What happens when U.S. insurers stop covering prescribed burns?

Editor’s note: This story first appeared in Mongabay and is republished here with permission. Click here for highlights from the story. Prescribed fires are a positive land management method, but when the flames occasionally escape control, the resulting damage to land and private property also hurts this conservation tool’s reputation. U.S. insurance companies are thus charging increasingly unaffordable premiums for coverage of this activity or are dropping the service altogether in the wake of some particularly large recent accidents. As a result, many small conservation groups and private businesses are getting out of the habit of using fire to improve grassland health, boost wildlife habitat, and decrease likelihood of catastrophic wildfires. California is bridging this gap with a new state program that insures the activity, while prescribed fire associations, where residents and firefighters cooperate to carry out burns on private land, are increasingly popping up in communities. 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… Read More
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