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California is no stranger to extreme weather. This weekend, the state was hit by a huge storm system, forcing evacuations. It's these type of weather events and wildfires in particular that are driving up the prices of home insurance. That's especially true in Northern California's Lake County, where many companies are just canceling policies. Now community leaders are working to reduce the risks from wildfires. But as Lauren Sommer from NPR's Climate Desk reports, many of the insurance companies aren't taking note.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: Penny Sidhu is getting a home makeover, which she feels like she won out of the blue.
PENNY SIDHU: I have no words. I'm just, like, shocked.
SOMMER: But it's not a makeover you'd notice standing in her front yard in Kelseyville, California, surrounded by rolling hills.
SIDHU: There's screens on top of the gutters. So now I have new gutters with screens on them so the debris can't get in.
SOMMER: Sidhu's house has been made over to protect against wildfires. She's part of a new California program to make homes less likely to burn. After evacuating from fires three times in the last nine years, Sidhu got concerned about overgrown brush between her and her neighbor's house.
SIDHU: You couldn't even see her roof. Like, it was like our houses were connected. There was huge trees and bushes.
SOMMER: She found out she was eligible for the Lake County Home Hardening Program, which uses state and federal funding. Deanna Fernweh, the program manager, set up an inspection to look for vulnerabilities like those bushes.
DEANNA FERNWEH: So if those were to combust, it would catch both of their roofs on fire. And so we removed all of the vegetation.
SOMMER: It's about protecting the house from embers - tiny bits of burning debris carried by the wind far from a wildfire itself.
FERNWEH: More than 90% of homes catch on fire due to embers, not direct flame. So that is what we highly focus on.
SOMMER: Fernweh's team removed the bark mulch near the walls of Sidhu's house and put in gravel. She'll get a metal gate in her side yard instead of wood.
SIDHU: I would never have been able to afford this. There's just no way I could do it. Especially I'm by myself. There's just no way.
SOMMER: Many of Sidhu's neighbors are in the same boat. The county has a lot of lower-income households. But some have gotten wildfire improvements too because the state program is focused on this neighborhood. Wildfire risk goes way down when many homes participate together. Sidhu hopes that insurance companies will notice that.
SIDHU: People are having such a hard time getting insurance on their houses right now. My daughter just bought a house in Crescent City, and it was a nightmare to get insurance.
SOMMER: But there are no guarantees that companies will keep insuring Sidhu and her neighbors.
JESSICA PYSKA: This insurance crisis is hitting everywhere.
SOMMER: Jessica Pyska is on the Lake County Board of Supervisors. She says in the last decade, about 70% of Lake County has burned. She lost her own home in 2015. And insurance has become a huge problem. Some residents are seeing rates double or are being dropped by their insurance companies.
PYSKA: I know a lot of people that are just going without insurance right now.
SOMMER: Pyska says the county is trying to reduce the wildfire risk with a range of projects. They've improved evacuation routes. They worked with federal and state agencies to reduce flammable vegetation in the forests around them. And there's the home improvement program.
PYSKA: People are trying to do everything that they possibly can to get their rates lower, but it's really not helping much.
SOMMER: Some insurance companies are offering small discounts - 5- or 10% - for homeowners that make their houses safer, but companies don't have to consider the work a whole community does to reduce their risk.
PYSKA: How do we get to the point where the insurers are saying, there's a much lower risk here community-wide - we'll come back, and we'll lower the rates or maybe not raise the rates quite so much.
SOMMER: That problem comes down to information. Nancy Watkins is a consulting actuary with Milliman, a risk analysis firm.
NANCY WATKINS: To really understand if the risk has been reduced, an insurance company would theoretically need information about what my neighbors had done. That's very difficult for an insurance company to know about or to verify.
SOMMER: It's something Watkins is trying to change. She's helping start the Wildland Urban Interface Data Commons. It would aggregate all the community wildfire projects into a big database, one that insurance companies can use to see where the wildfire risk is getting better. She says there's a lot to figure out about how it will work, like protecting consumer privacy and getting insurance companies on board. But it could help those companies provide discounts where they don't right now.
WATKINS: As long as there's a disconnect between what people and communities do to reduce their risk and what they're experiencing from their insurance companies, if that disconnect persists, there's this bias to do nothing. People think, nothing that I do will matter.
SOMMER: Insurance is a key motivation, she says, for incentivizing fire-prone communities to prevent disasters.
Lauren Sommer, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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