"‘It doesn’t matter if they cut every tree and bush on their property, we would not insure it because of where it sits.’"
"BOULDER, Colo. — A few months after Chris Cook and his family moved from California into a four-bedroom house nestled among ponderosa pines in the foothills here, they got a letter saying their home insurance policy had been canceled.
The insurer, Allstate, had concluded — after an assessor visited the property — that the house was too likely to be destroyed by a wildfire. Cook, a tech executive and recent transplant from the San Francisco Bay Area, said his reaction was something like, “Wait, what?!”
Mortgage companies require homes to be insured, so the cancellation put Cook’s financing at risk. He worried that getting another major insurer to sign off on the home would be more challenging after one had turned him down.
He’s not alone. As more and deadlier fires sweep through Western states, it’s becoming harder to get home insurance on a property surrounded by forest, reachable only by backroads, or on slopes where a wildfire is likely to run."
Sophie Quinton reports for Stateline/HuffPost January 3, 2019.
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