Coverage guide

Wildfire and fire cover

Fire is one of the oldest covered perils in property insurance and remains one of the most reliably covered. The difficulty in California has not been whether policies pay for fire — it is whether a policy is available at a given address at all.

Where fire sits in the policy

A standard homeowners policy covers fire damage to the dwelling, to other structures, and to personal property, and it pays additional living expenses when the home cannot be occupied. Smoke damage generally travels with it. Unlike earthquake and flood, fire does not require a separate purchase in the ordinary case.

What has changed is the surrounding structure of the deal. In fire-exposed parts of the state, policies increasingly carry a separate wildfire deductible distinct from the all-other-perils deductible, sometimes expressed as a percentage of the dwelling limit rather than a flat amount. Two policies with identical headline limits can therefore behave very differently in a wildfire, and the difference is not visible from the premium.

Kern County's particular geography

The Bakersfield metropolitan area sits on the valley floor, but Kern County extends into the southern Sierra Nevada, the Tehachapi range and the foothills on the valley's rim, where the exposure is materially different. Two addresses twenty minutes apart can face genuinely different underwriting, and that is a function of terrain, vegetation and access rather than of anything about the owner.

The practical consequence is that availability varies. Some owners in foothill areas find the standard market unwilling to write them and end up looking at the California FAIR Plan, which is covered on its own page here.

Mitigation is now part of the conversation

Insurers and the state have both moved toward recognising property-level work. The measures that come up most often are unglamorous and effective:

• Clearing a defensible zone immediately around the structure, with the first five feet kept free of combustible material entirely.
• Ember-resistant vents, which address the mechanism that actually destroys most homes — wind-driven embers entering the building, rather than a flame front arriving.
• A Class A fire-rated roof, and boxed-in eaves.
• Removing anything stored under a deck or against a wall.
• Keeping gutters clear, and maintaining vegetation clearance along the driveway so that engines can reach the property.

The California Department of Insurance publishes guidance on building and retrofitting for wildfire safety, and its material is written for homeowners rather than for contractors.

Documenting before, not after

A wildfire claim is usually a total or near-total loss, which means the homeowner has to reconstruct a list of everything they owned from memory, under the worst possible conditions. A home inventory made in advance — photographs or video of every room with cupboards and wardrobes open, kept somewhere off the premises — is the most valuable single hour anyone in a fire-exposed area can spend.

Keep a copy of the declarations page in the same place. If the house is gone, so is the paperwork.

Additional living expense is the quiet one

After a total loss the rebuild takes months and sometimes years, and the household has to live somewhere in the meantime. Additional living expense cover pays the difference between normal living costs and the higher costs of being displaced — rent, temporary furnishings, extra travel. It is usually expressed either as a percentage of the dwelling limit or as a period of time, and in a wide-area fire the local rental market is precisely when it is most strained.

It is worth knowing which form yours takes and what the cap is, because that number determines how long a family can stay stable while a rebuild proceeds.

If your policy is non-renewed

A non-renewal is a business decision by one company and not a verdict on the property. Californian law imposes notice requirements and, following declared wildfire emergencies, has at times restricted non-renewal in affected areas. Start looking early, ask specifically about mitigation credits for work you have already done, and treat the FAIR Plan as a real option rather than a failure.

※Where this page comes from

• California Department of Insurance — Building Communities Safer from Wildfires