As the West burns, insurance companies drop clients like never before.

The mathematical premise for insurance companies is relatively simple. They estimate the odds that a client will need to file a claim, and how much the company would then pay out to those clients. They calculate a premium – what the insured client pays – and expect that the premiums from their whole client base will be more than enough to cover claims. If you’re risky, they raise your premiums, and if you’re too risky, they drop you.

But amid massive fire years and the ever-worsening climate crisis, the formula is changing (see story, p. 8). Debbie Jones is a Salinas-based insurance broker with Leavitt Group, and she’s seen an unprecedented number of clients get booted entirely from their insurance policies. “I’ve been doing this for 44 years and I’ve seen so much, but nothing like this,” she says. “It’s been a very difficult road with insurance in the last five years, but it’s been really bad in the last two years.”

As of Jan. 26, she’s looking at 10 new non-renewals for clients, many of whom have been with her for decades. Some of them choose to self-insure – industry-speak for skipping insurance entirely – and some get policies through the California FAIR Plan, a statewide pool of all insurers licensed in California, developed to offer temporary insurance to those who can’t get traditional insurance. “[FAIR] is a last resort,” Jones says.

FAIR comes with its own challenges – it’s not cheap, and it’s capped at $3.3 million per policy. One property that was recently forced onto the FAIR Plan is Rancho Cielo, a nonprofit residential campus serving youth, located on the northeastern outskirts of Salinas on county-owned property. “Rancho Cielo has buildings worth more than $3.3 million, and we are not happy,” says Don Chapin, a member of the board. “It’s not enough and we have to do something better.”

Chapin also lives in the wildland-urban interface (WUI for short, pronounced woo-ee) on Crazy Horse Canyon Road in Prunedale, and says he’s lucky to have had the same insurance company for over 30 years. But as chair of the North Monterey County Fire Protection District board, he knows that’s unusual. “If you buy a new house out here, fire insurance is certainly something you have to be concerned with,” Chapin says.

One of Jones’ Prunedale clients is facing a premium hike from about $890 to $9,400 – for one manufactured home.

She is sensitive to the needs of the insurance companies too, noting that they’ve taken a massive hit during the waves of devastating California wildfires year after year. But she is among the many in the industry who are frustrated by insurers’ tendency to use a broad brush when determining risk for a structure. (For more on this, and specific ways homeowners in the WUI are trying to reduce risk, check out David Schmalz’s story on p. 14.)

“They are not looking at the individual home, they are looking at Google Earth, geographics, how close fires have come,” Jones says.

A hazards map created by the California Office of Emergency Services shows fire risk in red and yellow swatches all over the region, with stripes of purple along fault lines and blue bands representing flood risk along rivers – it’s like a modern art piece with barely any areas untouched.

The only areas that are untouched are urban areas that are largely paved. Properties like Rancho Cielo might not be in a forest or field of chaparral, but they are located in the WUI, areas outside of cities.

Jones’ clients who are losing their policies are located not in remote places, but more developed parts of the WUI. They are near Carmel High School, in Monterey along Highway 68 – places that we think of as “in town” because they are population centers, but places that to an insurance company are too risky to insure anymore.

They’re too risky because we’ve built communities in the WUI – in lovely places amid trees and nature. I wonder if the private insurance industry will force us to drastically modify our development planning policies where government hasn’t.

Jones works with clients who built their dream homes decades ago, back when the climate crisis was a thing of the future. But, she adds: “People are still building. Whose fault is it now?”

Maybe it’s insurance companies that will force us to develop only in more sensible areas going forward.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com