Marshall Fire won’t be Colorado’s last big fire; opinion

In a 1992 interview, novelist Cormac McCarthy told The New York Times that, in regard to housing, “Three moves is as good as a fire” – the moves being changes of address, the fire being a housefire.

Our situation 28 years later involved both a wildfire and three moves. The Creek fire of September 2020 – at that time the largest single-source wildfire in California history by acreage – destroyed our home and our community of Pine Ridge, just south of Shaver Lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  The three moves involved, first, our evacuation from Pine Ridge to a hotel in Fresno, then to what our insurance company called “temporary housing” (also in Fresno), then our recent relocation to the Denver area, where my wife has family.

When I hear now that Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest power provider, is disputing the conclusions of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office that a faulty Xcel Energy power line was one of two sources of the Marshall fire on Dec. 30, 2021 – and that Xcel is now being sued by 150 insurance companies – I feel a strange sense of post-traumatic déjà vu.

Government largesse for evacuation relocation and post-fire site cleanup only goes so far. Then the round robin firing-squad begins. Insured homeowners, having lost everything and discovering that they are now underinsured, take aim at their insurance companies. The insurers take aim at the utility companies for negligence and property damage. The utilities warn that, if they are found liable, they are underinsured to cover lawsuit payouts and will have to take aim at their customers, charging higher rates to make up the shortfall.

We’ve seen this movie before.  Just substitute the Camp Fire and Paradise, Calif., for the Marshall Fire and Superior or Louisville. Substitute PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) for Xcel Energy. Substitute the policyholders and ratepayers of one disaster for the other.

Ruins are interchangeable.

After the Creek Fire, many of our burned-out neighbors were hopeful that sparking power lines would prove to be the smoking gun for our wildfire. Those hopes were dashed when investigators concluded the it was likely the result of a strike from a dry lightning bust that swept through a few weeks earlier and left a small fire skunking around inside a tree the lightning had hit. The blaze grew for over a month.

An act of God, or natural causes, or climate change collateral damage, then.  But the members of that trinity are notoriously hard to sue, and the majority of the Creek Fire’s rural victims didn’t believe in climate change anyway.

The lesson here is that just about everyone in the firing squad has turned out to be underinsured. Like many policyholders, we had an inflation rider in our insurance policy – but that inflation rider did not even come close to riding far enough to cover the actual inflation, especially with surge-demand pricing and supply-chain issues thrown in. PG&E turned out to be underinsured too, and so began passing along its liability costs to ratepayers.

Here in Colorado, many policyholders who suffered through the Marshall Fire are similarly underinsured, for similar reasons. Although Xcel Energy has an estimated $500 million in insurance, it also has an estimated $2 billion in payouts due, if found liable for the Marshall fire.  Ratepayers seem likely to be on the hook again.

Even the insurance companies are underinsured – just ask the backstopping governments and the reinsurance companies (most based in Switzerland) that insure the insurance companies.

It shouldn’t take alien insurance adjusters coming from the stars to tell us “We’re afraid your species is underinsured” for us to realize that, as sure as this world turns, this world is going to burn — if we don’t turn it around.

The next move, and the fire next time, are all ours.

Howard V. Hendrix is the author of six novels and many essays, poems and short stories.  After years of trying to rebuild their home following its destruction by the Creek fire, he and his wife have recently purchased a home in the Denver Area.

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