The Orange Heights community is being master planned with fire safety as a central design principle to prioritize proactive resilience.

Homes will feature fire‐resistant roofs, windows and exteriors, while surrounding landscapes will serve as a multitiered defense, with expansive fuel modification zones buffering homes from wildlands. These zones will replace non-native vegetation present at the site now with fire-resistant vegetation, creating a significant safety buffer.

The community’s infrastructure is also designed for fire safety, with a new water reservoir to bolster local firefighting systems and reliability, and wider roadways for improved emergency-vehicle access.

Benefits of New Construction and Planning

Fire-resilient designs for new construction have proven effective throughout the region, with the recent examples of several Irvine Company residential communities being protected from the 2020 Silverado Fire.

When the Silverado Fire reached the fuel modification zones around those communities, the fire’s progress was halted and no homes were lost. 

The survival of one home often depends on the resilience of its neighbors, including in neighboring communities, a principle deeply integrated into the planning of Orange Heights.

Similarly situated Orange County neighborhoods successfully withstood the 2020 Silverado Fire by functioning not as a simple barrier, but as a meticulously planned, multilayered system of resilience. A similar system of resilience, with added insights from the experience gained in the nearby communities, is a key part of the Orange Heights master plan.

The Silverado fire didn’t damage a single residence in the community. The firefight was an unequivocal victory — a product of the meticulous planning of the neighborhood, the design of its homes and the painstaking plan set in place by the city.

–Los Angeles Times story on the fire resilience of Irvine Company communities