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A Fireproof Home? Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about how an unstoppable fire could easily blow through Topanga Canyon, potentially in just minutes, trapping motorists and residents, leading to a Paradise-like catastrophe. In short, strong winds, steep hills, narrow roads and huge amounts of long unburned vegetation, make building a home there quite dangerous. In fact, throughout the canyon you'll find typical, vulnerable wood frame houses tucked in between the laurel sumac. But while I was reporting on Topanga Canyon, I heard about a structure like no other, that seemed to disappear into the hillside around it. And, once I spoke with the builder, I found out that embedding the home under a mountain of dirt was done, in part, to make his place resistant to even the worst wildfires that might blow through Topanga. Even if you frequent the main road through the area, odds are that you probably haven't even noticed it, because from the backside, the property looks just like any other dirt hill dotted with chaparral. But turn down a driveway and the front of the house reveals itself. All you'll see are windows surrounded by large white walls, with concrete and gravel at the base. There are no eaves to burn, no mass of material (like mulch) pressed right up against the structure that could carry a flame and melt windows and no fence to catch on fire. Instead of wood siding, there’s smooth white stucco. The body of the home is made of a four-plus-inch thick reinforced concrete shell, designed by the company Formworks, out of Colorado. After the hillside was excavated, builders put up a big steel frame, filled it with foam, and blasted it with layer upon layer of concrete. They then pulled out the foam, covered the shell up with tons of dirt, and built up the interior like any other house. The guy responsible for building the house is stuntman Eddie Conna, who has 140 different credits to his name, including Natural Born Killers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and the Fast & Furious franchise. But how safe would Conna's home actually be in a fire? It's tough to say. We won’t know how the house actually performs until a fire shows up.
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