Ethan Swope/Associated Press As Los Angeles confronts a series of wildfires some experts say could be the most expensive in California history, the state’s beleaguered insurance industry also faces the possibility of further destabilization — with implications far beyond the fire zone.
It’s the type of perfect storm situation that experts have worried about: massive fires burning through expensive homes, many of which are insured through the California FAIR Plan, the state insurer of last resort.
Related: State Farm sought huge number of Pacific Palisades nonrenewals months before fire So far there has been no comprehensive estimate of the damage and the potential costs: With strong winds continuing to fuel the flames, firefighters are focused on saving lives and structures, with a full damage tally to come later.
Climate scientist Daniel Swain believes it could be the costliest firestorm the nation has ever seen. The number of buildings burned is likely far higher than the initial estimate released Wednesday morning of
1,100 structures destroyed. Importantly for insurance, the destruction includes plenty of high-end homes, with significant replacement costs, belonging to celebrities and other wealthy people.
“We’re having one of the worst-case scenarios play out right now,” said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University.
The ramifications could well be felt across California. Most obviously, the massive losses that insurers face could translate to increased rates for people across the state — particularly in the areas affected by the fires but also beyond.
It’s also possible that more companies would instead choose to leave the state, Wara said — an option that a handful of smaller insurance companies have elected to take over the past two years.
California’s insurance crisis was sparked by the mega-fires of 2017 and
2018, and these new blazes come just as regulators were trying to ease the situation by encouraging more insurers to stay in, or return to, the state and provide wider coverage in wildfire-prone areas. State Farm and Allstate do not currently write new policies in the state, and regulators had hoped they would reverse their stance.
New state rules that just took effect will make it much easier for insurers to hike rates by permitting them for the first time to incorporate the cost of reinsurance — insurance for insurers — into their rates and rely on forward-looking catastrophe models to assess risk.
In the wake of the ongoing fires, those rate hikes may be even larger than insurers might have otherwise planned, said Wara.
An overarching worry is the stability of the FAIR Plan, California’s insurer of last resort. Los Angeles County, where the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires have burned, has a large concentration of policies with the FAIR Plan as traditional insurers have dropped policyholders due to the high risk. The plan has an estimated $24.5 billion in exposure across
15,300 residential and commercial policies in the ZIP codes impacted by the Southern California wildfires, according to a Chronicle analysis of FAIR Plan data.
Loading... Over the summer, FAIR Plan President Victoria Roach told the Chronicle the plan had only about $385 million in reserves to pay for claims. Financial losses beyond that money and what it can recover from reinsurance, could burden all of the state’s insurers.
Under state law, if the FAIR Plan were to be overwhelmed, it would be able to charge regular insurers operating in the state — charges that could well get passed onto policyholders. On Wednesday, a FAIR Plan spokesperson wrote in a statement the insurer is “well prepared” for catastrophes such as these fires.
“It is too early to provide loss estimates as claims are just beginning to be submitted and processed,” the spokesperson said. “The FAIR Plan has payment mechanisms in place, including reinsurance, to ensure all covered claims are paid.”
The California Department of Insurance was not immediately available for comment.
State officials have long worried about how bad things could get in Los Angeles County, according to Wara.
In 2019, the year after electricity lines sparked the deadly and destructive Camp and Dixie fires in Northern California, Wara consulted with the California Senate as they worked to establish the California Wildfire Fund. The fund would be used to pay back residents who lose their homes and property in future utility-caused wildfires. As part of that work, legislators needed to know just how costly wildfires in the state could get.
So they used a wildfire catastrophe model to predict what the worst possible scenarios would be and came up with three options: a massive fire in the Moraga-Orinda area, the Los Altos Hills or in Pacific Palisades.
The estimated losses from a megafire burning every single home in Pacific Palisades were somewhere around $30 billion, Wara recalled, without factoring in post-pandemic inflation rates and inflated reconstruction costs.
How close a parallel the Palisades Fire is to that scenario remains to be seen. A full accounting of the insured damage will likely take weeks to months, and the final bill will determine just how bad things could get.
But California has already shown that the devastating fires of 2017 and
2018 are no longer a fluke — they’re a feature.
“We have been acting as if something like the current or the past approach to homeowners insurance was a sustainable strategy,” Wara said. “That assumption may no longer be true, after yesterday and today. That will change how home ownership works in California, because insurance is fundamental to home ownership. This is no longer an insurance problem; this is a home ownership problem.”
Reporter Susie Neilson contributed to this report.
Reach Megan Fan Munce: snipped-for-privacy@sfchronicle.com