Cutback in Insurance Forces Firefighters to Halt Controlled Burning of Brushland

The Los Angeles County Fire Department has suspended controlled burning of brushlands, one of the chief weapons in its arsenal to prevent disastrous wildfires, because liability insurance coverage offered through state government has been drastically reduced.

“We’re out of business,” Capt. Scott Franklin, the Los Angeles County Fire Department officer in charge of controlled burns, said Wednesday.

“This is a tremendous problem” from a standpoint of fire safety, he said. “We were just getting a handle on the wildfire situation (through a program of prescribed burns) and now I’ve got 10,000 acres ready to burn and we can’t do anything with them.”

In controlled burns, firefighters surround patches of old, heavy, often dead brush--the kind that fuels the hottest, fastest-moving fires--and burn it away. The burned-over acreage forms a natural firebreak. Over the ensuing several years, the land grows young, green vegetation, which does not burn as fiercely.

The Fire Department feels that the reduction in the state’s liability insurance coverage--from $6 million to $500,000--”just puts the county in too vulnerable a position,” Franklin said.

In past years, the state purchased an insurance policy which covered the state and county governments and private landowners who gave county firefighters permission to burn on their land. The policy provided protection to pay claims if the fires burned out of control and damaged other property, such as nearby homes or farms.

This year, the state had trouble finding any insurance company that would write the policy, said Richard Clanton, head of the vegetation management program of the state Department of Forestry.

The state paid a premium in the last fiscal year of $90,000--up from $40,000 three years ago--for $6 million in coverage from the Canadian Indemnity Co. of San Diego, he said. The department is now paying a $135,000 premium, 50% more, for a four-month extension on the policy that provides only $500,000 in coverage, he said. In addition, he said, the deductible--the amount of damages not covered by insurance--was increased from $25,000 last year to $100,000.

The extension took effect July 1 and expires Nov. 1, he said.

He said the agency is “hoping to get emergency legislation . . . allowing us to go self-insured. We’re not sure yet how it would work, but we’d probably have to set up some sort of fund with our own money,” from the department’s annual budget allocation.

Clanton attributed the changes to “turmoil in the insurance industry” because of financial losses.

In Orange County, Battalion Chief Stan Matthews, head of the wildland management program, said the Orange County department had suspended all controlled burns “until the county counsel and the chief and everybody has an opportunity to look at how this is going to impact us.”