When glass in windows breaks and pieces of glass fall out, the wildfire is able to move from the outside to the inside of the house. As the heat from a wildfire increases, glass will break as a result of temperature differences between the glass you can see through and the glass that is protected by the framing material. Research has shown that glass is the most vulnerable part of the window, but this finding only applies to the annealed and tempered glass commonly found in residential construction. From a fire-performance perspective, tempered glass is much stronger, and therefore performs much better than annealed glass. Use of multi-layered glazing (i.e., dual pane) with tempered glass would be an affordable way to improve the ability of windows to better resist wildfire exposures.

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