Insurance Companies Now Cutting Coverage For Prescribed Burns - Key To Dealing W. New Era Of Fire

On the first day of a 2021 prescribed fire in south-central Oregon, all went to plan as firefighters slowly burned areas in Fremont-Winema National Forest. They created a deliberate mosaic alternating between swatches of blackened land and decadent foliage. Fire specialists designed the operation to reduce risk to the nearby Sprague River Valley community and improve the quality of forage for mule deer through bitterbrush regeneration. But the next morning, winds blew embers over trenches meant to contain the flames. Small fires ignited in patches of grass and went up small trees until they grew into the very thing the firefighters were trying to prevent: a wildfire.

Declaring the prescribed burn a wildfire, called the Meadow Fire, was costly, but it brought in resources such as a large plane to control its spread and divert flames away from homes. That hasn’t been the case for other prescribed burns like last year in New Mexico, where windy conditions fueled out-of-control fires that forced evacuations and destroyed hundreds of homes.

These escaped burns exacerbate concerns among people who live in fire-prone communities and who are skeptical of using fire as a method to reduce unwanted wildfires. The same goes for insurance providers whose liability coverage is limited and increasingly unaffordable, with an annual premium as high as $100,000 for $1 million of coverage. This financial barrier is one of the primary obstacles to getting more burns done in the American West. “An escape on a prescribed burn, it’s very rare. You hear about them when they happen, but the percent is probably less than 1% of the time,” said Sean Hendrix, who has been a burn boss on prescribed fires in Oregon for 20 years — the last escape there was the Meadow Fire — and has never had an out-of-control burn on his watch.

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Carrying out this work is already expensive, so the bloated cost of insurance is hitting the bottom line hardest for nonprofit conservation groups and private companies like the one Hendrix works for, Grayback Forestry. The premiums represent such a cost to these small organizations that some are getting out of burn projects entirely. While premiums vary and aren’t generally advertised, Hendrix said rates for private forestry companies working with fire are 10 times what they were four years ago. That cost comes back to the groups hiring them to do the work, such as government agencies, conservation organizations, Native tribes, and small landowners. “It’s just really raised the price of burning,” Hendrix said, adding these are now going for $1,200 an acre (nearly $3,000 per hectare). “The cost of the liability insurance has skyrocketed, so we have to charge more, and that’s the hurdle.”

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https://news.mongabay.com/2023/11/as-insurers-stop-covering-prescribed-burns-states-and-communities-step-up/