As the fires rage on, the disaster threatens to upend the fragile balance between climate risk and home insurance in California.
If you live in California, you’re always bracing for the Big One. This week it arrived in the form of uncontrollable flames.
Liability experts equipped with climate models had been uneasily eyeing such a scenario, realizing in recent years that wildfire now had similar system-crashing potential as a major earthquake to upend lives and destabilize California’s $10 trillion residential property market. A group convened to examine worst-case scenarios determined that three specific areas in the state were particularly vulnerable and capable of causing far-reaching fallout. One was Pacific Palisades, the Los Angeles neighborhood reduced to ashes this week by one of at least five fires burning across the city.
Reprinted courtesy of Leslie Kaufman, Bloomberg, Lauren Rosenthal, Bloomberg, Michelle Ma, Bloomberg and Alexandre Rajbhandari, Bloomberg