States, wildfires have caused an average of $17.7 billion a year in damage since 2020, according to statistics kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the nonprofit Climate Central.
Climate change is intensifying and extending fire seasons across the U.S. and a growing population puts densely packed neighborhoods into fire-threatened areas. In the past three years, massive and devastating wildfires hit California, Maui in Hawaii and the North and South Carolina mountains.
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.
The institute’s research has already led to some conclusions that strengthened California’s fire code. New homes must have ignition-resistant walls, tempered or double paned windows and mesh over vents to prevent fire embers from getting inside.
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.