Qualified Insurance Resources (or QIRs) help homes survive fire by treating right around the homes and is included in homeowners’ insurance. Here’s an example of Travelers’ Insurance in Colorado and California using Wildfire Defense Systems
Conceivably this hits the sweet spot of structural protection, and homeowners pay for it through their insurance, so there is less of what economists call “moral hazard.”
Here’s a powerpoint (CGO wildfire conference.pptx) by Monique Dutkowsky. The slides above are from that powerpoint. The powerpoint also includes some policy recommendations. She will have a paper out in the next few months that covers this material in greater depth.
With the way things are going with climate change related disasters FEMA is starting to look like it’s not going to be big enough…
Was just thinking yesterday that fire insurance may well fall apart so much so that we’ll need an act of congress, maybe even a new cabinet level position to address all the issues that homeowners without insurance will face.
Seem like we’re heading into a perfect storm and actuaries for insurance companies are going to start putting forth some very startling projections that are gonna require a huge bailout.
As for QIR bringing a knife to to a gun fight by helping homeowners treat vegetation around their house, you have to remember that landscaping is usually established when a house is first established and so very old homes without air conditioning usually have equally old landscaping that creates enough shade for the house to be habitable.
But if you clear all that vegetation and create a “defensible space” you have to mitigate the loss by installing air conditioning. And with rolling blackouts to deal with peak demands on the power grid during unprecedented heat waves, we don’t have extra energy to retrofit old shaded house with A/C.
And in California with Coast live Oak trees in particular I know many homeowners who have left the oak canopy over their home intact because they have seen how advancing embers moving ahead of the fire are kept off the house where they could ignite a home and instead those embers get trapped in the bush oak canopy where they never get hot enough to ignite the tree. I’ve even seen it in the burn patterns on the roof of my Dad’s house that miraculously survived the Glass fire in wine country last fall.