This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Carole and Alan Balzer have called the town of Talent home since 1998. They met in college in nearby Ashland and never left southwestern Oregon. They love the small-town life and the bucolic setting of orchards, vineyards, and ranches.

On the morning of Sept. 8, 2020, Carole was at work a few towns away when she heard that a fire had ignited in a grassy field in Ashland. Like most people living in the Rogue Valley, the Balzers were used to seasonal drought and the occasional wildfire in the surrounding hills. But that summer had been brutally dry, and every bit of vegetation was parched. 

Carole called Alan, who was at their house without a car.

“Do you think I should come home?” she asked. 

She never got there. Fuelled by unusually strong winds, the fire roared northwest along the valley’s Bear Creek corridor. Alan had just enough time to gather their cat, a computer, and a box of photos before evacuating with a neighbour.

The fire destroyed the Balzers’ home and most of their neighbourhood, along with portions of Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, and Medford. Carole didn’t go back to her property until volunteers from Samaritan’s Purse were cleaning up the site a few weeks later.

“They found the three parts of my flute, but of course it was destroyed,” Carole recalls. ​“They gave me a chair to sit in, and I just started bawling.” 

The Almeda Fire burned approximately 3,000 acres and damaged more than 3,000 structures; over 2,500 of those were residences. Nearly 40% of the students in the Phoenix-Talent School District were displaced from their homes.

The Balzers were among thousands of people who had to find temporary housing after the fire. They were lucky—with the help of friends, they found a rental in Ashland.

Five other big conflagrations and a number of smaller fires also swept through Oregon that September weekend in 2020. Collectively, the ​“Labor Day Fires” burned over 1 million acres, destroyed more than 5,000 structures, and killed at least nine people. It was the most expensive disaster in Oregon’s history; afterward, the state faced the monumental task of helping residents and businesses rebuild.

In early 2021, the Oregon Legislature voted to temporarily relax building codes—mandatory construction standards usually determined by states and updated once every three years. These codes include energy-efficiency standards, which set minimum levels of performance for windows, insulation, heating and cooling systems, and other equipment. 

With Oregon’s postfire legislation, buildings replacing those constructed before 2008 were required to meet the 2008 codes, while buildings replacing those from after 2008 had to comply with the codes that were in effect at the time of the original construction. It’s a strategy that jurisdictions in California and Colorado have also employed after devastating wildfires.

Though meant to make rebuilding easier and more affordable, weakening energy-efficiency standards in particular has long-term consequences. 

The Oregon Department of Energy estimates that an average new home built to the state’s 2021 residential code is 30% to 35% more energy efficient than a similar home built to the 2008 code. Buildings are collectively responsible for 40% of energy use in the United States, so these codes are an important way to lower greenhouse gas emissions and help Oregon meet its ambitious climate targets. Moreover, reducing energy use lowers costs for individual households and businesses, and it stabilizes power supplies, which helps avoid the construction of new power plants and keeps utility costs lower overall. 

Given these benefits, the Oregon Department of Energy looked for ways to encourage residents to prioritize energy efficiency as they rebuilt.

“We allowed people to build to energy-efficiency standards in the past, but we also put on the table incentives to encourage them to build to contemporary standards,” says state Rep. Pam Marsh, a Democrat whose district encompasses southern Jackson County, where the Almeda Fire occurred. 

Money for these programs happened to be available. Oregon had received pandemic relief funding through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package that directed federal funds to state, local, and tribal governments to mitigate public health and economic impacts.

Meanwhile, Energy Trust of Oregon, a nonprofit that supports energy-efficiency programs and is funded by utility customers, worked closely with the state and officials in fire-affected communities. They revamped existing programs to make them work for fire victims, adding incentives to promote energy-efficient redevelopment.

A lot was available ​“to encourage people to try to build in the most efficient and fire-resilient way possible,” Marsh says.

With the extra support, a large number of developers, builders, and homeowners ended up prioritizing both wildfire resilience and energy efficiency. Five years after the disaster, many of the new homes in the Almeda Fire footprint, including the Balzers’ residence, are among the most energy efficient in the country. This carrots-instead-of-sticks approach to rebuilding could serve as a model for other states grappling not only with how to build back after disasters but also with how to prevent such disasters from happening again.

Incentives and Progressive Builders Drive Efficiency

On the morning of Sept. 8, Charlie Hamilton was driving south on Interstate 5 when he noticed a puff of smoke near an Ashland subdivision his company, Suncrest Homes, had helped build. He raced over; to his relief, the neighbourhood had escaped the fire.

“Later that day, the phone started ringing,” Hamilton says. 

Suncrest Homes has been building residences in Ashland and Talent since the early 1990s. For over a decade, every project has met the standards of Earth Advantage, a national green building program. 

“We had to get all our subs trained, and it’s a little bit more expensive,” Hamilton says. ​“But it is such a better house, and it’s so much more efficient — for the homeowner and their utility bills — that it’s worth a little bit of extra effort and a little bit of extra cost.”

Immediately after the Almeda Fire, Hamilton called the Balzers, who were old family friends, to see if he could help.

“We said, ​‘Yeah, maybe you could build a house for us,’” Alan Balzer says.

Kasey Hamilton, who runs Suncrest Homes with her father, Charlie, helped the Balzers and many former clients who had also lost homes apply to Oregon’s Fire Hardening Grant Program. A partnership between the state building codes division and Oregon counties, this program offered rebates for fire-resistant siding and roofing, ember-resistant vents that help keep sparks out of attics, and other measures that make homes more resistant to wildfire damage.

She helped families obtain additional rebates through the Energy Efficient Wildfire Rebuilding Incentive program, which the Oregon Department of Energy created in the wake of the fires. It offered $3,000 for a home rebuilt to the current code and $6,000 for one rebuilt to an above-code standard. For low- and moderate-income households, the incentives jumped to $7,500 and $15,000, respectively.

Meanwhile, Suncrest Homes was able to take advantage of boosted incentives through Energy Trust of Oregon’s energy performance score program, EPS New Construction. The company had long participated in the program, which offers rebates to builders who implement energy-efficient measures. A third-party verifier inspects a home and tests for air leakage and duct tightness to determine its EPS score; the lower the score, the more efficient — and the greater the incentive.

The boosted incentives were designed to encourage developers to rebuild homes that were lost in the Labor Day Fires as efficiently as possible.

“The incentive we had for going up and above code was doubled, and that’s where we saw a lot of uptake,” says Scott Leonard, residential program manager at Energy Trust.

A team from the nonprofit worked with the Jackson County Long-Term Recovery Group to create new bonus incentives for measures that also hardened rebuilt homes to wildfire.

“Here in Jackson County, we were really interested in not just energy-efficiency recovery, but what are the energy-efficiency measures that also have fire-resilience features,” says Karen Chase, senior community strategies manager at Energy Trust and a member of the Long-Term Recovery Group board of directors. After extensive modeling, Energy Trust landed on three factors that save energy while protecting homes from fire: triple-pane windows, exterior rigid insulation, and unvented attics.

There’s a strong overlap between energy efficiency and fire resilience. Windows, for example, transfer heat readily and are responsible for about half the energy loss in a typical home. Triple-pane windows are 40% more efficient than double-pane options and are more likely to stay intact during a wildfire, preventing fire and heat from penetrating the structure.

Suncrest Homes has taken advantage of the boosted EPS incentives in all 35 homes it has rebuilt in the fire zone.

“We basically stopped building any homes outside of fire rebuilds for two years,” Charlie Hamilton says. ​“I will say the single most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my career is to hand keys back to somebody who’s lost everything.”

The Balzers’ new home was the very first to be rebuilt in the Almeda Fire zone. Their backyard, landscaped with native plants, includes a swale that captures stormwater. They avoided planting any vegetation next to the house — one of several ​“firewise” steps that should make their home much less vulnerable to fire.

Their house has an electric, ductless ​“mini-split” heating and cooling system and heat-recovery ventilator, which ensures an adequate fresh-air exchange, and a superefficient electric heat-pump water heater—typical in all Suncrest Homes. (Suncrest does occasionally specify gas-fired tankless water heaters, as Energy Trust EPS incentives for builders are funded by both gas and electric utility customers and thus are ​“fuel agnostic.”) 

“The incentives reward the builder for choosing more-efficient equipment and better fixtures,” says Fred Gant, a local energy rater for the EPS program. The EPS score also helped verify that homes qualified for the Oregon Department of Energy incentives. ​“Our Energy Trust program manager worked very closely with ODOE to qualify those homes,” he says. So far, Gant has rated 220 homes in the fire zone — an impressive number, considering the size of the region. 

“One of the things that helped Energy Trust connect with the rebuild was that we had so many EPS builders already working with us in the Rogue Valley,” Chase says. ​“And through this process, more builders signed up to work with us.”

Chase recommends that other communities invest in recruiting and training skilled energy raters. That way, when disaster strikes, knowledgeable experts are in place.

“Fred already knew what to do. He just showed up, and that’s why it worked so well,” says Chase. ​“To have this many highly energy-efficient homes in one community may make it one of the most energy-efficient cities in the country. It really is the epitome of ​‘build back better.’” 

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