The harsh reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that there is no comfort in knowing how many others are going through it too. It's happening to you: your house is gone. Your father's painting is missing. Hundreds of hours of your footage, your movie, gone. An entire generation of your family's efforts to build financial stability has been effectively wiped out. This happens to other people too and it's horrible. As we all know, this will almost certainly happen again.
Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is only 39% contained, while the Eaton Fire is 65% contained. Many residents were told not to drink tap water because ash and melted pipes may have contaminated it. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, either to a burned-out site or to a house still standing but surrounded by toxic residue.
Fires are impossible to extinguish at their worst. But disruption on this scale is not inevitable. The question now is what people will do to limit the damage next time.
Because there will be a fire next. Vegetation (fire fuel) will grow back, the fire season will continue to extend into the wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will breed the wrong spark. Fire is part of California's ecology; a century of suppression has only made the modern flames more intense.
The way places like California respond to fires must change, or more communities will end up in ruins. Insurance was designed to protect people from the costs of extraordinary events, but these events have become so commonplace that private insurance companies have left California. The state's FAIR program, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed and may not be able to cover claims from these fires on its own. If it exercises its power to require private insurers to help make up the difference, it could cause more people to flee. These are signs that the nation has exhausted its magical thinking about fire risk.
“California is like a driver who has had five car accidents,” Michael Vara, a former member of the California Wildfire Commission and now director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. As it turns out, the state is at risk of catastrophic losses. But because California has tried to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable for years, these (still high) rates don't reflect the true risks homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurance companies rely on reinsurers (insurers of insurance companies), who, Vara said, "should be losing one percent of their losses... they shouldn't be losing four times" 10 points, which is exactly what we are aiming for in California. "
If some of these companies stop providing coverage to insurance companies, others won't necessarily step in. As of last year, the state was trying to avert a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probabilities and reinsurance prices into their rates. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but most local insurance companies are leaving the state or going bankrupt, and coverage in some places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because anyone seeking a mortgage typically requires underwriting, soaring interest rates in California could drive down home values, threatening another crisis, the housing crisis. If existing homeowners are unable to obtain insurance, they will be left alone to bear the costs of a disaster, as many in the burn areas around Los Angeles are now.
If nothing changes, more people will be trapped in this doom spiral because there is no way California can avoid some level of disaster. Wind-driven fires like the one in Los Angeles can throw embers forward, leaving firefighters unable to stop the blaze, and the fastest fires are now growing faster. As the climate warms and more people live in areas where cities meet wildlands, transferring these risks to insurance will become increasingly unaffordable, as the catastrophic risks faced by households are high and increasingly The higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, "This is not really an insurance issue. It's a risk issue."
To reduce risk, she'd like to see communities embark on ambitious missions to "harden" homes and their surrounding landscaping, then hold insurance companies accountable for those efforts. If every homeowner cleared the first five feet of vegetation around their home, and if communities kept roads clear and placed firebreaks where fires were most likely to occur, the likelihood of a place burning down would be much lower, even in a major fire. It will be much smaller. Many communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don't do this. Watkins envisions a future database in which every parcel of land is inspected for fire readiness so that each community can have a fire safety analysis and insurance companies can price accordingly. She knew it would take a huge effort to create this system, but it would inspire collective action: You might clean up your yard and screen your vents if it meant the difference between your entire community having coverage and not having coverage .
Watkins himself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco that Valla's research has identified as potentially experiencing the worst nighttime losses from an insurance perspective. one of three regions. (The other is Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who received non-renewal notices from insurance companies last year. Now she's making her plot as safe as possible in hopes of convincing the insurance company to come back. It's like preparing a property for sale, she says: "We're preparing our house to sell now to get insurance." She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out the mint garden, but So far, she's kept the house's Japanese maples, which turn bright red in the fall. Once she fireproofs the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire chief friend over for dinner and ask: How Bad Are Maple Trees? “Then do what they say,” she told me.
But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins' risk remains elevated. Taking these measures may be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who served as fire chief for the Moraga-Orinda Fire Protection District before retiring last month, told me he tried to pass an ordinance requiring homeowners to maintain a five-foot perimeter around their homes There are no flammable materials; he said that although these boundaries have been proven to reduce the risk of homes burning down, public opinion has been overwhelmingly against it. Residents say it's a draconian overreach that will make their homes unsightly and lower property values. He chose the moment to retire. He doesn't want to be held accountable for their failure to take action the next time a fire breaks out.
When communities take action, they can be saved. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeologist at the University of California, Merced, studied how Montecito, California—the town where Harry, Meghan, and Oprah lived—decided to get serious in the 1990s. Treat what happens after fire prevention. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent a total of $1.6 million clearing brush, maintaining evacuation routes, building fuel breaks and working with homeowners to ensure they cleared vegetation around their homes. Colden's research shows Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes when the 2017 Thomas Fire, which had winds of about 75 mph, hit. Instead, it lost just seven. Courtyards in Montecito do look a little different than those found elsewhere in California. But “there are a lot of really beautiful landscapes that won’t burn,” Colden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants (such as giant agaves) can be placed close to the house; rock gardens can be beautiful. If the palm trees are pruned well enough that they don't drop burning leaves like some of the palm trees in Los Angeles this week, then they're fine.
For an affluent community like Montecito, the cost of less than $2 million over nearly 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. According to Vara's research, the state could help fund such projects at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year (which, by his calculations, is less than Cal Fire's total firefighting budget in 2020), the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting with the most fire-prone areas and working their way up to each Establish fuel breakpoint communities in high-threat areas. This also includes preventative burns on every acre needed to prevent larger fires in the future.
Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won't change the fact that California's largest fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst fires to occur, and they will happen again and again with greater frequency. Slowing this trend requires global action. But Angelenos are here, living on their home, their planet. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They will happen and people will live along their paths. It is impossible to prevent them from happening. But minimizing the damage they cause is not.