With rubble still smoldering, Vardaan Vasisht narrated the moment he discovered his Malibu house survived January's firestorm.
“I’m very fortunate that it’s intact,” he said, his breath halting, on a cellphone video.
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WATCH HEREIn the sea of ash around L.A., it’s a mystery why some houses survived and others burned. But not here. Vardaan points to his roof-mounted sprinklers.
“I’m pretty sure, it wouldn’t be there,” he said about the sprinkler system he installed from Frontline Wildfire Defense Systems.
“We created almost like a water bubble,” said founder Harry Statter. Frontline installs sprinklers that can automatically trigger when a wildfire sparks nearby, essentially letting a house protect itself.
Statter says the system accounts for a harsh reality.
California
“There are simply not enough firefighters available during these wildfires,” he said.
Some homeowners stayed back in January and manually sprayed their homes with garden hoses.
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SIGN UP While, it was rewarding, yet risky, work, Statter said Frontline lets families evacuate -- while their sprinklers spray on autopilot.
Vardaan said he did exactly that.
“I could see the system working on my phone,” he said.
Statter said fending off the flames only required running the sprinklers 20 minutes per hour. The system adds firefighting foam from this on-site tank.
“It’s the same stuff that firefighters carry on their truck. You just don’t need a firefighter here to apply it,” Statter explained.
Statter first showed NBC Bay Area his innovation two years ago after the CZU fire. His goal: make homes too wet to burn. Recently, he showed the system again -- with fresh confidence.
Frontline claims it had 61 customer homes where the fires raged. 59 survived.
“We’ve had success in the past. but never at this scale,” Statter said.
Frontline said 96% of homes with its system in the Los Angeles fire zone are still standing. For comparison, we reviewed satellite images of Vardaan’s neighborhood post-fire. Our analysis showed just 35% of homes survived, overall.
“It seems the sprinkler systems did their job,” Vardaan said on his video. When he recorded it, he said the ‘too wet to burn’ idea became clear. “Anything that was not soaked is pretty much gone.”
Now, he’s wondering whether more homes could, should, or must have this tech.
“I’m not going to say it should be mandatory, because I don’t know how many people can afford this, but our cities and our governments need to think through a process where we say we’ll subsidize it, or we do a property tax rebate,” he said. “I don’t know what the structure would look like -- but I think that would be a very smart thing to do.”
Frontline might cost you tens of thousands of dollars, which could be out of reach for many. But Statter said consumers might get some help soon.
“We’ve had a number of insurance companies contact us,” he said. “They want to develop programs.”
It’s still too early for details, he said. But at a time when wildfires are more common and more costly, Statter said the idea of proactively making communities too wet to burn is just too important to ignore.
“You absolutely have to take matters into your own hands,” he said. “It’s not an ‘if’ your house is going to face fire, it’s a ‘when.’”
