In the rolling hills of Lake County, Calif., residents in Kelseyville are getting home makeovers. The improvements aren't eye-catching: new gutters on the roof, gravel around the exterior walls and wire mesh covering attic openings. Still, those mundane items can make a world of difference in a wildfire.
The goal is to make the homes less likely to burn in wildfires that are becoming increasingly destructive. Most structures ignite because of glowing, red embers carried by the wind. Making one house ember-resistant is good, but making a whole neighborhood resistant is dramatically better, since fires spread from house to house.
It's part of a new program being piloted in California, one that many residents in fire-ravaged Lake County appreciate all too well. In the last 10 years, 70% of the county has burned, according to local officials. It was the wake-up call that led officials to begin a broad range of projects to reduce fire risk and make homes insurable.
The problem is getting insurance companies to notice.
Across Lake County, insurance premiums are rising, and customers are being dropped. Insurance plan cancellations are increasing faster there than almost anywhere else in the country, according to a Senate Budget Committee report. It's part of a nationwide wave of non-renewals from insurance companies contending with increasingly expensive disasters, like wildfires, storms and hurricanes.
Homeowners who make their houses more fire-resistant are eligible for discounts from insurance companies in California, often around 5-10%. But larger efforts by communities often aren't factored in by insurance companies, like the project to retrofit an entire neighborhood. Insurance industry experts say companies don't have a verified source of information about what's being done across a whole community.
New efforts are underway to address that with a wildfire data commons, a database that aggregates community projects so both insurance companies and communities can get a better view of what's being accomplished. Wildfire experts say insurance could be a critical motivator for spurring unprepared communities to take action.
"Communities want their hard work to be recognized," says Nancy Watkins, consulting actuary with Milliman, a risk analysis firm. "As long as there's a disconnect between what people and communities do to reduce their risk and what they're experiencing from their insurance companies, there's this bias to do nothing. People think: nothing that I do will matter."
Extreme makeover – wildfire edition
For Penny Sidhu, her home makeover started with a tree. Its branches stretched from her house to her neighbor's, and she realized it was time to cut it down.
"You couldn't even see her roof," she says, pointing to her neighbor's house. "it was like our houses were connected. There were huge trees and bushes."
Sidhu lives alone and was worried about losing her home in a wildfire. She's had to evacuate three times in the last nine years, her adult children urging to leave every time a wildfire broke out. When Sidhu called a local government agency about the tree, she found out she was eligible for a new program that would address her whole house.
Lake County is one of six counties in California that's developing home-retrofitting programs through the California Wildfire Mitigation Program, created by a state law in 2019. The Lake County Home Hardening program is funded by the state, as well as a federal grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The program provides a home inspection and contractors, covering up to $40,000 dollars of work. At Sidhu's house, the projects quickly added up. The vegetation in her side yard was removed, and the bark mulch directly next to her house was replaced with gravel. Her wooden gate is being replaced with a metal one. The gutters now have covers, which prevent flammable leaves from piling up. The vent openings in her attic also have a mesh covering, which prevents embers from being sucked into her house.
"More than 90% of homes catch on fire due to embers, not direct flame, so that is what we highly focus on," says Deanna Fernweh, Lake County Home Hardening program manager. "When you harden your home, it makes that whole area safer. We call that a resiliency effect."
The program is clustering the work in the Kelseyville neighborhood to produce that fortifying effect. Even if one home does everything it can to prevent wildfire, it may still be vulnerable if a neighbor doesn't. So far, more than 30 homes have been retrofitted, with plans to reach 350.
Sidhu says when her kids visit now, they feel a lot better.
"I feel like I won the lottery," she says. "I would never have been able to afford this. There's just no way I could do it, especially because I'm by myself. There's just no way."
Growing insurance crisis
The home retrofitting program is just one of several efforts underway in Lake County to reduce dangers from wildfires. After losing her home in the 2015 Valley Fire, Jessica Pyska was elected to the Lake County Board of Supervisors. While some California communities have seen one or two catastrophic wildfires, Lake County has seen nine. She says the fires were an alarm bell for the county, which is much less wealthy than Bay Area counties to the south.
"It was very overwhelming to look at what needed to be done," she says. "How do we right the ship for California and the West with the climate changing? But we just started taking one little bite at a time."
The county put together a list of projects and started looking for grants. They improved evacuation routes and worked with state and federal partners to clear flammable vegetation on land surrounding communities. At the same time, as more extreme wildfires broke out around California, insurance started becoming an increasing problem. Residents were seeing premiums rise or were being dropped by insurance companies, leaving only the state-run FAIR plan as an option.
"People are trying to do everything they possibly can to get their rates lower, but it's really not helping much," Pyska says. "I know a lot of people that are just going without insurance right now."
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Under new California rules, homeowners can get a discount on their insurance if they retrofit their houses against wildfires. Still, for many, discounts around 5% or 10% aren't large enough to offset rising premiums and they're not guaranteed to keep their insurance in the future.
The problems have spread to the real estate market, where securing affordable insurance has become a significant hurdle. Sandy Tucker, who owns NextHome In The Valley and is president-elect of the Lake County Association of Realtors, says when a client is interested in a house, her first call is to insurance companies. She says insurance quotes can dramatically change a buyer's budget, or in one deal, even made a mortgage out of reach.
"It was enough of a difference that they didn't qualify for the loan anymore because they were so close to the line," Tucker says. "I have seen deals fall apart. When somebody gets a quote that says it's going to be $10,000, they really rethink whether they want to buy it or not."
While Lake County will never be out of danger from wildfires, especially as they get more intense with rising temperatures, Pyska is hopeful their work will dramatically decrease the chances that residents will lose homes. Still, she says insurance companies don't seem to be factoring that into their decisions about premiums.
"How do we get to the point where the insurers are saying: there's a much lower risk here community-wide, we'll come back and we'll lower the rates – or maybe not raise the rates quite so much?" Pyska asks.
Creating a data commons
Factoring in the efforts of a whole community starts with a data problem. While insurance companies have information about the properties they insure, as well as other factors like fire hydrants, evacuation routes and the larger landscape, they don't necessarily have data about entire neighborhoods.
"To really understand if the risk has been reduced, an insurance company would theoretically need information about what my neighbors have done," says Watkins, an actuary at Milliman. "That's very difficult for an insurance company to know about or to verify."
Watkins is trying to address that with fire experts by creating the WUI Data Commons (WUI stands for wildland-urban interface). The idea is to create a database that aggregates community wildfire projects. That could be vegetation management projects by state and federal agencies, as well as home level projects. Insurance companies could use the data to analyze where risk is being reduced and adjust their insurance decisions accordingly.
Watkins says the project is still in development, but she's hoping it will be a public-private partnership so communities can also use the tool to analyze their risk. While several insurance companies are interested, she says there are a lot of issues to be ironed out, like protecting consumer privacy and data-sharing among competing companies.
Still, there are no guarantees that better information will make insurance companies reduce their premiums. California's insurance commissioner recently allowed insurance companies to raise their prices, in exchange for offering more policies in areas at risk from wildfires.
"As long as we have inflation going up and labor costs and building materials, if those costs are going to keep going up and people are going to keep building more expensive buildings in climate-risk areas, and we're going to continue to have climate change, those are all going to escalate the cost," says Robert Gordon of the American Property and Casualty Insurance Association. "Mitigation helps offset that, but it's not going to reverse those prices."
Still, as California puts more resources into wildfire-prevention projects, Watkins says it's vital that communities get credit for it to incentivize that work.
"It's in California's very best interest to make sure that the insurance industry is aware of it," Watkins says. "Why make them trick-or-treat for data? When we've done all these things to reduce the risk, serve it up on a plate."
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