Wealthy Homeowners, Their Insurers Turn to Hired Help to Fight Wildfires

Johnson pays about $5,000 a year to lease the system, a pump-and-hose apparatus that can draw large amounts of water from his swimming pool to help fight the progress of wildfires and backstop the city's municipal firefighters and hydrants.

Just as Johnson and his wife started hosing down their property in hopes of preventing any embers from igniting, a man sent by the system's supplier, Fire Defense Service, showed up to help them. The Johnsons soon evacuated, believing they would never see their house again. But the man from Fire Defense stayed behind to help protect their house and a neighbor's who was also a client.

"His plan was to fight it if it came," Johnson recalled.

As the inferno engulfed parts of the Los Angeles area, tensions have flared over the crews of private firefighters who have been spotted roaming affected neighborhoods and battling the blazes for their clients.

A Pacific Palisades resident came under fire after offering on X to "pay any amount" for private firefighters willing to protect his home. Indignation was also directed at former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who used a team of six private firefighters to save his high-end shopping center in Pacific Palisades, while nearby properties were destroyed. Caruso defended his use of the crew in an interview. "It freed up resources of the city to help protect the neighboring area," he said.

While there are some firefighters-for-rent battling the Los Angeles blazes for the well-heeled, most so-called private firefighters aren't hired by homeowners or business owners, but by insurance companies.

As fires have become more frequent and expensive for insurers, some have taken matters into their own hands by paying for private firefighting crews. Insurers, including Chubb and USAA, feature the private-fire-fighter service in homeowner policies they offer in fire-prone areas across the U.S.

The insurer-paid firefighters say they don't favor more expensive properties during a fire, but give priority to client properties that are most at risk, whatever their value. They generally don't directly battle blazes. Instead, their crews try to get to client homes ahead of a fire, sealing off vents to keep embers from getting in, moving combustibles away from the structure, and sometimes spraying fire-retardant gel on the house.

As these private crews hopscotch among neighborhoods with client maps in hand, they bypass homes without such coverage.

Probably the largest of the insurance-hired contractors is Wildfire Defense Systems in Bozeman, Mont. David Torgerson, executive chairman, said his company has responded to more than 1,400 fires and sometimes has thousands of insured properties to service in any given incident.

"Our mission is structure survivability," he said, saying his teams typically spend 30 to 60 minutes helping make a home fire-resistant before moving on. "We understand the science of ignition...and we use every tactic we need to break the cycle of ignition on individual properties." Although his teams can't always get to a property in time, when they do, the company says, more than 99% of structures end up surviving.

In former Olympian Johnson's case, the person sent by Fire Defense wasn't a trained firefighter, but a friend of the company's owner who offered to help. Authorities ordered the man to leave before the fire reached the area, but he made it back the next day to report that Johnson's house had survived, unlike many others on the street.

Johnson, who won four Olympic gold medals from 1992 to 2000, said he installed the pump system after his previous insurer, which had provided private-firefighter coverage, canceled his policy amid a wave of wildfire-risk cancellations in the area.

Fire Defense Service's pool-pump system was developed in part by a Los Angeles Fire Department firefighter, Jim Prabhu, who realized during past fires that pools were often an untapped source of water equivalent to dozens of 500-gallon firetrucks. Prabhu spent much of the past week on the front lines for the city-fighting the Palisades fire.

Private firefighting crews "are additive" to publicly paid firefighters, said James Wessel, CEO of Capstone Fire & Safety Management, a private fire-fighting outfit in Escondido, Calif., that works all over the western U.S.

Anger about private firefighters in prior incidents sparked the passage of a 2018 California law requiring them to check in with authorities, seek permission to use official radio frequencies, limit their work as much as possible to prefire treatment of structures, and refrain from using flashing lights or decals indicating they are with official emergency services.

Private contractors who directly battle blazes "are not firefighters," said Brian Rice, president of the 35,000-member California Professional Fire-fighters union. "We don't know their training, we don't know their equipment. When we see them, we consider them a liability. Emergency services isn't a for-profit business, it's a service best performed by public-safety officers."

On the other hand, Rice said his unionized firefighters support the crews contracted by insurers, which he said are classified as nonemergency resources that prepare homes of clients and are helpful.