It has been a terrible period in California. Devastating wildfires have killed at least 71 people and destroyed 12,000 buildings, making them among the most damaging fires to have hit the state.
The fires have also left insurers scrambling to work out how to deal with a threat that is rapidly becoming one of the most serious — and unpredictable — that they face.
The Camp and Woolsey fires that have been burning for ten days come just three months after the Ranch and River fires consumed about 300,000 acres in the north of the state and less than a year after the Thomas fire destroyed more than 280,000 acres and 1,000 structures in Ventura and Santa Barbara.
Mark Bove, natural catastrophe solutions manager at Munich Reinsurance America said: “In general, overall wildfires in the US have gone down over the last 30-40 years but what we’ve seen is a shift in severity — fires are more severe than they used to be.”
There are two reasons why fires have become more serious, Mr Bove said. One of them is climate change. “California has drier conditions and winter rains are coming later and later. So things are bone dry and can ignite very quickly.”
The other is California’s…
