Viral images showing a single house left undamaged by the wildfire that devastated Lahaina last week have sparked lively online discussions about how it could have possibly survived the conflagration. But its owners say they recently renovated the Front Street property, and some of the changes may have inadvertently protected it against the disaster. Dora Atwater Millikin, who owns the red-roofed house with her husband, told the Los Angeles Times that they replaced its asphalt roof with a heavy-gauge metal and got rid of foliage around the house. Those factors—plus the property’s relative distance from neighboring homes—may have made it less likely to be affected by burning embers blowing in the wind. “I think conspiracy theories can flourish when we don’t understand how things happen,” Susie Kocher, forestry adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension, said. “People generally think that it’s a big wall of flames that is catching houses on fire, but often the mechanism is embers.”
