When a wildfire started spreading through the Pacific Palisades last Tuesday morning, employees of Wildfire Defense Systems, which provides “loss intervention services” to insurance companies, were already nearby, Dave Torgerson, the company’s founder, said.
Once they arrived at the scene, the private company’s workers stood back for a while, waiting for the government firefighters to complete the most urgent life-saving efforts. When they got clearance from public fire officials, they started their job, which focuses on protecting insured homes and businesses, Torgerson said.
Wildfire Defense Systems, founded in 2008, works with three dozen insurance carriers to help prevent the costly wildfire damage to homes and businesses that insurance companies will ultimately be responsible for paying. It’s an increasingly high-stakes issue for the insurance industry as the climate crisis fuels more frequent and intense fires: insurance losses for the various wildfires encircling Los Angeles are already estimated at $20bn.
As of Friday, Torgerson said, his Montana-based company had employees at every fire across the Los Angeles area, working to “break the cycle of ignition”, by stopping individual buildings from catching on fire.
While his company uses a wide variety of fireblocking gels, flame retardants and other equipment to protect at-risk buildings, “the biggest component of making a structure survive a wildfire incident is labor”, he said.
His company was not the only one providing boots on the ground in Los Angeles for major insurance companies. Capstone, a California-based private fire service company, said in a statement that as of Friday it was “operating over 30 wildfire engines deployed throughout southern California”. Capstone works for utility companies, property owners and insurance companies, including helping to staff the “wildfire response program” for USAA, a major company providing insurance and other financial services to military families across the US.
USAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As ongoing wildfires burn across Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, the use of private firefighting crews has prompted furious public debate.
Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer who lost the most recent race for Los Angeles mayor, protected his outdoor mall in the Pacific Palisades with private firefighters from Arizona and massive water trucks, the New York Times reported – an effort that was successful.
“Our property is standing. Everything around us is gone,” Caruso told the Times.
Caruso’s private residence in Brentwood was also protected this past weekend by workers from at least five different private companies, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Adam Leber, a Hollywood talent manager, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he had hired a company called All Risk Shield to guard his Hollywood Hills home, which was threatened by fire on Wednesday night. A Chronicle reporter’s video of workers tending the house went viral, prompting furious comments such as: “Private and firefighter should not be in the same sentence.”
Another wealthy Angeleno, Keith Wasserman, prompted an even angrier social media backlash and international tabloid headlines after posting a message on X on Wednesday: “Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades? Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning. Will pay any amount.” The post was later deleted.
But private efforts to combat wildfires are not just for the mansions of the superrich. In fact, many private companies that respond to wildfires now work for insurers, who seek to minimize the policies they would have to pay out.
AIG once touted its “Wildfire Defense Unit” as “the first insurance provider to introduce a proactive mitigation service to help safeguard homes throughout wildfire season.”
AIG’s service, which launched in 2005, was initially limited to members of the insurer’s Private Client Group “in 14 of California’s wealthiest zip codes, including Brentwood, Malibu and Bel Air”, before being expanded more widely, Vanity Fair reported.
Today, many insurance companies, including USAA, Chubb, Farmers, Pure and Travelers, contract with private companies to do “wildfire defense services”, which can include helping insurance customers prepare their homes for potential wildfires, as well as responding during a fire itself.
An overwhelming majority of the properties that Torgerson’s company serves are “average value homes with main street carriers”, he said. The number of firefighters working to protect individual properties of high-net worth individuals, he said, is probably “a fraction of one-tenth of 1%”.
The private firefighting force remains much smaller than the public firefighting force. Torgenson estimates that more than 90% of firefighting work is done by local, state and federal firefighters and government contractors.
And while investing in keeping properties from being destroyed in wildfires increasingly makes sense for insurance companies in a time of strapped firefighting resources, it also raises many questions.
Mike Lopez, the secretary-treasurer of the California Professional Firefighters, which represents 35,000 firefighters across the state, “99.99% of them public workers”, questioned whether the training, experience and equipment of for-profit fire service employees were up to the standards of experienced public firefighters.
And at the scene of a fire, where communication is already a challenge, having services focused on protecting insurance customers working next to public firefighters risks creating “a magnificent debacle of hierarchies of command”, he argued.
“Just because you squirt water out of a hose, that doesn’t make you a firefighter,” Lopez said.
While the individual workers who show up to fight fires for private companies are probably “good guys” and “well-intentioned”, Lopez said, “I’d like to know how many of these private providers were in Altadena, in a lower-income neighborhood, providing these resources, versus in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu.”
The different salaries and benefits that firefighters receive for their dangerous work is also an issue. Among federal wildland firefighters in particular, low salaries have been a major concern in recent years, and as firefighters battle ever more dangerous blazes, they are still waiting for Congress to take action to make their salary raises permanent.
Federal firefighters, who were also deployed into Los Angeles last week, expressed concerns at how many of their colleagues have left the service, some lured into private work for better pay.
But, if firefighters who work for the public are killed on the job, “we have death benefits to take care of their families,” Lopez said. A few years ago, when a firefighter for a private company was killed, their company raised money for their family through a GoFundMe, he said.
But Torgerson, the founder of Wildfire Defense Systems, argues that, as the climate crisis causes wildfires to become more frequent and more intense, companies who work to prevent economic losses for insurance companies and their customers also have a crucial role to play. “We work to keep insurance available in the marketplace,” he said – no easy task, as many insurers have begun backing away from insuring properties in wildfire-prone California.
His company has 17 years of experience in working in incidents run by public firefighters, and knows how to use the correct communication channels and obey the appropriate chain of command, he said.
Torgerson said workers for his company responded quickly to the fires in Altadena, as well as the wealthy Palisades, and that they were union firefighters who know the value of particular houses, but were doing their best to mitigate as much damage as possible under volatile wildfire conditions.
One of the challenges of the Eaton fire in Altadena, he said, was how fast it moved: “We can do a lot more work when the fires take more time,” he said.
The National Wildfire Suppression Association, an Oregon-based group that represents 369 private wildland fire services companies across the US, Canada and Australia, said in a statement on Monday that most of its member companies “work through state and federal contracts, supplementing [public] agencies when their resources are depleted”, and that some of them were responding to the fires in Los Angeles.
“A small percentage – less than 1% – of contractors are hired directly by private homeowners or landowners for both fire prevention/mitigation and response services,” Deborah Miley, the group’s executive director, said in a statement on Tuesday.
But contractors who do wildfire prevention and mitigation work for insurance companies are “a growing segment of the industry”, she said.
Despite all the media headlines, Torgerson said, as of Friday, his employees had spotted only about five or six trucks of private firefighters working across all the Los Angeles fires.
Lopez, of the California Professional Firefighters, said he did not have an estimate of what percentage of California firefighters worked for private companies versus public agencies.
Major fires, especially ones where public firefighters “get stretched thin”, attract many different kinds of workers, including “asset protection groups” that work to protect the equipment of major companies and institutions, such as Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Lopez said, who “are also not firefighters”.
The ethos of professional firefighters is simply different than those of any company providing resources to protect their bottom line, Lopez argued.
“When you have a private fire company, there’s a profit margin that they have to meet. We don’t have that,” he said. “Our profit margin is life, safety. Do they live or do they die? Do we save their property? That’s our margin.”
Multiple insurance companies, including Chubb, Travelers and Farmers, did not immediately respond to requests for comments on what role their company’s contractors were playing in the Los Angeles wildfire response.
Gabrielle Canon contributed reporting
