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CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE SEASON ARRIVES EARLY, ADDING TO CHAOTIC YEAR
By Lynette Bertrand, Communications Manager, CACM
On August 27, Rena MacDonell, CCAM, was working from a hotel room. With both her office and home on fire evacuation notices, MacDonell had no choice but to set up office remotely there.
MacDonell, a regional manager for The John Stewart Company in Scotts Valley who manages multiple properties of both HOA and apartments, said she had been evacuated from her office for a week. Luckily, most of the 21 people in the office were set up to work remotely already thanks to COVID.
“COVID was a great precursor to this,” she said. “It made us become better equipped to be mobile. We can pick up in a minute’s notice and be somewhere else. COVID was a great precursor to make us be prepared for other things.”
While California is no stranger to wildfires, this year has been particularly bad. The wildfire season started earlier than usual and has been deemed one of the most dangerous and overwhelming fire seasons in history with more than 3 million acres blackened by midSeptember due to high temperatures, strong winds, dry forests and lightning storms. On August 15, lightning strikes started hundreds of fires across Northern California.
The fire evacuation order in MacDonell’s area was lifted just moments before our phone interview. None of the communities she
manages were impacted, however, a couple were on the edge of evacuation zones. Most of her communities were in Santa Cruz County, with one in Santa Clara County— both counties impacted by the CZU and SCU Lightning Complex fires (see sidebar).
“We’ve sent out notices to two of them saying, ‘Be prepared.’ If the fire starts coming this way, you’ll need to evacuate,” she said at the time.
Even before the start of the fires in midAugust, MacDonell said properties were facing impact and challenges as a result of people working from home due to the pandemic. Trash is building up faster. There are more sewer blockages as plumbing is used more often and by more people who are at home, and parking has also become a bigger headache. Not only are people home all the time, but so are their college kids who are learning remotely, prompting parking violations, hearings and towing.
By mid-September, when we checked back in with MacDonnell, things had settled down—at least on the fire front.
“Everybody is happy to see a little bit of blue sky over our head again,” she said on September 17. “Everyone is jumping for joy that they can go outside and breathe air. A real uplift for people in our community. None of our properties were directly affected because they weren’t up in the mountains. Many of them accommodated evacuees.”
Eileen Sullivan, CCAM, of LLW Properties in Vacaville said that at one point in August, as many as four communities they managed were on mandatory evacuations and three were in evacuation warning areas where many residents evacuated voluntarily. LLW Properties’ own office was closed due to the wildfires for three days.
“All communities are repopulated with no direct fire damage,” she wrote in an email to CACM. “Staff, friends and vendors have lost homes and we are pitching in to help them out as best we can. [We’re] definitely receiving a lot of requests for information on Master Policies and what individual owners in the condominiums or townhome communities need for insurance. Of course the owners are being referred to the association’s or their independent insurance agent for policy details and recommendations.”
LLW Properties also has rental and sales divisions in addition to its community management services, and Sullivan said any available rentals were scooped up right away and the phones had been ringing a lot with requests for housing.
One impact from the fires up in Northern California is that many insurance carriers implemented moratoriums on writing new policies for properties within these fire zones.
“We have had one smaller single family association in Napa that took their common area insurance out to bid for their policy coming up on 9/2,” Sullivan said. “They selected a different carrier that was about 10% less. Due to a moratorium many of the carriers have right now on writing new policies in our area of the state, they refused to write the new policy for them and the association had to stay with their current carrier.”
Sullivan said she’s heard that a number of sale closings were similarly affected as buyers are having difficulty getting insurance bound on their new homes in Solano and Napa Counties.
And as community managers look to the fall and winter, the concern is potential landslides if it’s a particularly rainy season. For communities near hills or slopes that were burnt due to the fires, heavy rainfall can bring on landslides. Consulting with a soil expert and looking into landslide coverage are ways to prepare for potential problems. At the time of this writing in midSeptember, more than 17,400 firefighters remained on the frontlines of 26 major and three extended wildfires in California, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Since the beginning of the year, there have been nearly 7,900 wildfires that have burned over 3.4 million acres in the state. Since August 15, when California’s fire activity elevated, there have been 25 fatalities and nearly 5,400 structures destroyed. According to Cal Fire, five of the top 20 largest wildfires in California history occurred this year.
Fires of Interest
LNU Lightning Complex
Multiple North Bay counties affected: Napa, Lake, Sonoma, Colusa, Solano and Yolo Counties 363,220 acres | 98% contained | Date started: 8/17/20
CZU Lightning Complex
San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties affected 86,509 acres | 95% contained | Date started: 8/16/20
SCU Lightning Complex
Multiple East Bay counties affected; Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Joaquin, Merced and Stanislaus Counties 396,624 acres | 98% contained | Date started: 8/18/20
This in addition to multiple forest fires across the state. For full fire status report, go to fire.ca.gov.
Source: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (as of Sept. 17, 2020)
