Those stupid hippies

There's an additional fire insurance policy that can be purchased to have a company come in and spray your house down with fire-retardant chemicals and take some other fire-preventive measures if your house is in danger of being consumed by a wildfire. The company (Chubb Wildfire Defense) that provides this service has a written understanding with local firefighting services regarding what they will and won't do.  Chubb's work possibly was responsible for saving ten houses that were within the burn zone and were covered by their policies.

So what's the reaction from a local Boulderite?

"When you don't have that policy and someone else does, it sets up a have and have-nots kind of feeling," she said.

I'm not going to provide links here, but this poor have-not's two-bedroom, one-bath house was valued at over $400,000 prior to the fire, and prior to the housing crash is was valued at almost $600,000.  So I'm going to make a wild-assed guess that she might have been financially able to purchase a policy that included this protection.  She had Allstate insurance, there's no reason she couldn't have purchased from Chubb instead. 

So I'm curious...Is it better to have ALL your neighbors' houses burn down than to allow a few of them to buy extra protection for their houses to protect their investments?  Or would it be better to just raise everyone's rates so they can all have this sort of protection? 

It's this same sort of stupidity that's creating a lot of the health care debate.  People buy low-end policies and then are surprised when they don't get high-end treatment.  And there's no way we can give low rates to everyone and expect everyone to get high-end treatment; math just doesn't work like that.

Posted by: Alice H at 03:26 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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