Branislav Kecman was one of roughly 50,000 Californians who lost their homeowners insurance coverage in the months before the fires that swept through the Los Angeles area in January, dropped by State Farm because his house was too high a risk. His home in the community of Altadena was destroyed in the blaze, and he was left facing a series of hard financial choices.
With only the coverage offered by the state’s last-resort insurance plan, Mr. Kecman estimates that he will receive about $1 million, only enough to build a house about a third smaller than the one he lost. The cost to insure the new structure is likely to be much higher, too, now that carriers are asking for rate increases to offset rising wildfire risks.
Mr. Kecman is among the thousands of Californians affected by the fires who say a broken insurance market is hampering their ability to rebuild their lives. On Thursday, many of them gathered in Altadena to urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to install a new insurance commissioner, require insurers to pay outstanding claims and ensure that consumers are protected as companies raise premiums.
“We thought we could trust the system,” Mr. Kecman, a 64-year-old electrical engineer, said at a news conference organized by the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
Mr. Kecman said he had found it encouraging that Ricardo Lara, the state insurance commissioner, had drafted new regulations not long before the fires that would require carriers to write policies in risky parts of the state in exchange for higher rates. But he and others cited a New York Times story from last week that revealed how a series of loopholes could allow insurers to qualify to charge the higher rates merely by writing new policies in the areas where they had recently dumped customers like him.
The investigation found that there were no guarantees that a substantial number of new policies would be written in the state’s high-risk fire areas.
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California Fire Victims Urge State to Hold Insurers Accountable
