Fire and roof tiles

[Robin Rierdan <rierdan@ix.netcom.com>]

In Fine Homebuilding a year or two ago, there was an article about 
protecting homes from fire. It highlighted this  one house, the only one 
standing after a fire took out a bunch of homes near Newport Beach or 
San Clemente. The house was designed by an engineer with fire in mind. 
It showed all of the roof tile courses  plugged with cement at the lower 
edge of the roof to stop embers from traveling up inside the roof. That 
was just one of the tricks that left this house standing when all others 
were burned to the ground. It was a very good article.

 Amazingly it said that houses in a wildfire burn from the inside out. 
It gets so hot in these fires that the interior combusts and the 
resulting fire takes out the rest of the structure. That whole concept 
sounds so  incredible to me that maybe I got it wrong. But I do  seem to 
remember seeing houses explode before just before the flames got them in 
the great 1969 fire in San Diego. Maybe I imagined that too.

r2