‘A ton of unknowns’: months ago, LA residents lost wildfire insurance. Then the fires came
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After insurers like State Farm dropped policies, to switch to the state’s Fair plan was prohibitively pricey for many. When Palisades resident James Borow realized last Tuesday that his house was on fire, he was 300 miles away in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. The power was out at his house but a friend suggested he remotely turn on his Tesla and see if the cameras showed anything.
![[silhouette of person standing in front of bright ember flames]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1c0ce485afe4feb9baabe0d2702bbf3bb93b207a/0_0_5500_3667/master/5500.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
From the car camera, he watched in a panic as his house burned. As he drove home from Vegas to LA, he called his parents and told them: “You’ll see it on the news tomorrow, but the house is totally gone. I just watched it.”. Borow’s first concern was securing a place for his family to live. His second was about insurance. Three months ago, he’d received a letter from his insurer, State Farm, that his fire policy wasn’t being renewed. The letter advised him to get fire insurance through California’s Fair plan, created by lawmakers 50 years ago to help people who had no other options for insurance. “The end result was that my insurance increased 400%,” says Borow. “It was expensive, but it wasn’t complicated.”.
Borow was one of 1,626 State Farm customers in the Palisades neighborhood whose fire insurance was not renewed at the end of 2024, according to California’s insurance office. They represented about 70% of State Farm’s market share in Pacific Palisades, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
