Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Build Here

Wildfires are close to torching the insurance industry in California

- By Leslie Kaufman and Eric Roston

Dave Sapsis went to bed on Sunday, Aug. 16, with a sense of foreboding. As the head of risk mapping at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, he’d seen the readouts from the agency’s high-precision weather forecasting system showing broad bands of clouds that could produce lightning without rain. After a wet spring, the state had spent the summer months baking under record-high temperatures, turning all those spring shoots into dry tinder.

Sapsis has been studying California wildfires for three decades. He knew what was coming next.

By the next morning, more than 900 separate fires were burning; these and the ones that followed have so far consumed 4.2 million acres, a record even in fire-prone California. As much land area has been scorched this year as in the past three years combined.

That’s not what disturbed Sapsis’ sleep. His primary responsibility is to anticipate how fires will affect people and property, and in that dimension at least, 2020’s fires have failed to break records. As of the first week in November, the fires had destroyed 10,500 structures, far fewer than the 23,000 lost in 2018.