A red flag warning for the county’s mountains and valleys is in effect until 6 p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday). The National Weather Service issues red flag warnings when weather conditions cause an increased risk of fire danger. One thing to emphasize here is just because you have much lighter winds doesn't mean you couldn't have a fire, you know, in a, in a neighborhood area or in a high brush area with a lot of vegetation that burns very well.
San Diego Unified continues to investigate a data breach impacting students in the district. We now know that the exposed information was primarily contact information like names, addresses and phone numbers. Among the stores described as underproductive are the Macy's in Mission Valley and the Chula Vista location at the Otay Ranch Town Center. In Southern California, the company is also closing locations in downtown Los Angeles.From KPBS, you’re listening to San Diego News Now. Stay with me for more of the local news you need. It’s been nearly a week since wildfires began ravaging the LA area. Thousands of people have lost everything. But reporter John Carroll tells us that as the calls for help have gone out, the aid has flowed in from San Diegans. I’m hearing from my friends up there that lead churches similar to ours that the stores are empty, so there’s no more toilet paper, no more paper towels, there’s no clean water.” Rock Church Executive Campus Pastor Travis Gibson - speaking at a donation drive-thru event sponsored by the church. Gibson says over the course of just two days, they’ve filled four 26-foot trucks with all sorts of badly needed supplies. They’ll be driving them up on Tuesday. At the San Diego Humane Society, a call for people to foster and adopt animals, especially large dogs, brought more than 400-applications from people like Stacie Mittelman. “I just want to do anything I can to help and if one dog gets to spend a week outside of the shelter or, you know, not in a crate, then that’s what I can do.” We have more ways you can help online at kpbs dot org. JC, KPBS News. Rebuilding from the historic fires in L-A will come at a steep price. I spoke with reporter Tania Thorne about how the insurance industry will handle the aftermath and what residents can do now. The insurance market in CA was already shaky. Companies like Farmers Insurance, Allstate, State Farm were offloading CA clients and cancelling policies because of the fire risks. Thousands of homeowners got cancellation notices or non renewals. Which sent all of these homeowners searching for new policies in a limited market. So what homeowners were left with were little options such as limited coverage or double, triple even, the rates for fire coverage. Clients who had no insurance companies serving the area were pushed to the insurer of last resort, the CA fair plan for fire coverage. Now what's important here is that homeowners with a mortgage are required to have homeowners insurance. So they were pushed to get whatever policy was available to them. Now, we have to think about those on limited incomes, seniors possibly who were prepared for double or triple the rates. Some without mortgages just went without homeowners insurance. So to see these fires happening at a time when the insurance market was already rocky is tragic. Was anything being done to stabilize the insurance market? Yes, so for the last year, our current insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara was in negotiations with insurance companies to figure out a plan. How to get insurance companies to come back to CA without hiking the prices to the consumers to the point where insurance is unobtainable. Insurance companies want to be in the CA market but it has to be profitable for them. On December 31st, he announced new regulations that would bring back insurance companies into what are being deemed fire risk areas. Companies agreed to start issuing policies in the next 1 to 5 years, of course at a cost… and then you have this event happen days later after the announcement. I spoke to Dave Jones who is the former insurance commissioner and currently the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley's Center for law energy and the environment. He says these events were not a matter of “if” but more of “when” It's a sad and tragic consequence of our failure to transition away from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emitting industries which are driving global temperature increases, driving more extreme and severe weather. Related events like these massive infernos that are befalling California. From an insurer's perspective. It's also a disaster because we've already had a challenge with insurance pricing and availability in California. And this is only going to make things worse. We can expect, even before these wildfires that we're going to see tremendous increases in insurance price