WOW! Fire & Ice! CA is getting pummeled.

[Karen Margrave]

We're back in CA, just in time for the snow storm. It was just a foot of snow, but the devastation to the drought stricken trees was enormous. Here's a photo of a family members house, just as it was being rebuilt from being burned down last summer. The costs to insurance companies on all of these losses makes one wonder what effect it will have on insurance in the future. 

Before the fires insurance companies were already refusing to issue new insurance or drastically raising prices on many areas of CA. Now with this, I can only imagine what it will do to new buyers, etc. What do you think? Are insurers all going to pull out of states like CA, FL, LA, and the eastern states that are hurricane prone? 

These are just a few of the photos. Every fence was knocked down. There are about 20 of the large trees. The photos don't get the point across as well as seeing it. It looks like a bomb went off in the middle of the property. 

[Nick C.]

We've already had major insurance companies pull out of Florida due to hurricanes. State Farm, Prudential off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are others... 

[Jay Hinrichs]

@Nick C.  also some of the companies that were insuring houses in Paradise CA have gone chapter 7 with the homeowners getting ZERO.. talk about a disaster.

and well as i sit here in Summerlin ( Vegas) we have 4 inchs of snow today LOL.. so much for a nice warm or warmer winter than Portlandia..

[Nick C.]

This is horrible. To pay into insurance for that long and then you finally need it, and you get nothing. The homeowners would have been better off putting that money into a pillowcase every month. 

It can definitely happen here in Florida if one of the bigger cities gets a direct hit from a Cat 4 or 5 storm. 

[Jay Hinrichs]

Karen.. maybe fire insurance carriers are going to have to send their agents out to take photos of each proposed insured to see how fire fuel may be situated by their homes.  

Also from another perspective this is not like hurricane or flood.. now that the fires have devastated these areas.. it will be another 20 to 40 years before there is enough fuel to burn again.  And of course the bigger timber is 60 to 120 Years old. And those Oaks in your picture 100 to 200 years old.  So the fire burn areas are the safest place to put fire insurance today.

Just in my growing up in N. Cal  fire was a yearly event.. in 1980 the cow mtn. fire burned from Ukiah to lakeport about 40k acres.. .. and that exact same area burnt last summer in the epic Lake county fires.. it burnt through our historic family ranch on the way to burning 400k acre plus.. largest ever.. but the majority of that one was forest land so not nearly as many structures maybe less than 50. 

In 82 ish the Atlas peak fire in Napa burnt 30k plus acres and about 25 wine country estates.. now that same area burnt last year along with the Calistoga fire.  and this time it got all the way down into Silverado CC were i used to live and burnt down about 75 homes there all million plus. 

@Nick C.  last time i was in Orlando they were having fires as well.. but harder to tell since there are no mountains LOL And they tend to move slower. its the steep mountains that create a chimney effect and the intense under growth.. because we suppress wild fires and keep nature from burning the under story like what happened 200 years ago before we had aerial tankers.  

[Karen Margrave]

@Jay Hinrichs all those trees just fell over or broke to pieces from less than 12" of snow, which is more than the area has had in over 50 years. Also, I think due to the drought the past years these trees were so dry that they had no flexibility in their limbs.  The house shown in the photos has estimates for taking down the trees, and repairing fences, sheds, etc. of approximatley $40,000!  Plus the cost of rebuilding the house from the fire. I cannot imagine the insurance companies being able to sustain that many losses. The Paradise fire, the Camp Fire, burned so many homes. Here in Cottonwood, CA the dump trucks and trailers removing all the burned debri and going to the Igo dump (one of the only ones rated for that type of stuff) number in the hundreds per day, and that's just on one of the routes. 

I have never seen anything like this.