DALLAS — Aside from the devastation we’ve been seeing on TV from California, wildfire probably isn’t on your list of top concerns. But it is probably quickly climbing that list for some here in Texas.
At the same time that wildfires were still raging out of control in Los Angeles last month, a new legislative session was just starting in Austin. And Texas lawmakers were being asked to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to hopefully prevent future fires here from being as damaging or deadly.
And there will be future fires here. Since 2005, this state has experienced more than 200,000 wildfires. Two of those blew up to become just larger than the entire city of Los Angeles. Two others — the Smokehouse Creek fire and the East Amarillo Complex fire — exploded to each become the size of three L.A.s!
And it’s not just fields of dry vegetation that should have us concerned. Corelogic estimates 244,617 Texas homes are threatened by a moderate or greater danger of wildfires, making this the third-most at-risk state behind California and Colorado.
The report says the number of homes that are susceptible in Austin (94,673) and San Antonio (78,207) makes them the fifth and seventh most wildfire-vulnerable cities in the country. For perspective, all the other cities in the top seven on that list are in California, which is notorious for wildfires.
So, fire officials with the state’s lead firefighting agency, the Texas A&M Forest Service, say they need resources that were especially critical in California recently: Firefighting aircraft. Texas does not have its own fleet, so the state must rely on federal tankers, which are needed in other states as well. Texas lawmakers are now being asked to pay more than $350 million to create a dedicated aerial firefighting fleet here.
“That’s a combination of both purchasing aircraft and contracting directly with vendors to supply other aircraft,” Texas A&M Forest Service Deputy Director Wes Moorehead said.
Moorehead said the agency has been getting some positive early feedback from legislators.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of interest and they didn’t tell us to go pound sand,” he said. “And I think it’s because it is so important and they, the lawmakers in Austin, have seen the benefit of having aircraft and allowing Texas to take care of its own and not waiting on the federal system to allow us access to aircraft.”
That’s the biggest ask the forest service has, but they are asking for more than $50 million extra in other wildfire-fighting funding. Moorehead told us all about that and about the specific scenarios in Texas that keep him up at night. He also shared the story of one Texas town that got a lot of things right and may have kept a bad wildfire from becoming much worse.
It’s all in this episode of Y’all-itics:
Are you underinsured?
As officials in Texas work to ramp up their firefighting efforts, the situation in California provides a stark example of the destruction these fires can leave behind. The Los Angeles Times has mapped an estimated 16,200 structures lost to fire in Altadena and Pacific Palisades alone.
I wonder how many of those structures didn’t have enough property insurance to be fully rebuilt. Could it be that three-quarters of them were underinsured? A study last year looked at insurance claims from a very destructive wildfire in the Denver area and found about 74% of insurance policies there weren’t sufficient to totally rebuild.
And many of them (36%) were found to be severely underinsured, meaning they only offered enough money to replace about three-fourths of the structure. The researchers explained that, in many cases, people were underinsured because they relied on an insurer’s estimate of how much coverage they needed and that people seemed to be “choosing insurers that appear to be offering a lower premium but are in reality just offering less coverage.”
So, shop around. And compare coverage amounts. Over the years, I have gotten a few suspiciously low replacement estimates. They had lower premiums, which was enticing. But no thank you. I did not want to regret that decision the day after a potential disaster.
Also, you may want to consider extended replacement coverage, which gives you extra insurance in case rebuilding costs more than your policy provides.
Let’s say your dwelling coverage is $300,000. Depending on your insurer, extended replacement could give you an extra 10% of coverage, or an extra 25%, even an extra 50%. Yes it costs more, but Policygenius estimates it’s usually $25 to $50 more per year. That may turn out to be money well spent if you lose everything and rebuilding is much more expensive than you planned for it to be.
Texas has a portal where you can search near you to determine the potential wildfire risk. Click here to go to it. Additionally, the state offers this insurance shopping guide. And Texas offers this site for you to compare some homeowner policy prices.
Finally, United Policyholders does a lot of work to prevent property owners from being underinsured. They have these important tips to consider when shopping for coverage.