Newport Beach is known for its coastline and beautiful neighborhoods, not wildfire. Yet the city borders wildland areas and includes dense neighborhoods where wind-driven fire can rapidly transition from into the built environment.
Wildfire interaction with neighborhoods in Newport Beach is shaped by weather, topography, vegetation adjacent to homes, and older homes built under outdated standards. To protect homes and reduce community-scale loss, the city needed a defensible strategy to prioritize mitigation and track its impact over time.
To move from generalized awareness to targeted, effective risk reduction, Newport Beach partnered with XyloPlan to conduct Fire Pathways modeling that reflects how wind-driven fire would likely approach and spread within the community. The result is a wildfire mitigation plan that aligns the city’s finite resources with the areas that have the biggest impact on risk reduction.
Buck Gully divides two neighborhoods that share geography but have very different wildfire preparedness. South of the gully, newer homes were built with fuel modification zones (FMZs), irrigated landscapes, and ignition-resistent features. North of the gully, older homes have combustible siding, narrow streets, single pane windows, and wildland vegetation abutting the property line.
Two Sides of Buck Gully, Two Different Realities
Newport Beach Fire Marshal James Gillespie emphasized that parts of the city are at very different stages of wildfire readiness. Fuel modification zones, which slow fire’s spread at ground level, are inspected twice a year and HOAs reimbursed only after validation that the mitigation work meets standards. While effective, FMZs don’t stop embers carried by wind. To improve outcomes, the city needed a clearer understanding of where wind-driven fire would likely enter neighborhoods, and which homes are most vulnerable to ignition.
Why Newport Beach Turned to Fire Pathways Modeling
Before working with XyloPlan, Newport Beach could identify areas that seemed at risk but weren’t able to prioritize parcels, outreach, or funding. The team partnered with XyloPlan for help quantifying risk and identifying where fire is likely to transition into the community. To close this gap, XyloPlan modeled local fire behavior based on:
This modeling gave Newport Beach a scenario-driven risk map of where wildfire would most likely enter neighborhoods and which structures were most likely to initiate conflagration in the built environment.
Modeling Insights Become Actionable Plans
The value of Fire Pathways modeling became clear when Newport Beach translated the analysis into a practical mitigation plan. Rather than broadly targeting entire neighborhoods, the city had a clear, prioritized list of 132 parcels where defensible space, home hardening, and vegetation efforts would deliver the greatest impact.
“In a perfect year, if you had 1,500 hours to dedicate to inspections, you might touch 1,000 parcels,” Fire Marshal Gillespie said. “That still leaves thousands.” By focusing on priority parcels, the city created a plan that could be realistically executed with existing staff and budget, producing visible, measurable outcomes that reduce risk now and build momentum over time.
This prioritization now guides staff time, supports HOA conversations, and gives homeowners clear steps to improve their fire resilience. Fire Marshal Gillespie described it as “almost a force multiplier.” Instead of spreading resources thin across a wide area, his team can focus efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact, ensuring taxpayer dollars fund work that will actually reduce wildfire risk.
This clarity also proved essential when proposed treatments intersected with protected lands such as Orange County Parks. The science-based modeling helped demonstrate that those efforts were targeted and necessary. While not every project was approved, the defensible analysis aligned stakeholders, supported collaboration, and streamlined the review process around shared risk-reduction goals.
XyloPlan’s modeling also strengthened the city’s ability to respond to updated Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps, which nearly doubled the number of parcels classified as “very high hazard”. With parcel-level insights, Newport Beach can prioritize enforcement and outreach based on actual threat, not just zoning designations.
Insurance is Driving Action
Insurance impacts in Newport Beach are personal and immediate. One city council member saw her annual homeowner premium spike to over $20,000. After completing a few key mitigations and earning a Wildfire Prepared Home designation, her premium dropped by 30%.
While individual upgrades don’t guarantee insurability, they offer a credible way to demonstrate risk reduction. Newport Beach now guides residents to mitigation standards like the the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home and California’s Safer from Wildfire framework.
XyloPlan reinforces these insurance standards in its modeling. Only homes that meet the base level of IBHS criteria are considered “hardened” within an analysis. That alignment makes the data more useful in insurance conversations and helps connect parcel-level mitigation to community-wide resilience.
Visual Storytelling That Drives Community Buy-In
The model helped the city quantify the impact of mitigation. By comparing two wind-driven fire scenarios, one under current conditions and one with hardened, defensible priority parcels, XyloPlan estimated approximately 349 fewer structure ignitions. That’s the difference between a fire that overwhelms firefighting capacity and one that can be contained.
Fire Marshal Gillespie and his team found that XyloPlan’s modeling helped build momentum. By showing residents how fire could spread through their neighborhoods, and how mitigation actions can prevent that spread, agencies gain a powerful tool for community engagement.
Newport Beach used XyloPlan’s Fire Pathways modeling to visually demonstrate fire behavior under local conditions. When residents saw the modeled outcomes at the parcel-level, interest turned into action. “Seeing their own communities and how fire spreads changed the trajectory for us,” Fire Marshal Gillespie said. “It created real buy in.”
Newport Beach’s approach is already influencing other agencies. “Anyone that will listen, I try to tell them to go this route,” he said. “People want to do something. They just don’t know where to start. This modeling is a game changer.”
Fire Marshal Gillespie has shared the work with peers across California, recommended it to other fire marshals, and brought it into national conversations through professional organizations focused on the wildland-urban interface.
The lesson from Newport Beach isn’t that wildfire risk can be eliminated, but that it can be managed. With XyloPlan, communities can prioritize actions that slow fire spread, align investments with real impact and show progress that earns resident and agency support.
Reach out today to learn more.