Defensible Space Around Where Your Pets Are: The Kennel, the Run, and the Fence You Built to Keep the Dog In

Walk the yard and ask one question: where is the animal, physically, most of the time?

For a lot of households the honest answer is a run along the side fence, or a kennel building at the back of the lot, or a patch of grass behind a wooden gate that is the only way in or out of that part of the property. None of it was sited for fire. It was sited for shade, for the hose bib, for where the neighbour’s window is not, and for keeping the dog out of the vegetable beds.

This page is about that yard on a calm afternoon. Not about smoke, which is a different exposure and has its own page. Not about the drive out, which our evacuation triage page covers. This is the property itself: the fence, the run, the kennel, the gate, and the five feet closest to anything with a roof on it.

Two things to say before the details, because they decide whether the rest of this page helps you or hurts you.

The first is that this is a synthesis, not a discovery. A federal laboratory, a national fire association, an insurance research institute, a state legislature, a state fire marshal, a university extension network, a county fire department, a state agriculture department and a wildfire education organisation have all published pieces of this. One of them names pet containment as the reason fences end up standing in debris. Another writes explicitly about barns, coops and kennels. A third permits pet doors and beds by name inside its noncombustible zone. Nobody has to invent this. The work is assembling it, saying where the issuers disagree, and marking the four places where this site is reasoning on its own rather than reporting: how the California draft’s structure and outbuilding definitions would fall on a kennel, how the Zone 0 mulch rule reconciles with the opposite-facing federal sentence our post-fire page quotes and then declines to act on, the gate you have to work one-handed, and where the animal actually is at 2 a.m.

The second is that siting and occupancy are different clocks, and the second one outranks the first. You can put a kennel in exactly the right place, build it out of exactly the right materials, keep its clearance perfect all summer, and it is still not somewhere to leave an animal when fire is coming. Idaho Firewise, in guidance written for people who cannot evacuate their animals, states: “If you cannot evacuate your pets, bring them indoors.” And then, in capitals of its own: “NEVER leave pets chained or kenneled outdoors; the smoke and heat from flying embers are not only scary but dangerous to your pet’s health.”

Read the scope on that carefully, because the same page also tells you that “At the earliest signs of a wildfire, your pets should be brought inside and/or kenneled and other animals brought into barns, pastures or coops.” The two sentences are not in conflict. A crate indoors is a good idea early. An outdoor kennel run holding an animal on a fire day is the thing forbidden. Everything below is the calm-day clock. The fire-day clock has one answer for pets and it is indoors.

What This Site Has Not Covered Until Now, Stated Precisely

We ran this against our own library before writing, because a page whose whole pitch is “nobody covers this” is exactly the kind of page that gets it wrong.

What holds is the narrow, checkable version: before this wave, no article on this site used the wildfire home-hardening vocabulary at all. The words defensible space, home hardening, Zone 0, Firewise, IBHS and ember-resistant did not appear anywhere in the library, and no article carried a defensible-space zone scheme.

What does not hold is the sweeping version of that claim, which would be that this site had never told anyone to change anything about a structure or a yard for fire. It had, and a careful reader will find it. Our horse and livestock evacuation page already carries property-scale clearance for large animals and a fence-material rule, sourced to a county fire department. Our heat emergency page already argues that most effective home-envelope work is a calm-day project rather than an emergency response, which is exactly the argument of this page transposed to a different hazard. Our renters and homeowners insurance page already treats a dog run and a kennel building as property, under the other-structures coverage of a homeowners form. That page decides whether the structure is paid for. This one decides where it goes. Both questions are real and they are not the same question.

So the gap this page fills is narrower than “nobody writes about pets and wildfire,” and it is still a real one: the yard, the enclosure, the fence, and the five feet closest to the thing with a roof on it.

The Legal Status of Zone 0, Dated

This section is dated deliberately, and it is dated August 15, 2026. It is about to change.

California’s Public Resources Code section 4291 sets the duty. It attaches to “A person who owns, leases, controls, operates, or maintains a building or structure in the state responsibility area”, and it requires that person to “Maintain defensible space of 100 feet from each side and from the front and rear of the structure, but not beyond the property line”. Inside that hundred feet the statute grades the intensity, describing “more intense fuel reductions being utilized between 5 and 30 feet around the structure, and an ember-resistant zone being required within 5 feet of the structure, based on regulations promulgated by the board, in consultation with the department, to consider the elimination of materials in the ember-resistant zone that would likely be ignited by embers.”

Read the last clause twice. The five-foot ember-resistant zone is contingent on regulations. And the statute says so again, later, in its own words: “The requirement for an ember-resistant zone pursuant to paragraph (1) of subdivision (a) shall not take effect for new structures until the board updates the regulations, pursuant to paragraph (1) of subdivision (a), and the guidance document, pursuant to paragraph (2) of subdivision (e).” For existing structures it is later still: the requirement “shall take effect for existing structures three years after the effective date for the new structures.” There is a further brake in subdivision (h): the department “shall not change defensible space inspection practices and forms or enforcement to implement the requirement for an ember-resistant zone until the State Fire Marshal makes a written finding, which the State Fire Marshal shall post on the department’s internet website, that the Legislature has appropriated sufficient resources to do so.”

The regulations that would start that clock are in front of the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection right now. Board staff wrote a memorandum in July 2026 describing the package as one “which will come before the Board for consideration at its August 19, 2026 meeting.” On what happens if it passes: “Should the Board approve the proposed regulations on August 19, 2026, staff will immediately submit the emergency rulemaking package to the California Office of Administrative Law (OAL) for review.” And on timing: “Assuming the anticipated review timeline, staff expect the regulations could become effective as early as September 2026.”

Read that date against the statute above before you put it in your calendar. The effective date staff are estimating is the effective date for new structures. Subdivision (g)(2) then gives existing structures three more years from whatever that date turns out to be. If your kennel, your fence and your house are already standing, an effective date in September 2026 is not your deadline. How much later it is cannot be calculated here, because the three years runs from a new-structure effective date that does not exist until the Board acts.

That vote is four days after this page was written and its outcome is not known here. So here is how to use everything below.

• Every California number on this page comes from an April 2026 draft, which the July memo says staff intend to edit further before the Board sees it. It is not the rule.
• If you are reading this after August 19, 2026, check what the Board actually did rather than trusting this paragraph.
• The operative answer for your own property, on any date, comes from your local fire department or fire protection district, not from a web page. That is not a hedge, it is how the statute works: subparagraph (B) of the same section provides that “A greater distance than that required under subparagraph (A) may be required by state law, local ordinance, rule, or regulation.” Read the two sentences that follow it in the statute, because they are the limits on that power: fuel modification beyond the property line “may only be required by state law, local ordinance, rule, or regulation in order to maintain 100 feet of defensible space from a structure”, and “Fuel modification on adjacent property shall only be conducted following written consent by the adjacent landowner.”
• And there is a fourth party who can move the number. Subparagraph (C) provides that “An insurance company that insures an occupied dwelling or occupied structure may require a greater distance than that required under subparagraph (A) if a fire expert, designated by the director, provides findings that the fuel modification is necessary to significantly reduce the risk of transmission of flame or heat sufficient to ignite the structure, and there is no other feasible mitigation measure possible to reduce the risk of ignition or spread of wildfire to the structure.” The sentence directly after that one is the boundary on it: “The greater distance may not be beyond the property line unless allowed by state law, local ordinance, rule, or regulation.” If you have had a letter from an insurer about clearance, that is the provision it is operating under, and those are its two conditions and its edge.

Everything outside California operates differently again, and Oregon is the clearest example of the difference. The Oregon State Fire Marshal states that “The Oregon State Fire Marshal and its partners have developed a model defensible space code that local governments across Oregon can adopt”, and that “In accordance with OAR 837-040-0030, local governmental subdivisions shall notify the Oregon State Fire Marshal (OSFM) that they are pursuing their local process to adopt the model defensible space code.” A model code that localities may adopt is not a statewide mandate. Which means the same yard, moved two counties over, can be under a different rule or under none.

The Zone Schemes, Side by Side

This is the section most likely to be merged into a single tidy diagram by someone in a hurry, so it is a table instead, with one row per issuer and the outer bound stated in that issuer’s own units. They do not agree. Do not average them.

Issuer (all read 2026-08-15)	Innermost zone	Middle zone	Outer bound
NFPA, Home Ignition Zone	Immediate zone: “The home and the area 0-5’ from the furthest attached exterior point of the home; defined as a non-combustible area.”	Intermediate zone: “5-30’ from the furthest exterior point of the home.”	Extended zone: “30-100 feet, out to 200 feet.”
California PRC 4291 (statute)	“an ember-resistant zone being required within 5 feet of the structure, based on regulations promulgated by the board”	“more intense fuel reductions being utilized between 5 and 30 feet around the structure”	“100 feet from each side and from the front and rear of the structure, but not beyond the property line”
UC ANR Fire Network, describing CAL FIRE	Zone 0 (0-5 ft), “The Ember Resistant Zone”	Zone 1 (5-30 ft), “The Lean, Clean, and Green Zone”	Zone 2 (30-100+ ft), “The Reduced Fuel Zone”
IBHS, Wildfire Prepared Home (voluntary program)	0-5 Foot Noncombustible Zone	5-30 Foot Defensible Space Zone	“maintaining 30 feet of defensible space or to the property line around the home”
FEMA, Home Builder’s Guide fact sheet 4 (09/08)	Zone 1, “within 30 feet of the home”	Zone 2, well-spaced clumps and islands of vegetation	Zone 3, fuels “farther than 100 feet from the building”
Living With Fire (Nevada)	Zone 0, “The Ember-Resistant Zone”, 0-5 feet	Zone 1, “The Lean, Clean and Green Zone”, 5-30 feet	Zone 2, “The Reduced Fuel Zone”, 30-100 feet +
Los Angeles County Fire Department	Not published as a numbered zone on the page we read	Not published as a numbered zone on the page we read	“up to 100 foot radius of defensible space (cleared vegetation) around your home”, and “up to 200 feet of clearance may be required” where “Due to the location of a structure, and/or because of other hazardous conditions”

Two things fall out of that table that matter for an animal enclosure.

The first is that the FEMA fact sheet’s Zone 1 is thirty feet, not five. Its numbering is a different generation of the same idea, and if you are holding a printout from a fire safe council that references “Zone 1”, the first thing to establish is whose scheme it is on. That fact sheet is marked 09/08 and its file properties record a 2008 creation date, which is worth knowing before you build to it.

The second is the outer bound. NFPA reaches two hundred feet. California’s statute stops at one hundred and then hands the increase to local ordinance or an insurer’s designated expert. Los Angeles County Fire says up to two hundred feet may be required. Our horse and livestock page already carries a two hundred foot figure for horse properties, sourced to Ready LA County passing along its County Fire Department’s recommendation. Those numbers reconcile rather than conflict: one hundred feet is the statutory floor in the State Responsibility Area, and both the county fire department’s own page and the statute’s subparagraph (B) provide for more where conditions or a local rule require it. If your property is in Los Angeles County, read the county’s own three sentences together rather than the last one alone. It tells residents to “Ensure you have up to 100 foot radius of defensible space (cleared vegetation) around your home”, and adds that “If the 100 foot distance is on adjacent property, contact your local fire station for assistance in obtaining adequate clearance.” Only then does it say that “Due to the location of a structure, and/or because of other hazardous conditions up to 200 feet of clearance may be required.” Two hundred feet is what the location or the hazard can push it to. It is not the figure every parcel in the county starts at, and the fire station is who tells you which one you are.

The Fence You Built to Keep the Dog In

This is the part of the page where a laboratory has already done the work, and where truncating the finding does real damage.

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, ran 187 field experiments on fences and mulch beds under wind and published the results as Technical Note 2228-upd1. Buried in the report’s discussion of fence usage is the sentence this entire page exists to bring to a pet audience:

“Fences are often installed in contact with the ground to keep pets in a yard or unwanted animals out. Unfortunately, this configuration may put those fences in proximity to flammable mulch and to windblown debris accumulating at the base.”

A federal fire laboratory named the pet-containment function as the reason the fence sits where the fuel is. That is not our reframe. It is theirs.

The finding, whole

The abstract states: “The experiments in this study demonstrated that combustible fences can be rapid conduits for fire and can potentially spread fire to attached or adjacent structures.”

Stop there and you have overclaimed, because the very next lines grade the hazard by configuration and the grading is the actionable part:

“Combustible fences with mulch at their base were found to be high hazard, transporting fire through the community and providing a steady source of firebrands.”

“Medium fire hazard was found for wood fences in the absence of mulch, with slow fire spread dominated by glowing combustion with occasional small flames.”

“Low fire hazard was expected for noncombustible fences, with maintenance required to minimize the accumulation of fine combustible materials along the fence.”

So a wood fence is not a wick by virtue of being wood. A wood fence standing in shredded bark, dry leaves and pine needles is a high-hazard object. The same fence standing on gravel, with the base kept clear, is graded a step down. And even a metal fence gets a maintenance condition attached, because fine fuel collects along any fence line.

NIST explains why that base is hard to keep clear, and the explanation is exactly the pet owner’s problem: “When a fence is in close contact with the ground, it can be difficult to keep the area near the bottom of the fence clear of combustible materials.” A fence that a dog cannot dig under is a fence in contact with the ground.

The animal-proofing that undoes the mitigation

In the experimental section NIST tested raising fence panels above the mulch bed and found that lifting the panel slowed the fence’s involvement in the fire. Then it wrote the caveat itself, and it is the single most useful sentence in the report for this audience:

“attaching a wire screen below a raised fence to deter animals from going in or out of the yard would reduce the value of this approach, since leaves and other combustible materials could then collect at the base of the fence.”

NIST also states plainly that those height results “are not intended to recommend a specific fence height.” So this is not a measurement to copy into your yard. It is a mechanism to understand: the gap under the fence is what let the fence stay out of the mulch fire, and screening that gap for animal containment is what fills it back up with fuel.

If your fence has hardware cloth, chicken wire or a dig guard buried along the bottom because an animal was getting out, that is a spot on your property where debris collects and cannot easily be raked. It does not mean take it out. It means that stretch of fence needs looking at more often than the rest.

The configuration worse than one fence

NIST’s first recommendation is not about materials at all:

“Avoid parallel fences, to reduce exposure to large flames. Parallel fences can result in highly hazardous fuel accumulation corridors that are difficult to access and maintain. Spacing of 0.9 m (3 ft) between fences is not sufficient.”

And it describes exactly how a household ends up with one: “A parallel fence configuration can arise when neighbors erect fences along both sides of a property line.” In the report’s discussion of fence usage the same point appears from the homeowner’s side, that people fencing yards “may erect fences near or at the property line. When this practice is followed by two adjoining neighbors, it can result in a parallel fence configuration that this study finds to be particularly hazardous.”

If you fenced your side of the line so the dog could not reach the neighbour’s dog, and the neighbour did the same, that corridor is what NIST is describing. IBHS reaches the same conclusion in its Plus level requirements, where “Back-to-back (parallel) combustible fencing (meaning separate fences that are combustible and closer than 5 feet apart) are not permitted”, with an exception if one or both are noncombustible, and a note that meeting it “may necessitate coordination with neighbors or an HOA to eliminate at least one of the combustible parallel fences.”

The distance that was not enough

One more result, and it is the one that bears directly on a kennel building. The target structure in the NIST fence experiments was a shed with an eight foot square footprint. In the wood-plastic composite fence experiments NIST reports: “Smoke coming from the roof of the shed after the experiment indicates that a separation distance of 1.83 m (6 ft) between a fence and a structure is inadequate to prevent ignition.” It adds that “A long fence will increase the fire exposure by adding to the available fuel and linear extent, and other factors such as sloping terrain will also add to the hazard.”

Six feet between a burning fence and a shed roof was not enough. A dog run built along the inside of a fence line, with a roofed shelter at one end, is that geometry.

NIST’s own summary recommendations for a residential property are worth having in one place, because they are short and they are the report’s own words: avoid parallel fences; “Avoid combustible fences where they can impact egress, to protect life safety”; avoid proximity to other combustible fuels, including a direction to “Avoid mulch at base of fence”; avoid proximity of combustible fences to a residence, including a neighbouring one; “Replace combustible landscape features with noncombustible or low fire hazard features when possible”; “Keep fence and yard clear of debris, to reduce the amount of fuel and potential pathways for fire”; and harden structures against firebrands.

That second one, about egress, is a fire laboratory telling you that a combustible fence in the path you would use to get out is a life safety problem. Hold that thought for the gate section.

Where the Fence Touches the Building

Every issuer that addresses this at all lands in the same place, which is unusual enough on this page to be worth saying: the fence stops being wood before it reaches the wall.

IBHS, in its 0-5 Foot Noncombustible Zone requirements, states you “Shall remove combustible fencing materials (e.g., wood and vinyl), posts, gates, and retaining walls within 5 feet or replace with noncombustible material.”

The Oregon State Fire Marshal, under Home Hardening: “Use metal gates for fence sections within 5ft of the house.”

The UC ANR Fire Network, in its Zone 0 recommendations: “For fences attached to the building, upgrade the attachment point with a noncombustible panel or gate.”

IBHS’s own field observation explains the mechanism in a sentence: “A combustible section of fence attached to the home was exposed to flame and could have spread fire directly to the home. This is why fencing within 5 feet of the home must be constructed of a noncombustible material including where fences attach to the home.”

And California’s April 2026 draft rule, which is not in effect, would put numbers on it. Its plain-language summary says “A five-foot non-combustible section is required where fences attach to a home, to be completed in Phase 2” and gives the example of “replacing a wooden gate with a non-combustible metal gate.” The draft rule text is more precise, and here it matters which of the draft’s two articles you are reading, because the April 2026 package publishes them in parallel under its own bracketed headings: 14 CCR 1298 for the Local Responsibility Area and 14 CCR 1299 for the State Responsibility Area. In the Local Responsibility Area article the clauses read “Combustible fences and gates shall not be attached to an Occupied Structure”, and “All fences and gates that are attached to an Occupied Structure, or come within one (1) foot of contact with an Occupied Structure, shall have a five (5) foot non-Combustible span from the point of attachment or the point closest to the Occupied Structure.” The State Responsibility Area article sets both requirements in the same words except that it keys them to a “Building or Structure” rather than to an Occupied Structure, and those two terms are not defined in the same words, as the next section sets out. In both articles, new combustible fences and gates within five feet of a structure would be barred after the effective date, while “Fence repairs to an existing Combustible fence may be made using Combustible replacement materials.”

The Board staff memo of July 2026 restates the intent in plainer language, and the reassurance is worth quoting because it answers the question most people actually have: “The current draft regulations prohibit construction of new combustible fences within Zone 0 (within five feet of the structure) while continuing to allow existing combustible fences to remain in place and having no impact on fences beyond Zone 0.” Then the exception: “Where a fence or gate is attached to an occupied structure, however, the regulations require a noncombustible section (e.g. a non-combustible gate) within five years of implementation.” And finally: “Fences more than five feet from the structure are not impacted by the draft regulation.”

So even under the draft, the whole fence is not the subject. The five feet where it meets a wall is.

For a household with animals, that five feet is often the busiest five feet on the property, because the gate into the side yard is usually right against the house. It is where you take the dog out at night. It is the pinch point in every route between the back door and wherever the animal actually is.

The Kennel Building, the Doghouse, and the 120 Square Foot Line

Here is where the definitions do real work, and where this page is reading rather than reporting.

First, a structural fact about the April 2026 draft that decides which sentence you are under, and which is easy to miss because the two texts sit one after the other in the same PDF. The package publishes two parallel draft articles, marked by its own bracketed headings: “[14 CCR 1298 et seq. covers the Local Responsibility Area]” and “[14 CCR 1299 et seq. covers the State Responsibility Area]”. They carry the same Zone 0 requirements, in mostly the same words, but they are keyed to two differently worded definitions. Which article reaches your property depends on where the land sits. The Local Responsibility Area article states its own scope as the creation of an ember-resistant zone surrounding Occupied Structures “in a Local Responsibility Area (LRA) within a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone (VHFHSZ)”, in the parts of the state “where fire protection is managed by local agencies”. The State Responsibility Area article states its own scope by reference to a Building or Structure “that exists in grass, brush, and forest covered lands within the designated State Responsibility Area (SRA) of California.”

The Local Responsibility Area article defines an Occupied Structure as:

“Any constructed building or structure that is intended or used for support, enclosure, shelter, or protection of persons, animals, or property, having a permanent roof that is supported by walls or posts that connect to, or rest on the ground.”

The State Responsibility Area article does not use that term at all. It keys its requirements to a Building or Structure, and defines that as:

“Anything constructed that is designed or intended for support, enclosure, shelter, or protection of persons, animals, or property, having a permanent roof that is supported by walls or posts that connect to, or rest on the ground.”

The word animals is in both definitions. That is the draft’s own text, not our gloss. And the two are not the same width: the Local Responsibility Area version opens with “Any constructed building or structure that is intended or used for”, while the State Responsibility Area version opens with “Anything constructed that is designed or intended for”. They diverge in both halves of that phrase and they do not diverge in the same direction. The State Responsibility Area version reaches further on what the thing is, because anything constructed is wider than a constructed building or structure. The Local Responsibility Area version reaches further on why it is there, because “intended or used for” catches a structure by what it is actually used for and “designed or intended for” does not say that. Which of the two governs is not a question of which is wider. It is a question of which article covers your land.

Both articles then define an Outbuilding, identically, as “Buildings or structures that are less than one hundred-twenty (120) square feet in size and not used for human habitation”. The sentence that follows it is where they diverge again. The Local Responsibility Area article adds “For purposes of this Section, an Outbuilding is not an Occupied Structure as defined in subsection (g) above.” The State Responsibility Area article says the same thing about its own term instead, excluding an Outbuilding from being a “Building or Structure”. Either way, a structure under that footprint is carved out of the main definition and handled by its own clause.

Now the reading, marked as ours. This next paragraph is this site’s own reasoning about how those definitions would apply to a kennel, not a statement the Board has published about kennels. No definition in either article uses the words kennel, doghouse, run, coop or barn. But a roofed kennel building larger than one hundred and twenty square feet, with walls or posts resting on the ground, sheltering animals, appears on the face of the text to satisfy the Occupied Structure definition in the Local Responsibility Area article, and to satisfy the Building or Structure definition in the State Responsibility Area article as well, and would therefore carry a Zone 0 of its own under either. A doghouse or a small kennel structure under one hundred and twenty square feet appears on the face of the text to be an Outbuilding, which both articles expressly carve out of the main definition, and which both then handle by a clause they word identically: “Outbuildings are not permitted in Zone 0 unless they are constructed entirely of non-Combustible materials.” Whether the Board or a local inspector would read any of that the way this page does is not something this page can tell you. Ask your fire authority, and ask it which of the two articles covers your parcel.

One caution about citing the draft precisely, because it will trip anyone who opens the PDF: the State Responsibility Area text is printed as a redline, with subsection letters struck through and re-lettered on the page. That is why this page cites article numbers rather than subsection letters for it.

That one hundred and twenty square foot line is not unique to the draft. The Los Angeles County Fire Department already runs a permitting threshold at the same figure, stating that in the areas it serves, “construction of certain outbuildings and accessory structures over 120 square feet, parcel splits and subdivision/developments within areas designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones will require a Fuel Modification Plan approval before the applicable land division, Conditional Use Permit, or Building Permit will be approved.”

The draft also publishes an outbuilding clearance for the outer zones, and this is one of the places the two articles diverge completely rather than by a word. For both Zones 1 and 2 in the State Responsibility Area rule text, Outbuildings and liquid propane gas storage tanks would need “ten (10) feet (10 ft.) of clearance to bare mineral soil and no flammable vegetation for an additional ten (10) feet (10 ft.) around their exterior.” A doghouse is grouped with a propane tank there. That is not a metaphor, it is the clause. The Local Responsibility Area article sets no Zone 1 or Zone 2 requirements at all, and the draft’s own plain-language summary says why: in the Local Responsibility Area, defensible space standards for those zones “are set by the local fire agency in compliance with statute.” So if your land is in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone rather than the State Responsibility Area, that ten-plus-ten figure is not yours to work to, and the local agency’s number is.

How far from the house: three bodies, four figures

Issuer (all read 2026-08-15)	Separation from the home	The structure’s own clear zone	What kind of document this is
IBHS, Wildfire Prepared Home Base (footprint 15 sq ft or more, within 30 ft)	“Structures shall be at least 10 feet from the home and attachments.”	Structures “shall meet the same wildfire resilience requirements for the home”, and each one’s own 0-5 Foot Noncombustible Zone “shall not overlap the 0–5 Foot Noncombustible Zone required for the home, decks, or other structures within 30 feet.” No more than 3 within 30 feet.	Voluntary designation program with an application fee
IBHS, Wildfire Prepared Home Plus (footprint 15 sq ft or more)	“shall be located a minimum of 30 feet away from the home and attachments.”	As above	Voluntary designation program with an application fee
FEMA, Home Builder’s Guide fact sheet 4 (09/08)	“Separate auxiliary structures such as a detached garage, pump house, pergola, and utility shed from the home by at least 50 feet. Increase the distance if the structure is used for the storage of combustible materials.”	Not addressed as a distance around the auxiliary structure	Federal builder guidance, 2008 vintage
Living With Fire (Nevada)	“Locate outbuildings (e.g., for storage) at least 30 feet away from the home”	“and create an ember-resistant zone around all outbuildings and propane tanks.”	Wildfire education program
California, April 2026 draft Zone 0 rule	Outbuildings “are not permitted in Zone 0 unless they are constructed entirely of non-Combustible materials.” Both of the draft’s parallel articles carry that sentence identically. Its plain-language summary adds that sheds and outbuildings within Zone 0 “must have non-combustible exterior roofs and walls.”	State Responsibility Area article (14 CCR 1299) only, for both Zones 1 and 2: “ten (10) feet (10 ft.) of clearance to bare mineral soil and no flammable vegetation for an additional ten (10) feet (10 ft.) around their exterior.” The Local Responsibility Area article (14 CCR 1298) sets no Zone 1 or Zone 2 requirements; the summary states those “are set by the local fire agency in compliance with statute.”	Draft regulation, not in effect on 2026-08-15
NFPA, Home Ignition Zone	Not addressed as a separation distance	Extended zone: “Remove vegetation adjacent to storage sheds or other outbuildings within this area.”	Association guidance
Los Angeles County Fire Department	Not addressed as a structure-to-structure distance	“Keep woodpiles, propane tanks, and combustible materials away from your home and other structures, such as garages, barns, and sheds (recommended 30 feet).”	County fire department

Ten feet, thirty feet, thirty feet and fifty feet, from three bodies, for the same kind of object, and only three of those four figures are distinct. That spread is not a failure of the sources. It reflects what each document is for: IBHS is writing a designation standard it has to be able to inspect on ordinary suburban lots, and it says so, adding a note that “As of publication of this standard, IBHS continues active research into the spacing required between structures to reduce the likelihood of structure-to-structure fire spread, including the impact of structural openings, building materials, and connective fuels. The provisions of this section of the standard may be updated as this research matures.” FEMA’s fact sheet is written to a builder siting new construction, where fifty feet is a drawing decision rather than a demolition.

FEMA’s fact sheet adds one more instruction in the sentence immediately after the 50-foot one, and it is the one that turns a distance into a build spec: “Comply with recommended construction practices related to fire resistance for auxiliary structures.” IBHS says the same thing in standard language, requiring that accessory structures “shall meet the same wildfire resilience requirements for the home, such as roof covering, gutters and downspouts, vents, 6-inch vertical noncombustible wall covering clearance, decks, and the 0-5 Foot Noncombustible Zone surrounding them.” So the distance is only half of it. A kennel building at the correct distance, with a wood shingle roof and open vents, is still the object IBHS photographs and calls a large fuel source.

What this means practically: if you are buying or building a kennel structure now, site it to the largest of these numbers your lot allows. If it already exists, you are not going to move it, and the clearance around it is the part you can actually change.

The outbuilding is the fuel, not just the victim

One more framing from IBHS’s own field observations, because it flips the direction people assume. Under a photograph captioned Wood Shingle Roof on Outbuilding, IBHS writes: “An outbuilding (shed) near the home is a large fuel source that can potentially ignite and spread fire to the home. Additionally, the wood shingle roof makes the shed particularly vulnerable to ignition. This is why outbuildings within 30 feet of the home must meet strict requirements.”

A kennel building is not only a thing you want to protect. It is a wooden box near your house. If it burns, the house is the next thing downwind of it.

The Fences, Runs and Enclosures Other Bodies Already Address

The kennel-and-defensible-space join is published, in several places, in animal-facing language. It is worth reading these directly rather than taking a summary of them.

Idaho Firewise, under a heading about preparing before a fire, states: “Structures such as barns, coops and kennels, as well as corrals and pastures, should be just as maintained as your home and its surrounding landscape. All structures and their surroundings should be included in your defensible space or have defensible space of their own.”

That last clause is the whole argument of this page in one sentence, published by somebody else in 2025.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture publishes a handout titled Wildland Fire Safety for Your Livestock and Pets, and its Livestock section opens with a defensible-space instruction. There is a problem with quoting it, and it is the publisher’s problem rather than ours: the bullet is truncated in the published file itself, reading “Clear defensible space around your barns, pastures and prop-” and then stopping. We confirmed that with two different text extraction modes on August 15, 2026, and the same file’s “If You Must Leave Your Pet” section renders as two empty bullets. That is overset text in the publisher’s layout. We are not going to complete the sentence for them, and you should not treat the fragment as a complete instruction. What that document does carry in full is the response-side reality: “In battling a wildfire, firefighters will do what they can but they are not responsible for evacuating your livestock. Firefighters may cut fences or open gates to free trapped animals.”

Middle Park Conservation District, a Colorado conservation district writing for ranchers, lists among its advance preparations: “Create defensible space around all structures, including barns and hay sheds.” Its livestock-side reasoning about opening gates into a pre-grazed area belongs to our page on releasing livestock when you cannot load them, which works through that decision properly; this page does not re-derive it.

Los Angeles County Fire Department extends the clearance duty to the outbuildings in the same breath as the house: “Keep woodpiles, propane tanks, and combustible materials away from your home and other structures, such as garages, barns, and sheds (recommended 30 feet).”

NFPA, in the Extended zone of the Home Ignition Zone: “Remove vegetation adjacent to storage sheds or other outbuildings within this area.”

And IBHS legislates for pets twice in a document that is otherwise entirely about buildings. Inside its 0-5 Foot Noncombustible Zone, where combustible items must be removed, it permits a short list of exceptions including “bird feeders, pet doors and beds, trash/recycle bins, kids’ toys, pool pumps and accessories, garden hoses” and others, and then immediately conditions the exception: “All movable combustible items need to be relocated indoors or at least 30 feet away on Red Flag Warning days or during extended absences.” The same pairing appears again in its requirements for the top of walking surfaces, where “pet beds” sit in the permitted list and the same relocation condition follows.

The pet bed by the back door is inside a national wildfire standard, by name. It is allowed there on an ordinary day and it is not allowed there on a red flag day.

Mulch, and Why Two Published Instructions About It Point Opposite Ways

Zone 0 is, more than anything else, a rule about mulch. California’s draft rule text states: “No Combustible materials are permitted within Zone 0. This includes but is not limited to: fallen leaves and tree needles; Combustible mulches, including bark and woodchips; and other Combustible debris.” The same subsection attaches its own exception in the subparagraph directly beneath it: “Inspectors may allow temporary exceptions to limitations on mulches to prevent erosion during new or continuing construction, and during emergencies.” That exception is discretionary and about erosion, not about capping contaminated soil, and it is an inspector’s call rather than a standing permission. IBHS requires you to “remove all combustible groundcover materials (e.g., wood and rubber mulch and exposed weed cloth) within 5 feet to bare mineral soil”, permitting noncombustible hardscape instead. NFPA’s Immediate zone instruction is to “Move any flammable material away from wall exteriors” and it names mulch first in its list. NIST’s fence recommendation includes “Avoid mulch at base of fence.” And NIST found rubber mulch to be its own problem: “Rubber mulch generates large flames initially and when disturbed.”

Meanwhile, our own page on yard soil contamination after a fire cites the US Environmental Protection Agency on covering contaminated soil. We opened EPA’s Lead in Soil page ourselves on August 15, 2026 rather than carry the sentence across from our own page, and it states, under a heading about using caution outdoors: “Cover contaminated soil with a thick layer of clean soil, vegetation, mulch, or other materials.”

One yard, two published instructions about the same material pointing opposite ways. Both are correct in their own scope, so here it is stated plainly rather than left for a reader to trip over. This paragraph is this site’s own reconciliation of two sources that do not address each other. The Zone 0 instruction is about combustible fuel within five feet of a structure before a fire, where the failure mode is an ember landing in dry bark. The EPA instruction is about capping contaminated soil, and it is published on a page about lead in soil rather than about fire at all. Note what our own post-fire page does with it, because it is the opposite of an endorsement: that page quotes the EPA sentence inside a section headed What This Page Will Not Tell You To Do, and declines to turn it into an instruction, on the ground that EPA did not write it for an animal. So no page on this site tells a pet owner to spread mulch. Neither document mentions the other’s situation. If your yard has burned and you are working on contamination, that page governs. If your yard has not burned and you are working on ignition, this one does. If you are doing both, and a county or a professional has told you to cover soil on your property, the one thing this page will add is that the first five feet against a wall is the worst place on the lot to put a combustible cover, and that is our conclusion rather than either agency’s instruction.

Vents, the Eave, and the Only Gear Claim This Page Will Make

Two fire agencies publish the same vent measure, in the same terms, and it is the one piece of hardware on this page with a real published basis.

NFPA, in the Immediate zone: “Reduce embers that could pass through vents in the eaves by installing 1/8 inch metal mesh screening”, and “Clean debris from exterior attic vents and install 1/8 inch metal mesh screening to reduce embers.”

The Oregon State Fire Marshal, under Home Hardening: “Cover all attic and crawlspace vents with 1/8” metal wire mesh.“

There is a test method behind it. IBHS’s 2025 standard lists among its referenced standards ASTM “E2886 – Standard Test Method for Evaluating the Ability of Exterior Vents to Resist the Entry of Embers and Direct Flame Impingement”.

That measure is for the building. Now the boundary, because this is exactly where a page like this starts inventing.

We could not find an ember rating for a kennel. We searched for a fire, ember or radiant-heat rating, certification or test standard applying to a kennel panel, a run panel, a doghouse, a crate or a crate cover on August 15, 2026, and located none. That is a description of what we searched, not proof that nothing exists anywhere. It is also consistent with what this site already publishes about pet gear: our hard kennel comparison states that no crate or cover is fireproof and that no cover shields a pet from direct flame or heat, and our weatherproof crate cover roundup reports that no maker page we read publishes a fire, ember, or radiant-heat rating. Nothing on this page weakens either of those findings.

So: buy the eighth-inch metal mesh for the vents on the building, because two fire agencies publish that measure and a standards body publishes a test method for the class of product. Do not buy anything sold to you as an ember-rated kennel unless the seller names the test standard and the laboratory that ran it. And note what the mesh is for, which is the building envelope, not the animal.

The Gate You Have To Open While Carrying Something

This is the third of the four places where this page reasons on its own, and it is flagged rather than dressed up as sourced.

What is published about gates in a wildfire context is about materials or about apparatus access. Materials, covered above: metal within five feet, noncombustible span where it attaches. Access: the Oregon State Fire Marshal says to “Keep gates functional and wide enough for large apparatus” and to “Ensure driveways have 13’6” vertical and 20’ horizontal clearance for fire engines.“ Middle Park Conservation District tells property owners to “Have spare gate keys, combinations and property maps available for firefighters, or leave gates unlocked.” Idaho Firewise, writing about animals you cannot take, says to “Close, but do not lock, doors and gates so animals cannot re-enter barns and pastures”, and notes that “Firefighters may cut fences or open gates to free trapped animals, so providing identification on each animal is important.”

What is published about the direction a gate opens comes from a different hazard entirely, and the scope has to travel with it. Oneida County, New York’s fire coordinator publishes a two-page guide on evacuating livestock during a fire, which states that it “was developed with the assistance of University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension” and whose file properties record a 2010 creation date. Under its evacuation considerations it states:

“Don’t become trapped. If you are able to evacuate animals, be sure you are not leading them toward a dead-end, such as a gate that won’t open outward.”

That is a barn fire. The animals are livestock. The person is leading them out of a building, and “open outward” means the direction of travel out of the structure rather than a hinge specification for a suburban yard gate. It is a legitimate source for the principle that you can box yourself in, and an illegitimate one for a claim about which way your side gate should swing. The same document’s framing is worth carrying too, because it is the honest one: “Human safety, including your own life, must be your first priority.”

What nobody publishes, as far as we could find: any guidance on operating a gate latch, a run door or an enclosure catch with one hand while carrying an animal or a carrier. We looked for it in California’s draft rule text, the IBHS technical standard, the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s defensible space page, the UC ANR Fire Network’s zone table and NFPA’s Home Ignition Zone material, searching for gate, latch and hand as separate terms rather than as a phrase, on August 15, 2026. Every gate provision we found in that literature is about material or about apparatus width. None is about how a person works the latch.

So this is the site’s own reasoning and it is labelled as such. NIST’s own recommendation R2 is “Avoid combustible fences where they can impact egress, to protect life safety.” NIST wrote that about a fence that can burn and drop boards, having observed a fence type whose warped frame let six foot boards fall to both sides, “creating a 3.7 m (12 ft) wide zone of flames that could block egress and threaten property.” Egress, in that sentence, is a person getting out. Our extension of it, which NIST does not make, is that the same egress path from your yard is a path you will be walking with an animal in your arms or a carrier in one hand, and that a gate you can only work with two hands is a gate that stops you, in the dark, at the exact moment the fence beside it is the thing you are getting away from.

Nothing about that is a rating you can buy. It is something you find out by walking it. Take the carrier, load it with something the weight of your animal, and walk the actual route from wherever the animal is to the vehicle, at night, once. You will learn whether the latch needs two hands, whether the gate swings into the path you are on, and whether the route runs alongside the fence rather than away from it. That is a ten minute test with no product attached to it and no source behind it except this page.

The 2 a.m. Question

Here is the fourth and last place this page is on its own, and it is the reason the whole thing was worth writing.

Defensible space guidance is written for a property. It describes a house, a zone, a distance, and a set of materials. It is silent on a fact every household with animals knows: the animal is not in the same place at 2 a.m. that it is at 2 p.m.

We could not find a published source that treats time-of-day animal location as an input to defensible space planning. What follows is this site’s conclusion from putting the sourced material above together, not a published protocol. The zones are drawn from the structure outward. The animal moves. So the useful exercise is not to memorise a distance but to answer three questions about your own property, at the two times of day that actually occur:

1. Where is the animal at 2 p.m. in August? Usually the shadiest place on the lot. Shade means vegetation or a structure. Both are the things the guidance is about.
2. Where is the animal at 2 a.m.? For most households, indoors, and that is the correct answer on any fire day per Idaho Firewise. For some households it is a kennel building or a run, and that is a different property to harden and a different route to walk.
3. What is the route between the two, and what stands along it? This is where the fence sections, the gate, and the five feet against the wall all show up at once.

That third question is the join. The guidance addresses the structure. The evacuation literature addresses the animal. The route between where the animal sleeps and where the vehicle is parked is a piece of property that neither body of literature is written about, and it is the piece that decides how long it takes you to leave.

One boundary worth naming, so this page does not stray into a sibling’s lane. Our house and apartment fire page already reasons about the route between the back door and the dog run, in the context of an ordinary household fire hazard sitting in that path. That is egress reasoning for a fire that starts inside your property. This page is ignition reasoning for a fire arriving from outside it. Both point at the same strip of ground for different reasons, and that page owns the first one.

The Red Flag Warning Version of All of This

There is a published maintenance list for the day before, and it comes from IBHS, whose 2025 standard has a section headed Red Flag Warning and Extended Absence Preparedness. Its four steps:

• 0-5 Foot Noncombustible Zone: “Clear all accumulated vegetative debris and combustible items from this critical area.”
• Roof and Gutters: ensure no vegetative debris, such as leaves or needles, is left on the roof or in gutters.
• Combustible Items: “Relocate combustible items indoors or at least 30 feet away from the home. Examples include small door mats, chair cushions, potted plants, trash and recycle bins, kids’ toys, pet beds, pool accessories, decorations, and BBQ grills with a propane tank.”
• Parked Items: move vehicles, motorcycles, trailers, boats, campers, RVs, ATVs and similar at least 30 feet away from the home.

IBHS defines the trigger itself: a Red Flag Warning “is determined by local offices of the National Weather Service (NWS) and is specific to those local areas” and means “warm temperatures, very low humidities, and strong winds are expected to combine to produce an increased risk of fire danger.”

That is a property list. It is not an animal list, and it is worth being precise about which is which, because the two get blurred. The property list says move the pet bed thirty feet or bring it indoors. The animal decision on the same day is separate and its published answer, from Idaho Firewise, is that the animals come inside and are not left chained or kenneled outdoors.

If your utility also declares a public safety power shutoff, that is a third thing happening on the same day and it has its own sequence, which our power shutoff countdown page covers. That page already carries the overlap between the two notifications, because the utilities themselves list a Red Flag Warning among the conditions they plan a shutoff around, and its answer is the set of actions that serve both: animals indoors and locatable, carriers out and open, documents and medication in one grab-and-go container, and the vehicle able to leave. What it does not carry is the yard work above, and this page does not carry the shutoff sequence; between them the two halves are covered. And whichever notification you get, the evacuation trigger comes from your county or fire authority and outranks both. Our wildfire alert app comparison covers getting that notification onto your phone in the first place.

What We Could Not Reach

Stated plainly, because a page like this is only as honest as its gaps.

CAL FIRE’s own defensible space pages could not be opened from here. We requested fire.ca.gov/dspace, readyforwildfire.org’s defensible space page at two URL forms, and the Board of Forestry’s own Zone 0 landing page at bof.fire.ca.gov on August 15, 2026, and every one returned HTTP 403. That is a retrieval failure on our side, not a statement about what those pages contain. It is why CAL FIRE’s Zone 0, 1 and 2 scheme appears on this page only through the UC ANR Fire Network, a university extension network describing an agency’s scheme rather than the agency’s own page, and why we have flagged it as secondary in the source list. If you want CAL FIRE’s own words, go to those pages in a browser.

The Board of Forestry’s material was reachable only through its content delivery host. The July 2026 staff memo and the April 2026 draft rule text are both linked here at the azureedge address they are served from, because the Board’s own site returned 403 to us. Both documents identify themselves as Board material on their face.

A FEMA guide produced after the Marshall Fire, on reducing wildfire risk through defensible space, could not be retrieved. We requested it at its fema.gov path on August 15, 2026 and received an HTTP 403. We make no claim about its contents. It would have been the most directly relevant federal document about a suburban grass-driven fire, and our off-season wildfire page hit the same wall on the same day.

A California State Fire Marshal building materials listing, which would be the place to check whether a specific vent or gate product is listed for wildland urban interface use, returned HTTP 403 to us at osfm.fire.ca.gov on August 15, 2026. If you are buying a listed product, that listing is the thing to check and we could not check it for you.

No archived captures were used on this page. Every quotation here is a live read dated August 15, 2026, and every one can be re-verified by searching its own sentence in the document at the URL given.

The Checklist

Work it in this order. The first three items are the whole page if you only have an afternoon.

The five feet against every roofed structure, including the kennel

• Walk the perimeter of the house and of every roofed structure on the property, kennel building and coop and shed included, and clear the first five feet of bark mulch, woodchips, dry leaves, needles and stored combustible items down to bare soil, gravel or hardscape. This is the zone every issuer on this page agrees matters most, and IBHS’s version is to remove combustible groundcover “within 5 feet to bare mineral soil.”
• Check where fences and gates meet a wall. If the last five feet of fence or the gate itself is wood or vinyl, that is the section four separate bodies say should be noncombustible. Replacing one gate is a smaller job than replacing a fence.
• Clear the roof and gutters of the house and of the kennel building. A wood shingle roof on an outbuilding is the specific thing IBHS photographs and calls out.

The fence line

• Rake and clear the base of the fence, the whole run of it, not just the visible stretch. NIST’s own recommendation is to keep fence and yard clear of debris.
• Look specifically at any stretch where hardware cloth, chicken wire or a dig guard closes the gap at the bottom for animal containment. That is where debris packs in and cannot be raked, and NIST names that exact modification as one that reduces the value of a raised fence.
• Find out whether you have a parallel fence along a property line, and whether the neighbour’s fence and yours form a corridor. NIST rates that configuration as its highest hazard and says three feet of spacing is not sufficient.
• Get combustible mulch out from under the fence entirely. NIST’s grading of fence hazard turns on what is at the base, and rubber mulch is its own problem.

The kennel, run or coop as a structure

• Measure the footprint. Over 120 square feet puts it on the other side of a line that both California’s draft rule and Los Angeles County Fire Department already use for outbuildings, which may mean a permit, a plan, or a clearance duty of its own.
• Measure the distance from the house. Then ask your local fire department which number applies to you, because the published figures run from 10 feet to 50 feet depending on who wrote them, and not one of the bodies that published them is your fire authority: an insurer-backed designation program, a federal builder’s guide from 2008, and a state education program.
• Clear vegetation around the structure and out from it. The draft California rule’s figure for an outbuilding in Zones 1 and 2 is ten feet to bare mineral soil plus another ten feet of no flammable vegetation. Living With Fire’s version is an ember-resistant zone around all outbuildings.
• Move the woodpile, and know that the bodies on this page split into two answers rather than one. Three put a distance on it: IBHS requires wood piles at least 30 feet from the home unless the wood is stored in an accessory structure, FEMA’s fact sheet says to place woodpiles at least 30 feet from the building and store the wood in a vegetation-free zone such as a graveled area, and Los Angeles County Fire recommends 30 feet. The rest treat firewood as something to get out of the first five feet instead: NFPA names firewood piles among the flammable material to move away from wall exteriors, California’s draft rule lists firewood among the combustibles removed from Zone 0, and UC ANR says exposed woodpiles should be kept on a noncombustible pad and clear of all vegetation. The Oregon State Fire Marshal’s defensible space page does not mention firewood at all. A woodpile stacked against a kennel wall fails both answers at once.

The route, and the gate

• Walk the route from where the animal actually sleeps to where the vehicle actually parks, in the dark, carrying a loaded carrier. Find out what the gate does with one hand full.
• Note whether that route runs alongside a combustible fence. NIST’s egress recommendation is about a fence that can drop burning boards into a walking path.
• Confirm your driveway and gate will take a fire engine. The Oregon State Fire Marshal’s figures are 13 feet 6 inches vertical and 20 feet horizontal clearance, and gates wide enough for large apparatus.
• Leave a way in for responders. Middle Park Conservation District’s instruction is spare gate keys, combinations and property maps available for firefighters, or gates left unlocked.

The building envelope

• Screen attic, eave and crawlspace vents with eighth-inch metal mesh. NFPA and the Oregon State Fire Marshal both publish that measure in those words.
• Box in or screen the area under decks and porches, and clear whatever is stored under there.

On a Red Flag Warning day, or before leaving for a week

• Run the IBHS list: clear the five foot zone again, clear roof and gutters, relocate movable combustible items indoors or at least 30 feet out, and move vehicles and trailers 30 feet from the home. Pet beds are named in that list.
• Bring the animals inside. Idaho Firewise’s instruction is that pets are never left chained or kenneled outdoors, and a well-sited kennel does not change that answer.
• Put the carriers where you can reach them, not in the shed at the back of the lot.

Once, on a quiet afternoon

• Call your local fire department or fire protection district and ask three questions: what clearance distance applies to my parcel, does my kennel structure count as a structure with a duty of its own, and do you offer a free defensible space assessment. The Oregon State Fire Marshal publishes one, describing the scheduling as easy and the visit itself as education-focused. Whether your own department runs one is a question only your department can answer.
• Find out whether your property is in a State Responsibility Area or a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, because that is what decides whether any of the California material on this page reaches you at all.
• Write the answers on the same page as your veterinarian’s number and the address of wherever the animals go if you leave.

Where to Go Next

This page is the property-hardening spoke of our pet emergency playbooks hub, and it covers one narrow thing: the yard, on a calm day, around the places animals actually are.

If you are trying to work out whether wildfire applies to you at all. Our page for readers outside the western fire season covers the county-level lookups and what a region without a seasonal calendar or a zone system has instead.

If you keep horses or livestock rather than household pets. Horse and livestock evacuation basics carries the property-scale clearance figures, the corral material rule and the halter question, and releasing livestock when you cannot load them works through the gate decision during a fire, which is the opposite end of the same question this page asks on a calm day.

If the kennel or the fence is damaged and you are thinking about money. Renters and homeowners insurance for pet owners covers which coverage letter a dog run and a kennel building sit under, and the exclusions printed directly beneath that grant.

If the fire has already come through. Yard soil contamination after a fire is the same yard from the other side, and it is where the federal sentence about the same material points the other way, and where that page explains why it will not turn that sentence into an instruction.

Then do the one thing on this page with the best ratio of effort to result. Walk the base of your fence, the whole run of it, and clear it. It costs an afternoon, it needs no permit, no product and no agency’s permission, and on the grading a federal laboratory published after 187 experiments, it is the difference between a high hazard configuration and a medium one.