State bill would protect homes against wildfires, earthquakes
Few places in California have been devastated by wildfire as acutely as Butte County, where a pair of the worst blazes in state history burned two years apart.
Yet for all the devastation caused by the historic 2018 Camp Fire and the 2020 North Complex fire, which laid waste to the towns of Paradise and Berry Creek, many forested neighborhoods in the area remain unscathed — and vulnerable.
So authorities are trying to help the county’s Sierra Nevada foothill communities pre
pare for the next potential catastrophe. The Butte County unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, has been sending inspectors out to educate residents about how they can make their homes more resilient. They’re targeting 16,000 homes in the most dangerous areas, with the hope of reaching them all over two years.
Some protective measures, such as covering vent openings or cleaning up combustible vegetation, are affordable or even free. Other steps, such as replacing flammable home siding with stronger material, can be more expensive.
Nonetheless, officials have found their efforts getting a positive reception.
“I’ve definitely noticed that our community is more receptive,” said Jacob Gilliam, a fire captain in the Cal Fire Butte Unit. “A big reason is that we’ve had these devastating fires in the last few years. People are listening more.”
Still, high costs remain a major barrier for many households that desperately want to better defend themselves against the state’s evergrowing fire threat. But the state may be about to unlock a massive new source of funding to help ease that financial burden.
SB440 would by 2024 provide an estimated $100 million annually — eventually more — to help homes in fireprone areas withstand an onslaught of flames. The bill, which will have its first hearing in the Legislature on Thursday, would also set aside as much as $50 million each year to help fortify homes against the state’s constant threat of major earthquakes.
“What it is in a nutshell is an opportunity to significantly increase investment in both wildfire and earthquake protection on a continuing, year-to-year basis,” said state Sen. Bill Dodd, DNapa, the bill’s sponsor.
The bill follows a series of efforts in the Legislature to confront the state’s worsening wildfire crisis, including by spending more money on forest thinning and trying to make power lines safer. They are in response to disasters that have set grim records for their death toll, size and number of homes destroyed in recent years. Dodd’s North Bay district has been an epicenter of the crisis, and he championed new laws intended to reduce the risk of ruinous fires and address the role of electric companies in starting many of them.
Yet lawmakers and fireprevention experts acknowledge that focusing on the cause of fires is only one part of the solution. Millions of Californians live in communities that have been and will continue to be threatened when sparks start amid the perilously dry conditions that are becoming more severe and frequent because of climate change. Funds provided by the state could help spare those homes from total destruction, the bill’s proponents believe.
Dodd and adviser Michael Wara, a Stanford University climate expert, chose to put fire protection and seismic safety in the same bill because the money they’re seeking would come from the California Earthquake Authority, which sells residential earthquake policies to homeowners through insurance companies. But they also believe it makes fundamental sense to help strengthen homes against the state’s primary disaster threats in one piece of legislation.
“The thinking goes that these are distinct risks, but they’re both catastrophic risks that the state faces,” said Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “The goal here is to provide a broad benefit to many communities in California to make them safer.”
To make the funds available, SB440 would change how the earthquake authority ensures its own ability to finance claims in the event of a major temblor. Currently, the authority buys what’s known as reinsurance — essentially an insurance policy for an insurance company.
SB440 would replace much of the authority’s reinsurance with the ability to impose a 2% charge on all property and casualty insurance in the state — but only in the event of a catastrophic earthquake that crosses an extremely rare threshold. Wara said the event would have to be even worse than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and cause more than $15 billion in damage to homes insured by the authority.
In exchange for the right to impose that charge, the authority would essentially pay the state a premium and would not need to buy as much reinsurance. Wara said that by 2024 the change would make $150 million available annually, with twothirds of the money going to support fire protection of homes and onethird intended to address seismically dangerous buildings in urban areas.
By 2030, the total fund would grow to a projected $200 million annually, but the contribution for earthquake safety would be capped at $50 million annually, with the rest going toward fire protection. Most of the funds would go toward wildfires instead of earthquakes because the bill seeks to help as many areas as it can, since all Californians could be on the hook eventually.
“The fact that everyone is going to be assessed means that we should try to spread the benefits as widely as possible,” Wara said. If the earthquake authority ever had to implement the charge, he projects it would cost the typical family about $46 each year for a decade.
Because the charge that the authority could impose is considered functionally a tax, the bill will need approval from twothirds of lawmakers in each chamber to become law. Dodd understands it could be a tall order.
“We all have to understand that in these types of cases, by not acting right now and not doing these things, this problem could get so bad that all the costs are far greater,” he said. “There’s not a lot of options and not all the options are perfect.”
The seismic funding provided by SB440 could help cities in the Bay Area and elsewhere do more to retrofit softstory buildings, which have weak or open first stories that make them particularly prone to damage in an intense earthquake. Many such buildings collapsed in San Francisco’s Marina District during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
San Francisco has in recent years gone a long way toward bolstering many of its most vulnerable softstory structures. About 80% of the more than 4,900 softstory buildings targeted by a city program are now compliant with retrofit standards, according to the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection. But not all earthquakeexposed apartment buildings are part of the program — smaller complexes with only a handful of units are not included, department spokesman Bill Strawn said.
“It could certainly help those people,” Strawn said of SB440.
Wara said he considers aid for softstory retrofits an equity issue.
“Who lives in those low rise, softstory apartment buildings? That is renters — middle income, low income people,” he said. “Those are the buildings that fall down.”
But the bill’s most urgent priority remains wildfire protection, in light of the sheer number of homes lost to firestorms in just the last five years.
In the Camp Fire alone, nearly 19,000 buildings burned down, the vast majority of them homes. Joe Cardoza was one of the lucky ones: The fire came within about 1,800 feet of his home in Magalia, north of Paradise, but didn’t damage the structure.
Cognizant of the inherent fire danger living in the Sierra foothills, Cardoza and his wife had already cleaned up a lot of the vegetation around his property after moving there in 2017. Once he saw the horrific toll of the Camp Fire, that work became even more earnest.
They spent nearly $2,000 purchasing and painting fireproof vents to make sure that embers couldn’t get inside their home the next time around. They took an even more cautious approach to vegetation, removing all bushes and plants on the ground within 5 feet of the house.
Money from SB440 could help Cardoza go even further by replacing the siding on his house with a more fireresistant material.
“We know it wouldn’t cover the whole thing, but just that little boost would help us go there,” he said.
Many other residents are similarly restrained in their ability to pay for fireprotection home upgrades, said Susan Beeler, a Cal Fire defensible space inspector in Butte County. Numerous residences in the county were erected in the 1970s using light materials that pose a unique threat when flames come through, she said.
“They’re the ones who are most vulnerable to the fire, because they don’t have a hardened structure,” Beeler said.
Of particular concern to Beeler are the county’s older mobile homes, many of them built with singlepane windows and aluminum or vinyl siding, which is highly susceptible to damage by fire. A large number of their current inhabitants are senior citizens on fixed incomes who don’t have the means to buy expensive, fireproof materials.
The only avenue she knows of to help people pay for fire protection upgrades is a lowinterest federal loan program for lowincome households. But Beeler doesn’t know of anyone who has ever used one, possibly due to red tape.
“I wish this bill would pass yesterday,” Beeler said of SB440.