LOS ANGELES – Nearly 11 months after the devastating Palisades fire, Karen Martinez is far from the first to break ground on her new home.
However, their reconstruction celebration could be the first to involve the use of a blowtorch.
Neighbors who lost everything in the Sunset Mesa neighborhood crowded around the demonstration earlier this month as contractors held a flame to the insulated composite concrete form (ICCF) that will ultimately form the insulation in their concrete walls.
“Basically it’s ground up expanded polystyrene,” Martinez said. “They take things that would normally end up in the landfill, crumble them up and then mix them with cement.”
The material is environmentally friendly, fire and termite resistant, and strong enough to withstand a major earthquake.
Martinez hopes the fire-resistant material will allow her to transfer her property from the California FAIR plan to a better policy with private insurance. Among the neighbors gathered to view the construction materials was Mercury Insurance President and COO Victor Joseph, who said his company covered about 700 properties destroyed in the two major fires in January.
“This is the type of construction that we as an insurance company offer the most incentives for,” Joseph said of the composite material. “We believe this is a solution – or part of a solution – to the wildfire problem we face.”
While insurance companies offer insurance discounts for fire-resistant structures, there is no guarantee that these homeowners will be excluded from the FAIR plan, said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog.
“Without an insurance guarantee, we are setting ourselves up to be a hindrance,” Balber said, arguing the state should do more to require private insurance companies to cover fire-resistant homes. Despite changes aimed at keeping private insurance companies in California, a recent New York Times investigation found that the number of homes in the FAIR plan has increased to over 600,000 policies.
The current moratorium, which prevents insurance companies from denying additional policies in the Palisades and Eaton fire areas, expires in January.
The fear about the future insurability of these communities is real – seven years after the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, Mercury is the only private insurance company to return. Joseph said the company made the decision to return to the city after taking a tour and seeing many safety improvements to reduce the risk of wildfires by building more resilient structures and creating defensible space.
“We could see that this awareness permeates everything in the city, and yet we saw that they were still struggling to find more affordable and available insurance products,” Joseph said. “We felt it was right to come here and offer better options to homeowners there.”
Joseph said they hope other insurance companies will join in Mercury's return to paradise. He said the company has no plans to drop policyholders in the Eaton and Palisades fire areas.
“From my perspective, if you look at the Palisades or Altadena, you're going to see a period of time where the wildfire threat is, unfortunately, a lot less because of what they've been through,” Joseph said.
Now that the county has approved ICCF for new homes, Martinez said her neighbors plan to use it too.
“I look at the big picture,” Martinez said. “I think every single house should be built from non-combustible material. Why are we still building with wood when wood burns?”