this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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My childhood neighborhood got hit by a wildfire shortly after graduating college.
For evacuations, your best bet will be to stay with friends/family outside of the evacuation zone. I stayed at my boyfriend's (at the time) family's house. If you don't know anyone, usually there will be shelters set up in places like school gyms that you can go to. The problem with these is that there will be no privacy and you won't be able to take any pets.
I'm not sure who pays during the evacuation period, but if your home is uninhabitable, insurance should pay for any accomodations while you are waiting for your home to be fixed.
For smoke remediation, your insurance will evaluate what is necessary and should write a check to fix it. We got ~$4000 for carpet cleaning, special duct cleaning, some sort of ozone treatment for the attic and then these special sponges that absorbs soot from the walls. My parents were able to DIY a few of the things and put the money towards installing AC.
The thing no one prepared you for in this situation is the uncertainty. Pulling away from your house and seeing the fire barrelling towards it is awful. The next few days, you don't know if you'll be homeless or not. Your stuck in this state of wanting information, but the bureaucracy won't say anything (it also doesn't help in my situation the govt officials straight up lied to the media about it).
Bold of you to assume that any insurance company will keep operating in wildfire interface areas within the next 5 years. They've already been cancelling tens of thousands of policies in California over it and it's coming to your area next.
Reminder that insurance companies are in the business of collecting premiums, not paying out coverage. They will fuck you over at a moment's notice no matter how long you've paid into their system.
Yep. I can only speak to my experiences that occurred over a decade ago. I will say that everyone was shocked at how relatively easy to deal with they were at the time. I imagine as wildfires become more common and hit more populated areas that insurance will refuse to pay out more often. In our case, it was the most expensive fire that had ever hit our state, since most previous ones had occurred in remote areas.
We were actually lucky that our house wasn't ruined because my parent's policy actually changed at midnight the night the fire destroyed the neighborhood. I can only imagine the insurance trying to get out of paying up in that scenario.
Usually for cases where insurance is not feasible because of increased risk of for example wild fires, the government steps in and an insurance pool is created to cover the costs of rebuilding and temporary relocation. But it happens only after insurance companies start to retreat more broadly. I assume they cannot stop paying out especially fire claims because the costs that need to be reimbursed are immediate and will be agreed to when the fire is being reported - which usually happens within hours. All in all it would be kind of dump of an insurer to refuse payout in a case like a fire. There either was a fire or there wasn’t. So not much room for push-back I would assume. But not a lawyer so I am just being hopeful here haha.
I think the most likely outcome is that they will remove coverage for wildfires, which would likely have to be purchased separately like flood insurance works today. You are correct that if it is covered by the terms of the insurance they pretty much have to pay out at that point, as it is a contractual obligation.
I wonder how much money it would cost them to fight the subset of customers who took them to court over refused payouts?
Like if they refuse to pay out 10 x $500,000 payouts, as long as the legal fees and fines they’d pay to avoid prison costs then less than $5m, they’re making profit on a policy of “deny every claim”.