He built his family cabin to be fire resilient. It burned down anyway
B.C. builder Murray Frank says he wants to learn from this experience to make homes even safer from wildfires
A builder who spent three years constructing his family's legacy cabin in the B.C. Interior says it burned down despite adhering to federal and provincial guidelines meant to protect homes from wildfires.
Murray Frank, owner and operator of Building It Right, an award-winning, certified continuing education provider, says he hopes to learn from the experience.
"This is an amazing opportunity for us to know more and to perhaps be able to make even greater resistance [to wildfires]," Frank told Chris Walker, the host of CBC's Daybreak South.
Frank said he has hired a fire investigation team from Calgary to examine the cabin once evacuation orders have been lifted "to learn everything we can about what more needs to be considered in wildfire resiliency provisions."
Since 2020, Frank has been building the Ashnola Net Zero Demonstration Project near Cathedral Provincial Park.
The cabin's construction is featured in an educational series on how to build a net-zero home that embraces some of the new technologies in the construction of residential homes, including fire-proofing in case of wildfires.
Frank told CBC's Daybreak South that, despite sticking to federal fire-resilient building codes set out for places like wildfire-ravaged Lytton, the Crater Creek wildfire burned the cabin down anyway.
"It's disappointing," Frank said.
"But the building scientist in me realizes that this is the first opportunity we've had to put all of the common knowledge and the current thinking of fire resiliency into a build and then to actually have it face a wildfire."
WATCH | Ring camera footage of the Crater Creek wildfire as it reaches Murray Frank's cabin
Frank said building a fire-safe home includes using fire-resistant cladding and roofing materials, as well as ensuring there aren't any openings bigger than three millimetres that could draw in embers.
The cabin also adhered to the province's fire-smart guidelines, he said, which include tactics like removing flammable materials from the area immediately around the home.
"We actually had a professional forester help us reduce the amount of material and fuel sources ... at least to the extent of our lot," Frank said.
The building's exterior was completed, he added, with just the plumbing, interior finishes and some electrical left for alarms and internet. Substantial completion was set for October.
"I think with our house, the challenge that we had was the intensity [of the fire]," Frank said.
An ambitious goal
Felix Wiesner, an assistant professor in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry, says building a cabin in the woods and expecting it to be immune to wildfires is an ambitious goal.
"The further remote you get and the closer you get to the woods, you're increasing the risk of being caught in a wildfire," Wiesner said.
"You want to be out in nature, but nature can then turn on you."
Wiesner said provincial and federal fire smart guidelines are meant to help prevent catastrophic damage to homes, but there's only so much that can be done in the case of a raging wildfire.
"You can reduce the risk to a certain point, but you cannot completely eliminate it," he said.
"And, of course, climate change means that we do see more frequent, more high-intensity fires. So we need to re-evaluate what the risk is perhaps in terms of the guidelines that we have."
Having worked in countries like Australia that have much stricter rules around building codes for properties in high-risk areas, Wiesner said he thinks Canada and B.C.'s guidelines could be more specific for certain materials, like glass.
He also thinks the guidelines should be mandatory in some areas.
'We were able to see the fire approach'
Frank said the regional district hasn't confirmed that the cabin is gone, but his family had satellite-fed cameras on site to keep an eye on the property.
"We were able to see the fire approach and then consume everything," he said.
The cabin was meant to be a legacy for his family, and he wanted it to be passed on for generations.
According to the B.C. Wildfire Service, as of Sept. 6, the Crater Creek wildfire was 465 square kilometres in size and was still considered out of control.
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With files from Daybreak South