Their home survived the Forsyth Fire. They hope it can be a model for building in Utah’s fire-prone areas.

Keith and Malissa Kelsch were at an evening picnic in St. George when they saw a cloud of smoke billowing over the Pine Valley Mountains. They couldn’t see flames yet, but they quickly drove to their home near the high desert peaks.

As soon as they arrived, they sprayed down surrounding trees with a hose and put a sprinkler on the deck.

“Then the flame came over the ridge up there,” Malissa said as she pointed to the top of the mountains rising outside their living room windows, now cracked and warped from the fire. “And then more flames, and then more flames.”

Heavy winds quickly blew the blaze down the mountainside towards their home. Soon, three fire engines pulled onto their small cul-de-sac in Pine Valley, a rural community about a 40-minute drive north of St. George. It was getting late, after 8 p.m., and evacuations were underway. Malissa packed two outfits; Keith packed one. They didn’t think the evacuation order would last for eight nights.

They had only lived in their Pine Valley home, which they built themselves, for roughly two weeks. They barely even had home insurance, making their first payment the day before the fire started.

“You move all your stuff into a house, in a brand new home, and you don’t know if it survived,” Keith said.

Within a day, the Forsyth Fire, which started on June 19, had destroyed 13 structures.

Several of their neighbors’ homes — including Malissa’s mother’s cabin one cul-de-sac over — burnt to the ground. But the Kelsches’ home survived.

“You guys are really, really lucky,” a firefighter told them recently.

Keith prefers to give credit to their preparedness and God, though. “If there’s any blessing, I would thank my father in heaven for that,” he said. “But I would never say I’m lucky because I did prepare.”

Now Keith, who is a home builder and member of the Washington County Planning Commission, wants to help others in the county prepare for the next blaze.

At a planning commission meeting last week, Keith presented fire building recommendations he hopes the county will adopt into its code and turn into a simple checklist property owners go through before building in areas with a high wildfire risk. This may include protocols such as enclosed eaves, metal roofing and non-combustible siding materials such as fiber cement.

Under the cement siding, he recommends insulating with mineral wool, which he brought a sample of to the meeting. “What you see in the box here is two inches of mineral wool,” he said as he passed it down the dais to his fellow commissioners. “This is also why my home didn’t burn down.”

Keith thinks the county should act on this soon since those who lost homes in the Forsyth Fire may begin submitting permits to rebuild in the next few months.

“We have a sense of responsibility to do something,” he said.

Building in the wildland-urban interface

Washington County has adopted the 2006 Utah Wildland-Urban Interface Code, which includes regulations on land use and building in areas where human communities meet undeveloped natural areas. But Keith told The Tribune the county does not enforce it.

The county’s community development director, Scott Messel, said inspectors handle the code on a “lot-by-lot basis” when issuing a building permit. After the permit is issued, Messel added, there’s not follow-up enforcement.

“We don’t have the bandwidth to send building inspector, code enforcement officer, out to see subdivisions that were built 10 years ago,” he said.

Keith said a key to improving enforcement, beyond the protocol he’s proposing, is to identify high-risk areas. Soon, the state will do just that.

Earlier this year, the state legislature passed a bill, H.B. 48, which puts new regulations on high-risk properties in wildland-urban interface areas.

The legislature tasked the Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands with implementing the law, which will go into effect on January 1, 2026.

Currently, the division is creating a high-risk wildland-urban interface map. Based on preliminary modeling, it estimates roughly 80,000 homes will fall within that boundary, Jennifer McBride, the division’s wildland-urban interface coordinator, told The Tribune.

The new law requires property owners within the high-risk boundary to pay a fee that’s set by the division and collected by the county. The division is developing a tiered fee structure, so those who have hardened their homes and created defensible space may receive a lower charge.

McBride said the division hopes that will influence people to take steps to reduce the risk of a fire taking out their home and ultimately lower suppression costs for firefighting agencies.

Meanwhile, the division is also developing a program to evaluate and classify high-risk properties. Owners may request an assessment, which division staff, fire departments, contractors or county and local officials may perform using the division’s methods.

Once completed, property owners will receive a rating and recommendations of steps to take to reduce their wildfire risk. They will have to foot the bill for any improvements, though.

Washington County planning commissioners expressed concerns about the costs and regulations this bill and Keith’s proposal may put on home owners and builders.

“We already have people telling local government and telling the elected officials at the state level that there’s too many requirements and we’re making it too difficult for people to build homes,” Messel said at the planning commission meeting last week.

Keith said that the county needs to start viewing development in wildfire-prone areas like they do building on unstable soils, which also requires certain building protocols.

As the state develops new rules, Pine Valley is recovering

Keith himself will be putting in two permits to build new homes in Pine Valley within the next couple of weeks. He said he’ll use the wildfire-resilient building materials and methods he used on his own home, such as cement board siding and mineral wool insulation.

“Technology surfaces where there’s crisis that demands it,” he said.

One of those homes he plans to build is for his mother-in-law, who lost her cabin in the fire. “It was devastating for her,” Malissa said. The flames burned some irreplaceable items, like genealogy books and old letters Malissa’s mom received from her mother.

Malissa herself has been going through ups and downs of emotions. “I didn’t think I would have a roller coaster ride,” she said.

Last week, the devastation started hitting her. She feels bad for her neighbors and is still adjusting to the view of burnt trees out her living room window. “It’s like a whole different planet,” she said.

The Kelsches continued to spray ash off their deck as it fell from the fire last week. But the fire was over 80% contained with minimal growth as of Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, homeowners who lost their properties are dealing with the clean-up. Malissa, who’s a realtor, has coordinated with the Washington County Board of Realtors to get dumpsters in the community. Keith has lent his time and heavy equipment.

And this fall, the couple plans to host a dinner for the local firefighters to express their gratitude. Ultimately, Keith thinks if he can get more homes built in a wildfire-resilient way, that will improve things for the crews dousing the flames.

“I want to make life better and easier for firefighters, not worse,” he said. “And I think we can do that.”