This is the second in a two-part series on the Telluride region’s response to wildfire concerns, and a changing insurance marketplace. Listen to part one here.

Hilary Cooper lives in Telluride, just north of Main Street, in a compact home fronted by a big bay window. There’s a shady patch of synthetic turf out front, perched just above the street. She bought her house 1996, and has been here with her family since.

“And about two months ago now, I got a notice from Nationwide, my carrier, that my insurance was going to be cancelled due to wildfire risk,” Cooper says.

It’s not Cooper’s first difficulty with insurance; she also faced a canceled plan a couple years ago. “So it became pretty obvious at that time, a while ago, that carriers were starting to leave the area,” she says. “Since then, I've discovered that they're really trying to leave Colorado as quickly as possible and that a lot of wealthier homeowners are basically going to a self-insured approach. But what does that leave for the rest of us?”

Cooper is not alone in asking the question of how to maintain insurance in an era of increasing wildfire risk, especially for a homeowner with limited resources. A prior KOTO story profiled individual and community efforts to prepare for wildfire, from tree thinning in the ski ranches to roof replacements in Mountain Village. 

But the question of what a homeowner can do when an insurance plan is canceled remains. Community Development Director in the Town of Mountain Village Amy Ward says the Village has reached out to insurers, hoping to shape town building codes to the industry’s preferences, “and they’ve been unwilling to share that with us,” Ward says. 

But homeowners can still address the issue, and says Ward, “we do understand that after mitigation work, like replacing your roof or doing defensible space work on your home, you can actually go to your insurer and request a rate rebate.”

Mitigation techniques begin with those simple fixes: replacing a wooden roof with a metal one, trimming back bushes near a home. But as wildfire concern increases, mitigation is also evolving. Clifford Hansen runs the Telluride-based broker Latitude Insurance, which has offices across the West. 

“There are newer technologies coming into play,” Hansen says. “Outdoor wildfire sprinklers to sprinkle the lawn, sprinkle the house…Most of our clients here are with high net-worth carriers, and with that comes enrollment in a service called Wildfire Defense Services. And WDS for short, in the event of an approaching wildfire, has teams all over the place and they deploy them [to protect homes]. “

Even if a homeowner has all the resources to throw at mitigation, hiring a private fire-fighting team, and installing outdoor sprinklers, will insurers take note?

Aaron Johnson, a mitigation specialist with the West Region Wildfire Region Council, which consults on fire readiness across the Western Slope. When it comes to mitigation, he says, “there's nothing that's guaranteed to work. Providers have the final say whether or not it’s something they’re going to recognize. But we do hope it’s something they’ll consider moving forward.”

The roof on Cooper’s home? It’s not wood, it’s metal, and her front lawn is a mix of synthetic grass and hardscaping. 

“Even if we, you know, cut down the entire hillside between here and Lawson Hill,” Cooper says, “I'm not sure if that would have satisfied the insurance providers, because it's a much bigger problem. It's a global problem that little old Telluride is just a tiny pea in the sea of.”

Across town, in his office at the Telluride Fire Protection District’s Station 1, Chief John Bennett recognizes any one homeowner, or community, may be overshadowed as insurance providers are pulling out of entire states from California to Colorado. 

“It’s an unfortunate fact, and, I think all of these states are, at a legislative level, trying to find some solution to relieve that homeowner pain of either increased premiums, or quite frankly, cancellations of insurance policies. Unfortunately, it's not an overnight fix,” Bennett says. 

In Colorado, that legislative solution is called the FAIR Plan, or Fair Access to Insurance Requirements. State officials are currently preparing for its rollout. 

“It’s essentially an insurer of last resort,” explains Johnson. “So when people are dropped, they can turn to a state program. It's going to basically be a nonprofit program. The maximum coverage for individual parcels, I believe, is $750,000.” 

That maximum payout of $750,000 makes it ill-fit to our region’s real estate market, where even many deed-restricted properties fetch a higher value. For Cooper, the whole issue is just one more burden piled on to the affordability crisis affecting area residents. 

“I'm not sure where that leaves us,” she says. “It just leaves it all less affordable for us to be able to stay here in our beloved mountains where we thought we were going to grow old together as a family. But it's becoming more and more unlikely! And this is just yet another ‘notch.’”

This sense of uncertainty, even of defeat, amongst homeowners and some fire experts has not stopped those very communities and residents from trying to prepare. In the first part of this series, we heard from Caryn Borden, a resident of the Ski Ranches Neighborhood who performed mitigation work on her own property last year. She says, it’s going to take the whole community:

“You know, I can do my part, but if my neighbor doesn't do his part, it doesn't matter. It has to be a buy in from everybody. And not just Ski Ranches. So that's kind of….it's, it's hard.” she reflects. 

As the climate warms, and fire experts anticipate only increasing risk, landscapes, residents, and the insurance industry will have to find ways to adapt.