Did you know that State Farm, the largest property and casualty insurance company in the United States, is no longer issuing new home insurance policies in California? And they’re not even the first ones to make that move! Insurance companies are abandoning California in droves because of wildfires... |
For the Reckon Report this month, we’re going to be focusing on climate change, the increasing violence of natural disasters and solutions communities are trying out to keep life going on our warming planet. Wildfires are a fact of life on much of the West. “Fire season” is as much a part of life there as “tornado season” and “hurricane season” are for the Midwest and coastal communities in the South, respectively. And like those other disaster seasons, fire season has become more dangerous in recent years. In the case of California, a yearslong megadrought has created ideal conditions for fires to spark and spread more rapidly than in previous decades. Wildfires themselves can be a result of natural causes (a lightning strike in a forest or some abnormally dry brush, for example), but human activity has also played a role in some of the worst fires in recent memory. Pacific Gas & Electric, the country’s largest utility company, is currently on trial for its role in a massive wildfire in 2020 that killed four people, destroyed over 200 homes and burned 88 square miles of land (slightly larger than the city of Baton Rouge, LA). In a less corporate example, one couple who used a smoke bomb at a gender reveal party in 2020 were charged with starting a fire that killed a firefighter. |
