They lost their home insurance policies. Then came the L.A. fires

Last year, Francis Bischetti said he learned that the annual cost of the homeowners policy he buys from Farmers Insurance for his Pacific Palisades home was going to soar from $4,500 to $18,000 — an amount he could not possibly afford.

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Neither could he get onto California FAIR Plan, which provides fewer benefits, because he said he would have to cut down 10 trees around his roof line to lower the fire risk — something else the 55-year-old personal assistant found too costly to manage.

So he decided he would do what’s called “going bare” — not buying any coverage on his home in the community’s El Medio neighborhood. He figured if he watered his property year round, that might be protection enough given its location south of Sunset Boulevard.

It wasn’t. The home he lived in for nearly all his life burned down Tuesday along with more than 10,000 other homes and structures damaged or destroyed in the worst fire event in the history of Los Angeles. Sixteen deaths have been confirmed countywide.

“It was surrealistic,” he said. “I’ve grown up and lived here off and on for 50 years. I’ve never in my entire time here experienced this.”

Farmers Insurance declined to comment, saying it does not discuss individual policyholders.

‘A train wreck coming down the track’

Bischetti was far from the only homeowner living in Pacific Palisades, Altadena or other fire-prone hillside neighborhoods who struggled to maintain their insurance amid sharply rising costs and the decision by many insurers to reduce their exposure to catastrophic wildfire claims by not renewing the policies of even longtime customers. Many fire victims reported that insurers had dropped their policies last year.

The fires — expected to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history — have deepened a crisis in the state’s home insurance market that was already reeling before the devastation came.

The state’s largest home insurer, State Farm General, announced in March it would not renew 30,000 homeowner and condominium policies — including 1,626 in Pacific Palisades — when they expired.

Chubb and its subsidiaries stopped writing new policies for high-value homes with higher wildfire risk. Allstate has stopped writing new policies, and Tokio Marine America Insurance Co. and Trans Pacific Insurance Co. pulled out of the state, though Mercury Insurance offered to take their customers.

Liberty Mutual was sued last month by a homeowner who accused the insurer of dropping her over a bogus claim that her roof had mold damage.

“Driven by a desire to maximize profits, property casualty insurance companies … have engaged in a troubling trend of dropping California homeowners’ insurance policies like flies,” said the complaint, filed in San Diego County Superior Court. A spokesperson for Liberty Mutual declined to comment on the litigation.

The inability to get coverage is reflected in the number of policies picked up by California FAIR Plan, which as of September had about 452,000 policies, up from a little over 203,000 four years ago. FAIR Plan’s website says its claims exposure is nearly $6 billion in Pacific Palisades alone.

“The situation has been a train wreck coming down the track for a while,” said Rick Dinger, president of Crescenta Valley Insurance, an independent brokerage in Glendale.

Not enough insurance money to rebuild

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Peggy Holter spent decades as a television journalist, a peripatetic career that took her all over the world, but there was one place she called home and always returned to: the Pacific Palisades condo she moved into on Jan. 1, 1978. That all changed after Tuesday’s firestorm, when her condo burned to the ground along with the rest of the 36 units in the Palisades Drive complex.

Holter, 83, who only retired last year, is now facing uncertainty after she said State Farm didn’t renew her individual condo insurance, citing the condition of her roof.

But with the loss of her documents she isn’t sure if and when the policy lapsed — and she hadn’t yet secured a new carrier. The insurance typically covers personal belongings and a unit’s interior and provides benefits such as living expenses if a condo becomes unusable.

“I’m not a big keeper of things, but what I did have was a whole wall of pictures and albums of all the places I had been, family photos. I had a picture of my mother on a camel when she was 52 in front of the Sphinx,” Holter recalled. “The only thing I am concerned about is the future, because that is what you have to do.”

Her biggest question is whether she can rebuild. The homeowners association had a master policy from FAIR Plan, which totaled only $20 million. That would pay out only about $550,000 per unit if the complex were not rebuilt — far below the $1 million-plus the condos commanded in recent sales. The land could be sold off to a developer.

Holter, who is now living with her son in the Hollywood Hills, had paid off her condo.

She went back to the complex after the fires died down to get a closer look at the damage. There was nothing left of her unit, but the complex’s koi pond survived, along with the fish.

State Farm has declined to comment on its non-renewals, saying in a recent statement: “Our number one priority right now is the safety of our customers, agents and employees impacted by the fires and assisting our customers in the midst of this tragedy.”

‘We don’t cover anything in California’

Matt Knight considers himself fortunate: He and his family could have lost it all in the Eaton fire, just like Bischetti and Holter in the Palisades fire.

The trouble started last year he said when he received a notice from Safeco Insurance that the policy on his Sonoma Drive home in Altadena, where he lives with his wife and three children, would not be renewed due to a tree overhanging his garage.

The 45-year-old Covina elementary school teacher said he dutifully trimmed the tree only to be told the ivy growing on the garage also was a problem. After removing that, he said he was told he had to fix his damaged stucco, which forced him to paint his house and in the process replace his old roof. Yet he said he still couldn’t get insurance after spending $30,000 on the repairs.

A spokesperson for Safeco, a subsidiary of Liberty Mutual, said the carrier does not comment on individual policyholders.

“So we went looking company after company after company, and some of them would say, ‘No, we don’t cover anything in California.’ Some said, ‘We’re not doing any new policies.’ Some said, ‘No, we don’t do 91001 because it’s in a fire zone, and we were were like, ‘That’s crazy.’”

Just a day before his policy was set to expire last summer, Knight said he finally managed to secure similar coverage with Aegis Insurance. But in the haste to get the policy in force, the home he has lived in for 16 years was left wildly under-insured for less than $300,000. The home is valued at $1.13 million on Zillow.

The ferocious winds that fanned the Eaton fire started a power outage Tuesday evening, so Knight decided to drive his children over to his parents’ home on the other side of Altadena where they could do their homework. From there, he saw the fire start on a street hugging the mountains near what appeared to be a power line.

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“Within minutes it was taken up the hillside. It was unbelievable,” he said.

His parents’ home on Roosevelt Avenue escaped the devastation, and throughout the night he drove over to check on his home. By 6 a.m., he had joined a brigade of homeowners to fight the encroaching flames on Sonoma Drive. “The whole neighborhood was there grabbing hoses and fighting fires,” he said.

In the late afternoon, he said, the water ran out for the homeowners and firefighters alike, forcing him and his neighbors to pack up and go. He was sure he would lose his home, but the winds died down.

“I think that was the ultimate good fortune,” he said, though some other neighbors were not so lucky.

Bischetti was not so lucky either.

On Tuesday, when the fires started in the hills and all of his Palisades neighbors started to pack their cars, Bischetti stayed behind to keep hosing down his property, including his lawn, roof, rafters and walls.

“I thought everything would be relatively safe,” he said. “I was sticking around trying to protect the house with water.”

He gradually started packing his car with a change of clothes, one of his guitars, tax papers, property deeds and hard drives from his computer. He left his computer itself back in the house, along with his amps, music equipment and tools.

His entire street was a ghost town by 5 p.m. By then, Bischetti had already watered down his property multiple times. It was dusty and smoky, and a voice in his head told him it was time to go. “I’m going to come back for this tomorrow,” he recalled thinking. “I don’t want to weigh down my car.”

It didn’t work out that way.

Bischetti drove near Palisades High School and saw a house on the corner of the street start to burn down. He then tried going on El Medio Avenue and drove into black smoke, with flames on both sides of his car. He started panicking and realized he couldn’t get through.

After making it to his sister’s home in Mar Vista, he found out from a neighbor that all of the homes on his block had been leveled.

Bischetti said his siblings lost family mementos and photos and he lost thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and musical instruments. They also had spent nearly $4,000 fixing up the home in order to rent out some of the rooms.

Bischetti and his family have signed up for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds and are trying to get help with cleaning up the property, which he said could cost at least $10,000.

“I was getting ready for this,” he said of his one-man firefighting efforts. “That was the last hurrah.”