[background music] -When I saw the fire start, and I saw the smoke coming over our neighborhood, I knew from experience that where the smoke goes is where the fire goes.

-There are three main ways that a home can burn: flames, embers, and heat.

-My neighbors already caught on fire two doors away, and we tried to fight it with a garden hose.

It was too hot, the winds were too fierce, there were too many embers.

It was at that point I knew we weren't going to stop it.

It's still hard to talk about.

I witnessed my neighbor's homes burn down.

Immediately after the fire, when it's fresh on your mind, that's when we need to really look at how it impacted us or our neighbors or friends, and look at our own property and realize this can happen.

"It did happen.

Can this happen to me?"

-Fire experts over the years have developed two main lines of defense to protect homes from these threats.

One is home heartening, so the things that you can do to the home itself.

Then you have defensible space, what you can do to the yard itself to reduce the chance of your home igniting.

California, over the years, has developed stricter standards closer and closer to the homes.

It has Zone 2, which developed in the '60s, out 100 feet, where you have to space out all of your trees; you can't have any dead vegetation.

It has Zone 1, introduced around 2006.

This is 30 feet out from the home.

Then the strictest is Zone Zero within the first 5 feet of a home.

The most controversial proposal in Zone Zero is whether or not you can have any living vegetation at all.

This would mean that you couldn't have any shrubs, you couldn't have flowers or cactuses, you couldn't even have grass within the first 5 feet of your house.

-What is Zone Zero going to do to the aesthetics, the charm, and the basic livability of our communities?

I truly believe that my vegetation saved my structure.

When we were here that night.

The homes around us were burning; those hedges saved my life.

I hid in those hedges.

I still had water in the hoses.

My husband was on the roof.

I was in the backyard.

The home behind us was fully engulfed and collapsing on itself.

It rained sheets of flames down on us, but because I had those hedges, I was protected.

It goes against every part of my experience fighting this fire to think that if I had not had those hedges, I would have been burned, and I would have been in greater danger.

-Zone Zero and all of the defensible space requirements apply to areas that have a very high fire hazard.

The state maps these out.

Over the years, they've been increasing the amount of land that's in these areas.

In California, this is about 6 million acres of urban developed areas.

We're talking about millions of Californians that, within a few years, will have to implement all of these Zone Zero regulations and requirements.

-Bougainvillea, very flammable up next to the house.

Rosemary, any plant that's got that oil that smells good, they burn very hot and very fast.

We're not saying you can't have it, we're just saying don't put it right next to your house.

Put it far enough away when it burns, it's not going to set the house on fire.

-The rules as they stand call for the removal of all vegetation within 5 feet of any structure in the very high fire hazard severity zones, with some exception for trees.

In Los Angeles, where we have very small lots, particularly in this neighborhood, like Silver Lake, where I live, that means the removal of quite a bit of vegetation.

In Silver Lake in particular, we stand to lose, by some estimates, up to 18% of our tree canopy.

If I look out my window, most of the vegetation I see would be at risk of removal under the Zone Zero rules.

A lot of it would be under threat for sure, and all of the benefits that come with that vegetation.

The cooling effects, the biodiversity, the hedges in the neighborhood.

These are like condos for birds.

We see the birds coming in and out of these hedges all the time.

There are privacy, security, beauty, aesthetics, pollution mitigation.

There are just so many impacts that this vegetation has.

It would be a massive removal of these plants.

-There's a lot of competing values here.

If all you care about is wildfire risk reduction, you can just pave over everything, and nothing's going to ignite.

People care about the plants that they have.

They like living in an ecosystem.

On top of that, removing all this vegetation is not cheap.

It can often cost thousands of dollars for people.

If you're suddenly going to impose this requirement and there's not a lot of ways for people to get financial support to do that, that's another burden that exists on people.

-I have heard the statements that a hedge had saved the house because it blocked the embers.

You can't really say that unless you were there.

I witnessed the homes in my neighborhood burn.

I've been on many strike teams and watched how homes burn.

It's very difficult to come in afterwards and say, "Oh, that's what happened."

Bottom line, for whatever reason, it didn't meet the requirements for combustion.

I had one lady say, "Hey, the one house on the block survived because the hedge was there."

Well, what about the other 40 houses that have hedges that didn't survive?

That, to me, is not a good ratio.

-Scientists are still trying to figure out how effective Zone Zero is, and what different proposals here might actually be the most effective.

There's been a lot of studies in these big fire labs where they'll reconstruct homes inside a lab, they have these big fans, and they'll create a fire, ignite a structure, and just look at what happens.

When we step away from the lab and look in the real world, the picture is much more complex.

A lot of these steps reduce the risk of your home burning down in a fire, but they don't bring it down to zero.

-There are aspects of Zone Zero that absolutely make sense: wood fencing, the gates up against the house, those can be replaced with masonry walls, steel gates, and non-combustible hardscape around your home.

Those applications, I completely support.

-The more time that passes after the fire, and the further you are from the fire, you start to become complacent again.

It becomes a story in the past.

The challenge is keeping it fresh in your mind, and to learn of what happened and how you can protect yourself and continue to take that action.

It's more than just your own property; it's also your neighbor doing what they can so the fire doesn't start on their property.

It's a community issue.

We don't want to be that first house in the community that sets the rest of them on fire.

If I do the home hardening and the vegetation management on my property, I'm ensuring that my house doesn't catch on fire, so it won't set my neighbor's house on fire, but if my neighbor has vegetation and their house catches on fire, it can burn mine down, so we're protecting each other.