As Western wildfires force evacuations in Arizona and California – on the heels of an early and severe wildfire season in New Mexico – insurers are increasingly eyeing the growing risks.

“Insurers are very much concerned about the wildfire situation,” said Arindam Samanta, director of product management for Verisk Underwriting Solutions. “We are talking to dozens of insurers.”

The increased interest has led to increased sales of Verisk’s wildfire modeling and data, Samanta said.

Things look bad with California’s ever-sooner wildfire season seemingly approaching and what’s shaping up to be a severe drought across the Western U.S.

The plague of wildfires in the past few years in California have made things tough for residents and businesses, and in the last few years, larger and more frequent wildfires have been particularly bad for utilities.

One business segment that’s getting some bad breaks are contractors that work for utilities or that work in wildfire-prone areas.

Roughly three dozen pieces of California legislation are directly related to wildfire, and while those bills should hold much interest for the insurance community, there are other bills making their rounds that should draw a great deal of concern.

So far 2,369 bills have been introduced in state Legislature this year, according to John Norwood of Norwood Associates, an industry lobbyist who also represents the California Insurance Wholesalers Association.

Norwood said he’s by encouraged by all the attention California’s wildfires are getting.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Monday announced a new partnership between the California Department of Insurance and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Administration to establish statewide standards for home and community hardening aimed at reducing wildfire risk, protecting lives and property and making insurance available and affordable to residents and businesses.

Co-workers Rajdeep Singh, 35, of Rocklin, Calif., and David Bailey, Jr., 29, of Sacramento, were arrested on multiple counts of insurance fraud and arson after allegedly conspiring to commit vehicular arson in order to receive an undeserved insurance payout of over $30,000.

The Sacramento Fire Department on June 24 responded to a vehicle fire in a parking lot and identified the vehicle as a 2016 Honda Pilot. The morning of the fire, the registered owner’s son, Singh, arrived on the scene and claimed the vehicle had been stolen while he was working at his job, Primetime Autos, a used car dealership where he worked as a finance manager.

Given that business-as-usual is unlikely to return soon due to the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. property/casualty insurers will continue to face challenges related to virus-related insurance losses and premium volume declines in 2021, according to Fitch Ratings.

The operational and risk management challenges of managing workforce flexibility, limiting risk aggregations and reducing claims exposure through clarity of policy terms will endure beyond the pandemic and become “new normal” longer-term drivers of the industry, contend analysts James Auden and Christopher Grimes, authors of “The Next Phase: U.S. Property/ Casualty Insurers.”

First Street Foundation, a nonprofit agency, is making accurate climate change-adjusted flood scores available for every property in the U.S. today. There are government-produced maps showing 8.7 million homes and properties at significant flood risk—and it turns out those may have underestimated the amount of real estate at risk by 67%. Or, in other words, an additional 6 million properties face a significant risk of flood.

Before these individual property scores were available, there was no easy way for your average homeowner or buyer to understand the flood risk associated with specific properties. That’s particularly problematic because climate change is causing flood risk to increase; there are more extreme rain events and coastal flooding than there used to be.

As in 1918, New York may use staggered work hours to keep subway safe

As New York City makes plans to reopen in the coming months, officials are dusting off the playbook from the 1918 flu pandemic, when businesses were ordered to begin their work days at staggered times to prevent the subway from becoming a vector of disease.

The California Catastrophe Response Council, which oversees the Wildfire Fund, has formally named the California Earthquake Authority the fund’s administrator.

The Wildfire Fund was established by the California Legislature, under Assembly Bill 1054 and Assembly Bill 111, and was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on July 12, 2019. At that time, CEA was designated the fund’s interim administrator until the nine-member California Catastrophe Response Council could be formed and appoint an administrator.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara on Tuesday issued a notice requiring insurance companies and other California Department of Insurance licensees to comply with their obligations to fairly investigate all business interruption claims caused by COVID-19.

The notice follows numerous complaints from businesses, public officials, and other stakeholders of certain insurance representatives attempting to dissuade business policyholders affected by COVID-19 from filing a notice of claim under business interruption insurance coverage or refusing to open and investigate these claims upon receipt of a notice of claim, according to the CDI.