Private Firefighters Are Increasingly Popular With Insurers. But Do They Pose a Risk?

Robert MacKenzie is an assistant fire chief — but not the kind who works for your local fire department. As the Palisades Fire bore down on Southern California last week, the private fire crew he oversees headed out to help defend homes for their customers: insurance companies that offer wildfire protection to wealthy homeowners and others with the coverage built into their policies.

Working with lists of high-risk properties provided by insurers, the team from Capstone Fire and Safety Management aims to arrive at houses before a fire does, then make changes to the structure that will give it the best chance of survival. If a fire is getting close, they’ll smear a fire-protective gel on the side of the home, then get out.

“If the windows are open, maybe we can close them. If there’s a woodpile that’s too close to the home, we can move it,” said MacKenzie, who ran an in-house fire department for Southern California Edison before coming to work for Capstone. “Ninety percent of what we do is prevention.”

Capstone is part of a growing and controversial ecosystem of private firefighting companies that have seen themselves thrust into the spotlight as some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles have gone up in flames. It includes firefighters directly contracted with government agencies as well as those who work for insurance companies and directly for rich families and developers.

As California faces a future of more frequent and severe firestorms, the current fires have made clear that private companies are one way insurers and homeowners will respond to that threat. They’ve also posed the question of how the state should regulate private firefighters and how they should communicate with the public firefighting agencies leading disaster response.

One of Capstone’s clients is Pure Insurance, a boutique firm that advertises its services to high-net-worth individuals with luxury homes and art collections. But mainstream insurers are also offering wildfire defense services to their customers, typically included in the cost of their premium. Insurers that have contracted with fire defense companies include State Farm, which holds the most residential policies in the area covered by the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.

Insurers’ use of private firefighters “started years ago with some of the high-net-worth insurance carriers, but it’s moved into the standard market as well,” said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry association. “It is really part of the landscape now. And even average homeowners are really taking a look at their risk way more than they used to.”

“It’s not just the Kardashians,” agreed Matthew Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, referring to the time Kim and Kanye infamously used a private squad to protect their mansion from the Woolsey Fire.

Fire experts note that private firefighting is nothing new, dating back to the 1700s, before Benjamin Franklin co-founded the Union Fire Company, the first volunteer fire service organized to defend the whole community and not just its members.

But critics have skewered the private companies as creating a two-tiered system where those with more resources get better protection than everyone else. After billionaire developer Rick Caruso hired private crews to defend his Palisades Village mall, backlash spread on social media as images circulated of pristine chain stores with water trucks parked outside alongside burnt-out ruins of homes and small businesses. Caruso later pledged a $5 million donation to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation.

A 2018 California law requires private firefighters arriving in an evacuation zone to check in with the local incident commander and follow any of their instructions, including leaving the scene when asked. They’re not allowed to use the same radio frequency as government firefighters to communicate with each other, must mark their vehicles as “nonemergency” and avoid using sirens.

That law doesn’t prevent private firefighters from hooking up to public fire hydrants — though representatives for both the fire companies and the state’s fire protection department, Cal Fire, said they typically bring their own water trucks or connect to homeowners’ hydrants. It’s a sensitive issue because some hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry early last week as firefighters struggled to contain the blaze.

Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, who authored the 2018 law, said in a statement to CalMatters that it was sparked by previous wildfire seasons in 2007 and 2017 in which private firefighters entered disaster zones without coordinating with their public counterparts, confusing residents and distracting emergency responders.

“The public thought the private firefighters were public firefighters, which gave a false sense of security that there was emergency response in their neighborhoods,” she said. “Private firefighters were going into evacuation areas without prior authorization. In a couple of (instances) they had to be rescued, which put emergency personnel at risk.”

Aguiar-Curry said fire agencies are evaluating the effectiveness of the law as the Los Angeles fires unfold to see if any changes need to be made.

Insurers, who are likely staring down tens of billions of dollars in liability from the Los Angeles fires, have been willing to spend on wildfire defense in order to avoid the more costly loss of insured property. A contracted rate for private firefighters to visit a home and take preventive measures as a fire approaches can run about $1,000, said Mark Sektnan, vice president of state government relations for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, another industry group.

MacKenzie said Capstone is made up largely of retired firefighters and younger employees trying to gain the experience they need to be hired by a fire service. During the off-season, they visit insurers’ customers and give them tips on how to fire-harden their properties.

When they’re on site at a fire, he said, they try to know their limits, sticking to the jobs that emergency responders might not have time to do.

“We don’t want to become part of the incident and create more havoc for the responding agencies,” he said. “If there are small spot fires, like an ember coming from half a mile away, we’ll extinguish that. But if that fire is coming up the canyon at a rapid rate, we typically gel the side of the exposed home and we’ll leave and make sure our folks are safe.”

The company has visited more than 2,000 homes during the current Los Angeles firestorm, said MacKenzie, fielding a team of 16 engines with 34 people at the height of their operation.

Another company widely used by insurers, Wildfire Defense Systems, says it has responded to 1,400 wildfires since 2008 and has a 99% success rate in saving structures if it arrives on scene in time to prepare the property.

“The people that actually have to put money at risk in these situations are insurance companies and reinsurance companies, so I think it’s important to look at what they think is effective,” said Wara, the Stanford researcher. “They think (home hardening by private firefighters) is highly effective and want to see more of it.”

A key question, said Wara, is whether private firefighters hired by insurers can get to a fire scene fast enough and whether they’re admitted by the on-site commander. He said he’d heard from private firefighting crews who attempted to enter the Palisades Fire zone and were turned away.

Captain Dan Collins, a spokesperson for Cal Fire on the Palisades Fire, said he couldn’t confirm whether private crews had been denied permission to enter, but that if they were, it was for their own safety.

Unlike private firefighters who are contracted directly with Cal Fire, fire crews who work for insurers or homeowners may not have the same training as regular firefighters, Collins said. Some fire departments, for example, require firefighters to be trained as paramedics.

“There’s no way for us as professional firefighters to vet their training, or their personal protective equipment,” he said.

Private firefighters are also not communicating on the same system or always briefed on the overall plan for tackling the fire, he said. “It makes things harder if we’re in a dynamic fire situation and we drive by some unknown type engine and we can’t get a hold of them or advise them of danger or something happening. It creates a potentially dangerous situation for those people.”

“No one wants to take on that liability,” he added.

Of the more than 5,000 people fighting the Palisades Fire, Collins said Cal Fire had contracted one private fire engine with a four-person crew. They were previously vetted by Cal Fire and report to a Cal Fire supervisor, he said.

“Firefighting resources that prevent the destruction of a residence are helpful on incidents like these, with an emphasis on coordination and accountability,” Cal Fire added in a statement provided after publication. The agency said it had worked with private companies to improve coordination over the past few years.

Will the private firefighting sector continue to grow? Ken Sebastiani directs the fire technology program at Santa Rosa Junior College, where about 1,200 students pass through each semester, many inspired to work in fire prevention by personal experience in the Tubbs, Glass and Carr fires, which ravaged the wine country.

He doesn’t see many go on to private firefighting companies, he said; most want to work for Cal Fire or municipal departments.

But he described the existence of private firefighting as a sign that with wildfire danger increasing, it’s all hands on deck. “It’s a global challenge, the need for firefighters, because of climate change,” he said. “It’s happening everywhere — Greece, Italy — so it’s not just California.”

“Until Mother Nature slows down, it’s really hard for the fire departments to catch up.”