Pavement around your house? Plants pushed away? What insurers may seek as wildfires mount

In the aftermath of a wildfire, Dean Cameron has a grim job. The director of Idaho’s Department of Insurance, Cameron visits communities affected by fires, holding town halls to answer the questions from people who have lost everything.

Those visits are on the rise. In just one fire near Lewiston this July, nearly 150 structures burned down, including about 25 homes and 120 outbuildings, like barns, Cameron told the Idaho Statesman between visits to residents in the communities affected.

“When you lose your home, you’ve probably lost your records, and you may not have internet access or the ability to even file a claim,” he said. “Our office is trying to … be available to make sure that consumers don’t have to feel like they’re fighting their insurance company at the same time.”

The rising structure loss, in turn, is taking a toll on homeowners’ ability to buy affordable property insurance, as insurers warily eye the risk they’re taking on in fire-prone parts of the country, and watch their own rates of “reinsurance” against large claims rise. With these concerns compounded by inflation and rising construction costs and property values, insurance providers have hiked up their rates — and in some states, including California and Oregon, have pulled out altogether.

From 2021 to 2023, Idaho’s home insurance premiums increased by 46%, the fourth-fastest rate in the country, according to a report by insurance agency Policygenius, which chalked the rate hikes up to the state’s increasing wildfire risk and rising home replacement costs. As of March, the average cost of homeowners insurance in Idaho was $1,510 per year, according to Nerd Wallet, a personal finance company.

None of the over 700 property insurers in Idaho have pulled out of the state, and Cameron wants to keep it that way. To that end, Cameron is trying to help builders incorporate fire-safe designs and landscaping into new homes, and to help existing homeowners retrofit their properties to mitigate wildfire risk.

He’s in touch with insurance carriers who have expressed “their commitment and their desire to stay,” he said, even as his department must “help make sure it makes financial sense for them.”

Landscaping, building materials make the difference

On a Monday in April, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety set two houses on fire.

They were small, one-room model houses, which looked nearly identical except for the details: one had plants, a tree and a wooden fence in its yard, close to the building. The other had a “moat” of cement, a metal fence, and plants located a little farther away.

These distinctions took on significance as the minutes passed during the burn demonstration, part of a Wildfire Risk Forum hosted by Cameron’s department.

With little fuel available, the fire at the second house quickly burned out. But as fire crept up its tree and along its wooden fence, the house with more traditional materials and landscaping was consumed by flames. After about 10 minutes, it collapsed.

“We really need to start thinking about … the other fuels that could potentially burn and allow the fire to get to the house,” Steve Hawks, the senior director for wildfire at the Insurance Institute, told the Statesman in a video call. “We think of those as connective fuels (that allow) the fire to travel from outside the house directly to the house.”

The event aimed to teach Idaho builders and policymakers, including representatives from the Department of Emergency Management and Department of Lands, that “defensible space,” the space around a house, and the materials the house is made of, “really can be the difference between a home surviving a wildfire and not,” said Hawks, a former firefighter.

Cameron said Idaho is “typically listed in the top five as far as number of forest fires or wildfires, but until this year, we have not had … much structure loss.”

Last year, Idaho lost only four structures total to wildfires. Cameron credits efforts to manage vegetation and underbrush.

He blamed the “significant” structure loss this year on high winds and high heat — factors exacerbated by climate change that have become “more pronounced” in the last two or three years.

“Over the last five years, this is going to be one of the most challenging years we’ve faced,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

It’s hard to quantify the difference fire-safe designs make, Hawks said, but “we know that they do provide a definite benefit compared to not having them,” based on studies of surviving homes after California wildfires, like the Camp Fire in Paradise in 2018.

At a similar demonstration in California, one attendee was struck by the difference design made.

“What I saw was just a reminder about that defensible space around” a house, said Dan Dunmoyer, the president and CEO of the California Building Industry Association, at the event. “This really shows that that five (feet) of paver stones is a game-changer … I’ve been told that, but this time I saw it with my own eyes.”

It’s possible to build a new home with “enhanced” fire safety — landscaping changes, for example — for only $3,000 more, the Insurance Institute found in California in 2022. But achieving an “optimum” level of fire safety, using the most fire-resistant building materials available, can run homeowners into the tens of thousands. Retrofitting an existing home, too, can be prohibitively expensive for many owners.

In California, homeowners can seek assistance from federal grants and a state wildfire mitigation program to pay for some these changes. In Idaho, Cameron is proposing legislation to set up a “mitigation pool” to help homeowners cover these costs.

Wildland-interface construction standards

In many ways, California has been on the cutting edge of bringing its homes up-to-date to mitigate wildfires. In 2008, the state wrote wildfire preventative measures into its building code, requiring builders in fire-prone areas to use fire-safe materials and landscaping.

“Since then, they’ve been ... having to build with wildfire resilience in mind,” Hawks said.

As of November, Utah was the only other state with a uniformly enforced statewide code addressing its residential and commercial properties’ wildfire exposure, according to the Insurance Institute.

Idaho provides recommendations to local jurisdictions for wildfire safety codes and preparedness activities, but it does not require or enforce any provisions at the state level, according to a 2023 study by the Insurance Institute. Many of the state’s communities, though, have adopted at least part of an International Wildland-Urban Interface Code that sets standards for new construction, like using ignition-resistant building materials and planning vegetation to provide defensible space.

Idaho code requires builders to take into account “hazardous areas,” but wildfire is not explicitly included in the definition of a hazardous area, according to a presentation by an economic development clinic at University of Idaho’s College of Law.

A downside: aesthetics. Can you have ‘curb appeal’?

One downside to these changes: builders and buyers push back on the aesthetics of pushing plants farther out from the home, and the inclusion of more pavement or gravel.

It’s “one of the hurdles we keep hearing about,” Hawks said.

In response, the Insurance Institute partnered with universities in California on a landscape-design challenge. The winners offered different tiers of design. There was a nearly $65,000 “unlimited budget” option that incorporated a corrugated metal fence, a brick border, crushed granite for the front yard, and an array of succulents and other fire-safe plants. But they also offered a $10,000 option that prioritized the home’s appearance from the street, rather than its backyard, with a more limited stone pathway and a less expensive type of gravel in the yard.

“You can have ‘curb appeal’ while still thinking about wildfire resilience,” Hawks said.

At the same time, accepting the changing appearance is “really going to take a mind shift of ensuring that we’re prepared for wildfire and reimagining what our landscaping around our house looks like, so that we incorporate that wildfire resilience into our landscaping plan for our home,” he said. “We know” these changes are “just so critical for wildfire defense for a home.”

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