At the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in Anaheim, California, recently, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety conducted an experiment. It built two identical structures, one surrounded by combustible mulch, shrubbery, and a wooden fence, and the other with a 5-foot-wide apron of concrete around the structure, a metal fence, and several fire retardant features. Then they started a fire around both buildings.
“We’ve always had insurance, it’s just been there, it’s been included in our everyday processes like getting a mortgage,” said Josh Wilkins, a retired firefighter in Idaho who now consults with insurers and property owners about reducing fire risk. But “that business model is dying. The end users — the insurance customers — are actually going to have to do something to make sure that they keep the business model going.
In Anaheim, not everyone was pleased with the demonstration. One landscape architect complained that builders were “not going to be happy” to have to cede valuable space around a house for a fire resistant ring of concrete. People love their mulched gardens and wooden fences that snuggle right up to their homes. We want what we want and that’s the end of it.
Josh Wilkins, the consultant in Idaho, estimates that insurers want to reduce wildfire risk by 20% before they will consider returning to a region. To assess their risk, insurance companies are using powerful prediction models, which synthesize information about rainfall, vegetation, wind, topography and human activity to make detailed analyses.to within a square meter and focus on a single structure.