12/24/2022 0 Comments Read fire forceMany types of regular old fire insurance can come with his company’s service. “If it hits somewhere in Utah, there won’t be.” In either case, he says, Wildfire Defense Systems will respond. “If the fire hits Malibu, there will be a lot of high-value houses,” Torgerson told me. Ninety percent of the homes they protect, he said, were “average-value homes,” contracted through normal insurers, not the specialty companies that take on high-net-worth individuals’ properties. These fire clubs were important social institutions, often commingling middle-class and working-class men of many ethnicities in the virtuous activity of defending their city from conflagration, according to the historian Amy Greenberg’s Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City.ĭavid Torgerson, the president of Wildfire Defense Systems, disputed any characterization of his particular company as fighting fires only on behalf of the rich. Insurers might give bonuses or other support to these groups, but firefighting was primarily a civic rather than commercial enterprise. The United States might have been expected to inherit a similar system, but instead, volunteer fire departments became the most common means of fire protection. Read: The simple reason that humans can’t control wildfires “Each insurance company maintained its own fire brigade, which extinguished fires in those buildings insured by the company and, in return for a fee to be paid later, in buildings insured by other companies,” the economist Annelise Anderson has written. In London, firefighters worked explicitly for insurance companies during the 18th and 19th centuries. “While other societies throughout history have relied on private firefighting companies to protect the property of the upper classes … for the most part, we … have accepted the idea that fighting fire ought to be a public good.” “If the idea of private firefighting strikes us as an oddity nowadays, it should,” Benjamin Carp, a historian at Brooklyn College CUNY, told me. The TMZ story feels uniquely 2018-financial capitalism, inequality, KimYe, the fires of Armageddon-and it is, for Americans at least. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb-and up to a dozen other insurers-contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “ wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk. As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week.
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