How do you build fire resiliency into new homes?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. Just over a year ago, the most costly wildfires in history hit LA, destroying more than 10,000 homes in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, including the home of Marketplace's David Brancaccio.

He's now in the arduous process of rebuilding using a fire-resistant material called

CLT, cross-laminated timber.

You can get lumber from sustainably farmed forests, and they press this wood into these

laminations about as thick as my arm or as thick as my thigh,

depending on what the structural needs are for these big panels. And they're fabricated at a factory

off-site. And they ship these panels flat like an IKEA kit to your location and your house can get enclosed in sometimes just a week.

Now, you can't live in the house after a week. It's not a total prefab. On the outside, as it would,

no. Over the outside is mineral wool insulation, which is a premium product that does not burn.

Over that, we're going to put stucco, which is kind of

concrete. So it's going to be really hard for a future fire to get through the walls and

destroy absolutely everything. So there's a dormitory at Colby College in the east. It's actually my hometown in Maine, where a European company called KLH is building that dorm out of these materials. A company called Mercer is doing the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library in South Dakota out of the stuff.

And Megan actually went up to the factory in Spokane and took the tour about how they make this.

And here's Mercer's Nate Foster.

We're doing a lot of the front end work off-site in our manufacturing facilities so that when this product shows up on site,

it's picked up

with a crane, dropped into the correct location, and we're able to continue moving.

We're sometimes seeing, you know, 15, 20 percent savings on schedules on some of these projects.

Schedules for building these things.

So it's particularly interesting for two reasons.

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