I would advise using extreme caution in using a generic quote like that. There is no supporting data to suggest whether fire insurance coverage is provided as part of either one or both of those figures. Secondly, an average does not appropriately indicate the disparate differences between WUI coverages vs. municipal coverages. Those of us who have been negatively impacted by policies being cancelled and forced to use the California FAIR Plan would be highly skeptical that we can obtain full coverage insurance for $1,587 a year, more like 6 or 7x that amount to get full coverage including multiple policies to get it done.
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Why? Although this post is focused more on wildland urban interface zones, a large majority of homes in California are not in them. Outside of earthquake and minor weather events, what real risk does LA, San Diego, bay area, the central valley or the deserts have?
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Is this a rhetorical question? Wages for fuels crews.
Informally, the entire weight of LAC pushed on this fire to keep it out of the city. LAC can bring the tonnage, Type 1 Engines stacked bumper to bumper, unable to keep fire from jumping over streets and burning neighborhoods. Thomas? Never heard of it! ROTFL.
ā¦and, what are the anti-wage wings doing for these people?
If itās a rhetorical question, do the reader a solid and finish the paragraph.
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Not following the logic in your post. Any urban city in the State will have significant immediate fire resources available to it and they do utilize them. If you are referring to the Thomas fire I can speak with authority the Ca system was used to its full extent.
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Defend the quoted numbers, if you like. I donāt think they are accurate. If they do reflect an argument why wages should not be a priority, and I think they probably do, I think they reflect a bias against wage-earners. A bias that is coming with an increasingly unacceptable price tag.
Iām sure there are contexts for intellectual questions, meaning information and intelligence, that donāt have to answer to wages, for example where a formal, or informal, non-disclosure rule is in force. Not here, where wages are discussed. The relationship of; wages for fuels crews, wildfire risk and insurance cost, is undeniable.
The season of suppression may be upon you, but there are, yet, longer term issues that need answers. In any case, if your discourse must avoid wages? See you at the polls.
Topic Link: Social media misinformation.
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It was and wasnāt.
Yes, urban conflag is a risk, but a very minor one. Of the 19 structures destroyed or 88 damaged in the Saddle ridge fire, what percent of those were in a urban setting as opposed to a wildland urban interface. I wasnāt there so donāt have a ton of knowledge on it. It would seem from your posted map though that it failed to penetrate the urban environment.
I did work Tubbs though, where a substantially larger number of structures were damaged and destroyed. It relatively quickly got controlled though when it entered the urban core. This was a function of both terrain, fuels, and resources able to be brought in on residential roads vs
Returning to risk though, It is silly in my opinion to assume that an urban zone has similar risk than a wildland urban interface. Resources that can be brought in, infrastructure, and fuels are all substantially different.
Further, I have yet to see a single source from you that contradicts the insurance numbers as quoted. Here is the CA DOI spreadsheet breaking down insurance premiums. The average in 2021 for dwelling-owner occupied (Fire) was $1,261.84. The average for homeowners multi-peril was $1,458.47.
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0200-studies-reports/0250-homeowners-study/upload/A-Part-I-Data-Summary.xlsx
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True, I donāt have a professional reference to directly contradict it, but that might only be because I havenāt spent any time at it, really, but just pulling things out of the news feeds that seem to have some traction on our discussions.
You could say Iām a data skeptic, I suppose. And, yes, I know there are libraries full of books detailing why evolution has made us common-sense-stupid.
Even so, I donāt think I can swallow that average, just yet. I just might not have anything more meaningful to say than, ānah.ā Not because there is something essentially wrong with the whole prospect, but because Iāve seen enough of the internals of these models and systems to know that there are a hundred ways to iterate over arbitrary variables that measure things by secondary and even tertiary effects, and a lot of them are wrong, or even prejudicial.
This is an endemic problem that will remain a problem, because the obvious alternative is collecting so much data from private individuals and businesses as to deny rights of privacy. Neither sacrificing privacy, nor coercing behavior to make the models more accurate, are acceptable alternatives to the blind spots.
Even more difficult than weather, in some ways, because Nature does not go out of its own way. Socioeconomic data and AI does that all the time.
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You are right, I donāt have anything other than 1st hand knowledge respective to refuting the quoted averages. However, in order to that average, there would have to be 10 people paying $1,000 per year against my amount alone. Now factor in all the other people in the State who are similarly situated as me, and the averages from 2021 do not have any basis in reality. The numbers simply do not match up mathematically. So, you can suggest that the numbers are what they are and say this risk or that risk is minimal, but that changes nothing.
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There are not very many people in the rural areas all things considered. We are a very urban state. From the US Census:
Of the 50 states, California was the most urban, with 94.2% (37,259,490 people) of its population residing within urban areas.
Nationās Urban and Rural Populations Shift Following 2020 Census
My own insurance is roughly 9 times as expensive as my brothers in the by area. But he has 6000+ people per square mile around him. I have ~100. Your 1:10 (10%) ratio is roughly have what the population of rural to urban is (~1:20).
The DOI numbers are based on legally mandated reporting from insurers. When aggregated, the average insurance cost is significantly lower than ours is because so much of the population lives in LA and the Bay area.
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I will grant you that the majority of the Stateās population lives in the urban settings, however, what these numbers do no reflect is those of us who the commercial insurance carriers will no longer renew or write policies for. If a carrier doesnāt write a policy for a Zone 7 or above dwelling, their stated averages are going to be substantially lower than including the costs for those us who do live in the higher zones. Itās still cherry picking what the numbers are and where they come from. And letās be clear, the urban areas are not immune to being forced into finding other carriers or paying much higher rates. The entire Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks area which are very urban are facing these exact same issues with cancellations, not being covered for wildfire damages, etc.
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For the first time, using information from rate filings from the top 10 home insurers in the state, the Chronicle is mapping ZIP code-level data on insurance premium costs across California. This data, sourced from the California Department of Insurance, includes information only from insurance carriers that have raised their rates in 2023 or 2024. All the premium costs cited are averages, meaning some homeowners in each ZIP code may pay much more ā or much less ā than the overall average. The averages account for the number of homes insured by each insurer. The data does not include premiums for condominiums or for policies through the California FAIR Plan.
The data covers an estimated 56% of all policies in the state. The map excludes any ZIP codes with fewer than five policies from the top 10 insurers represented.
What Californians are paying for home insurance in every ZIP code (sfchronicle.com)
I donāt get the state and Cal Fire anymore. There process of determining high risk areas is nonsense. If you look at the eastern sierra zone on their map, ArcGIS Web Application, they show all the large bodies of water as a moderate risk. Really, mono lake, Bridgeport reservoir have a moderate risk of fire. Not sure when the last time water actually burned? People need to start asking questions and speaking up. These maps have no common sense to them, but the insurance companies use them. So I can take those two areas, do you think anyone from Cal Fire even goes up there to validate the information when their closest station is in Bishop? It is time for people to speak up and start questioning Cal Fire and the state about their process.
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Yep, I agree that makes no sense. It was my understanding that the Insurance Agencies werenāt supposed to be using CALFIREās map.
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Not true, every insurance copy uses their map.
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The original intent of the FHSZ maps was to help local jurisdictions plan new communities and create construction standards for them to be fire safe. But public documents are what they are andā¦here we are
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Yes i agree. I have edited my areas when I worked.
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SRA vs LRA
Back in the early 90ās I worked on the SRA maps in Sacramento for 5 weeks. Many areas back then were SRA are changed to LRA because of urban growth. Cityās and local districts have annexed WUI for tax benefits.
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FEMA Los Angeles County Community Report - Los Angeles County, California | National Risk Index (fema.gov)
FEMA says earthquakes are nearly 50 times more cringy and .1% more risky.
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