Source: Mercury News
As wildfire insurance premiums skyrocket, researchers, consumer advocates and industry leaders alike are racing to factor homeowners’ hardening efforts into insurance pricing. But without hard data, it’s a mystery how much any particular measure cuts the risk of a house burning down.
Because of a lack of research, insurance companies can’t assign a dollar value to those efforts. But while experts do know certain things help protect structures — having a fire-rated roof, using non-combustible materials around your home, clearing weeds and spacing out bushes in your yard, cleaning gutters and roofs of plant debris, installing metal screens over vents to block flying embers — it’s the specificity that’s lacking.