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# On the Mendocino Coast, Wildfires Are Rare and Insurance Increases Are Steep
- URL: https://www.mendolocal.news/on-the-mendocino-coast-wildfires-are-rare-and-insurance-increases-are-steep/
- Published: 2026-11-13T16:58:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-13T17:36:56.000Z
- Description: On a foggy coast that state fire records show rarely burns, four Mendocino towns face California FAIR Plan increases of 35 to 40 percent — and, per dollar of coverage, now pay a higher rate for fire insurance than Los Angeles's fire zones.
- Author: Elise Cox
- Tags: Mendocino County, Mendocino Coast, News, Mendo Local enterprise

MENDOCINO, Calif. — Two of the Mendocino coast towns facing the largest California FAIR Plan increases this year — Mendocino, at nearly 40 percent, and Caspar, at close to 35 — sit on a foggy stretch of coast that, by the state's own fire records, has almost never burned.

Neither has a fire of 1,000 acres or more recorded within five miles in CAL FIRE's historical dataset, which reaches back more than a century; the only blaze logged near either is a 1.6-acre fire from August 2025\. Farther south in Manchester, where the filing projects a 40 percent increase, the last fire of 1,000 acres or more was a 2008 lightning fire four to five miles away; in Point Arena, up 36 percent, the last within five miles was in 1945\. Yet the FAIR Plan ties the increases to wildfire risk.

That paradox sharpens when the premiums are measured not in dollars but against what each home is insured for. Coastal Mendocino's FAIR policies cost less in absolute terms than those in Los Angeles's fire zones — but per dollar of coverage, the coast pays more than those fire zones do. Using the FAIR Plan's own public insured-value data alongside the figures in its rate filing, MendoLocal.News found that, once the increase takes effect, the average coastal Mendocino policyholder will pay about 0.43 percent of the home's insured value in premium, against 0.37 percent in 20 fire-prone Los Angeles County ZIP codes and 0.36 percent statewide. Inland Mendocino County, where the county's largest fires have clustered, will pay more still, about 0.55 percent.

What sets the coast apart is the size of the current increases, about 25 percent against 21 percent inland. In Manchester, a homeowner's annual premium comes to 0.56 percent of insured value — roughly 1.6 times the 0.34 percent a homeowner pays in Pacific Palisades, a Los Angeles neighborhood devastated by the January 2025 Palisades fire. Coastal Mendocino homes are insured for far less, about $920,000 on average against $1.6 million in the Los Angeles fire zones, but after the increase they still pay a higher rate on that value, though the gap narrows: the coast's rate rises from about 0.34 percent to 0.43, the Los Angeles fire zones' from 0.27 to 0.37\. The lower bill reflects a cheaper house, not a lighter rate.

The contrast with Southern California is not subtle. Los Angeles and San Diego counties — where the FAIR Plan's increases average 32 and 35 percent — have each recorded more than 300 fires of at least 1,000 acres, over 100 of them larger than 5,000, with major fires in nearly every recent year, including the Palisades and Eaton fires that leveled whole neighborhoods in January 2025\. The smaller Orange County has 63 large fires on its record. These are dense, combustible communities with long fire records. Coastal Mendocino is not: its homes sit on acre-plus lots, its summers are damp with marine fog, and its fire record is nearly blank. Per dollar of coverage, it is being priced above those fire-scarred communities.

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The plan's own explanation for its very steepest increases does not cite fire history. In a February response to state regulators, when it was seeking a larger increase, the FAIR Plan said policies facing increases above 100 percent get more of their premium from wind, hail, and vandalism coverage — optional, but carried by nearly all policyholders, and rising far faster than the plan's basic fire rates — and tend to have low wildfire scores, which mean lower wildfire premiums. That accounts for the extreme cases. It does not account for the 35 to 40 percent averages in the four hardest-hit coastal ZIP codes, which the filing's ZIP-level table does not break down by coverage.

How the FAIR Plan arrives at that result is easier to describe than it was two years ago, but the calculations are still impossible to follow down to the level of an individual home. The plan builds its rates on a wildfire catastrophe model that projects expected annual fire losses at roughly six times its ordinary, non-catastrophe claims. That model, Verisk's Wildfire Model for the United States, is now laid out in a 137-page document the company released in 2025 through a new state review.

Verisk says it was the first wildfire model to complete the Department of Insurance's catastrophe-model review for rate-setting. The documentation describes a model driven not only by where fires have burned but by climate and fuels: it draws on more than a century of weather data — temperature, precipitation, humidity, and a dryness gauge called vapor-pressure deficit — and calculates fire intensity down to a 90-meter grid.

But the same documentation shows the model learns the relationship between weather and fire not town by town but across broad ecological zones. Verisk builds a separate wildfire-weather model for each of 45 EPA "ecoregions" spanning the Western states, and it flags northwestern California's forested, largely interior North Coast Range as one of the zones where a warming climate most increases the acreage it expects to burn. The Mendocino coast is not in it: by the EPA's own ecoregion mapping, the coastal communities facing the steepest increases — Fort Bragg, Caspar, Mendocino, Point Arena, Manchester, and Gualala — all sit in a different ecoregion, the foggy "Coast Range," while the interior North Coast Range zone the model singles out lies well inland, taking in areas such as Willits.

What the public record does not show is why the plan's increases diverge so sharply between neighboring coastal ZIP codes — Manchester at 40 percent and Mendocino at 39.7, while Albion, between them, falls 1 percent and Little River rises 6 — or how a wet, fog-bound, low-density coast is weighed against a drier, forested interior. Those property-level scores, and the model that produces them, remain proprietary; the state's insurance regulator has said it will not require insurers to publicly submit the models themselves, only to publicly provide "relevant information, data, and documentation" about them.

Nor does the filing reconcile the increases with the plan's own stated rationale. The FAIR Plan told regulators that as a "residual market of last resort" it cannot control the "catastrophe aggregation and concentration risk" in its book — the danger that a single fire destroys many insured homes at once. That is a description of a dense wildland-urban interface, not of a scattered, low-density coast where few structures stand close enough to burn together.

The FAIR Plan did not respond to requests for comment. MendoLocal.News asked it, on Oct. 26 and again on Oct. 29, what drives the high wildfire scores on the Mendocino coast given its fire record, low density, and marine climate; whether its model credits coastal moisture and low housing density; why adjacent coastal ZIP codes diverge so sharply; and how it responds to the concern that low-fire areas pay a heavier rate per dollar of coverage.

The California Department of Insurance, which approved the filing, also did not respond. MendoLocal.News asked the department how it evaluates whether the geographic spread of increases matches actual risk; whether it examines premium relative to home value by region; its position on model transparency; and the insurance commissioner's view on low-fire areas paying rates comparable to, or higher than, fire-scarred ones.

The plan actually relies on two models, and the public record neither clearly explains why the coast in particular is being hit so hard. A per-property wildfire score from ZestyAI, called Z-FIRE, helps set each home's share of the risk; the Verisk catastrophe model sets the broader fire-loss and reinsurance loads that drive the overall increase.

ZestyAI said in a statement that its score "is not used to establish the California FAIR Plan's base rates" but helps "assess the relative wildfire risk of individual properties." The company said the model accounts for each location's temperature, precipitation, wind, and drought patterns, along with vegetation, terrain, proximity to fire suppression resources, surrounding building density, and characteristics of the home itself, and that the Department of Insurance has approved it for use in rating in multiple insurers' filings. The statement did not address why neighboring coastal ZIP codes saw such different increases.

Asked directly about the coast, Verisk did not discuss Mendocino's specific numbers but defended the method in general terms. Average annual loss, the figure the model produces, "is the modeled expected loss per year across a range of potential wildfire events" and "is not a prediction of what losses will be in any particular year," said Dr. Julia Borman, an assistant vice president at the company, in a statement. The model "accounts for climate and local conditions, as well as factors such as vegetation and fuels, ignition, fire spread and intensity, and the properties exposed to the hazard," she said, and "does not rely on wildfire history alone." An area that "hasn't experienced a significant fire in the historical record," she added, "doesn't necessarily have low or negligible wildfire risk."

The CAL FIRE fire-perimeter record is incomplete, especially for older and smaller fires, and the FAIR Plan's model is deliberately forward-looking, built on fuel, terrain, wind, and climate rather than only on what has burned before — so the past is not, by itself, proof the model is wrong, a point Verisk makes directly.

But fire history frames a question the filing does not answer: Is a foggy, low-density coast that rarely burns being charged for a risk it does not carry?

Assemblymember Chris Rogers, whose North Coast district includes these communities, said the question arrives as the Legislature is already wrestling with how California spreads wildfire costs. Reached by phone on Oct. 29 as he drove home from a joint Assembly hearing in Sacramento on the subrogation of wildfire claims — the third in a legislative series on California's wildfire crisis — Rogers said he had used the newsroom's findings to press the panel on how the state apportions fire risk. Rogers said it was worth looking into whether low-risk areas are subsidizing high-risk areas in the FAIR Plan.

He said now was a good moment for that discussion: "we're having these hearings that are on who shoulders the liability and who shoulders the risk." Rogers, a member of the Assembly's Utilities and Energy Committee, which has held a series of joint hearings with the Insurance Committee on wildfire risk and liability, said the reporting would help him formulate "smarter questions to ask."

*This is the second story in our series on the California Fair Plan. Read the* [*first story.*](https://www.mendolocal.news/fair-plan-premiums-rise-across-mendocino-county-especially-on-the-coast/)

#### **How we reported this story**

This story builds on our earlier coverage of the FAIR Plan increases. The figures come from the plan’s approved rate filing and its own public data, plus our calculations. Here is what we used, and how.

- **The rate filing.** California Department of Insurance file 25-2174 (SERFF tracking number MOCC-134657692) is the FAIR Plan’s dwelling-fire rate application, approved in April 2026\. The 2,619-page filing is public through the department’s online rate-filing search; we downloaded it Oct. 24, 2026\. The per-ZIP premiums are from its “Exhibit 20,” which lists, for each ZIP code, the policies in force on March 31, 2025, their premiums at current rates, and what the plan projects they would pay under the approved rates.
- **Premium as a share of insured value.** Our central measure is premium per dollar of coverage: each area’s total FAIR premium divided by the total insured value of its policies. We used it because raw premium dollars track home value as much as risk. Premium is from Exhibit 20; insured value and policy counts are from the FAIR Plan’s own public FY2025 data by ZIP code, as of Sept. 30, 2025\. The premium is the **total dwelling-policy premium — fire plus the allied wind, hail, and vandalism coverages, not fire coverage alone.**
- **Coast, inland and statewide.** We defined the coast as the same ten ZIP codes as our earlier story — Westport, Fort Bragg, Caspar, Mendocino, Little River, Albion, Elk, Manchester, Point Arena, and Gualala — and inland as the county’s other 17\. After the increase, the average coastal policy pays about 0.43 percent of insured value (about 0.34 percent now), inland about 0.55 percent, and statewide about 0.36 percent, across the 1,650 ZIP codes we could match to a county. The coast’s average increase is about 25 percent, inland about 21 percent.
- **The Los Angeles comparison.** We compared the coast with 20 fire-prone Los Angeles County ZIP codes we chose — Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Topanga, Calabasas, Agoura Hills, Altadena, La Cañada Flintridge, Sierra Madre, three in Pasadena, Sunland, Tujunga, Acton, Sun Valley, Sylmar, two in Glendale, Brentwood, and Bel Air. The selection is our judgment, not an official classification. Those ZIP codes pay about 0.37 percent of insured value after the increase, on an average insured value of about $1.57 million a policy, against about $920,000 on the coast.
- **The Pacific Palisades comparison.** It is approximate. That ZIP code’s FAIR Plan rolls shrank after the January 2025 Palisades fire (from about 1,849 to 1,557 policies), so its premium (from March 31, 2025) and its insured value (from Sept. 30, 2025) come from dates six months apart in 2025.
- **Small ZIP codes.** Several coastal ZIP codes carry few policies, so their averages can swing with a handful of policies.
- **Southern California fire counts.** The counts of large fires come from CAL FIRE’s historical fire-perimeter records, intersected with county boundaries: Los Angeles County has 325 fires of at least 1,000 acres (126 of them above 5,000); San Diego 333 (113); Orange 63 (30).
- **Coastal fire history.** Also from CAL FIRE’s historical fire-perimeter records. We counted every recorded fire of 1,000 acres or more whose perimeter came within five miles of each town’s center. CAL FIRE says its records are incomplete, especially for older and smaller fires.
- **The catastrophe model.** The plan builds its rates on a wildfire catastrophe model, Verisk’s Wildfire Model for the United States. The “six times” comparison is the filing’s catastrophe adjustment factor of 5.97\. The model is described in Verisk’s public California documentation (filing PRID-2025-00001, 137 pages, 2025) and in a written statement from the company.
- **Ecoregions.** The Verisk documentation fits a separate wildfire-weather model to each of 45 EPA “ecoregions.” We looked up each town’s ecoregion in the EPA’s Level III Ecoregions service (Nov. 12, 2026): Fort Bragg, Caspar, Mendocino, Point Arena, Manchester, and Gualala fall in ecoregion 1, the Coast Range; Willits and other interior towns fall in ecoregion 78, the Klamath Mountains/California High North Coast Range that the documentation flags for the largest climate-driven increases.
- **The two models.** Each property’s wildfire “territory” is set from two scores from the company ZestyAI (its Z-FIRE score); the Verisk model sets the broader catastrophe loads. ZestyAI and Verisk each responded in writing, and we quote their statements. Each property’s own score, and the models themselves, are proprietary; the Department of Insurance has said it will not require insurers to publicly submit the models, only to publicly provide “relevant information, data, and documentation.”
- **Assemblymember Rogers.** Chris Rogers was interviewed by phone Oct. 29, after a joint oversight hearing of the Assembly’s Utilities and Energy and Insurance committees on the subrogation of wildfire claims — the third in the Legislature’s series on California’s wildfire crisis. His quotes are from a recording of the call.
- **What the figures are not.** They are projections of what the plan’s filing says it would charge for the policies it had in March 2025, not actual renewal bills. A bill also depends on a property’s own wildfire score, which optional coverages it carries, and annual adjustments to insured value.
- **Comment.** We asked the FAIR Plan and the California Department of Insurance for comment on Oct. 26, and followed up with the FAIR Plan on Oct. 29\. Neither responded.

Questions or corrections: [editor@mendolocal.news](mailto:editor@mendolocal.news)