FORTUNE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021 135residents in harm’s way. She recalls contentious discussions
with town officials, after which they agreed to hire a private
consultant to assess local vegetation. When the consultant,
Ray Moritz, began putting together his own map and re-
port, town leaders were floored to discover he had identi-
fied more of the town than Cal Fire had as of very high con-
cern. In a vitriolic 2008 town council meeting, speaker after
speaker fumed that the Moritz map would hit their homes’
insurability and values. One council member, according to
the official minutes, declared the body “should do whatever
it could to get the State to adopt its original map.”
That opposition infuriated Enea, who saw it as valuing
money over life. “I was blown away,” she recalls. “My job
was to protect them and they didn’t want any part of it.”
Portola Valley did adopt a slate of tougher state building
rules designed to improve the fire resistance of structures.
And it inserted in its overall planning document refer-
ences to Moritz’s map and report. But the town council
declined to formally adopt either the Cal Fire map or the
Moritz one. Dennis, the current town manager, agrees
that residents and leaders back then were leery of any-
thing they thought would raise insurance rates and lower
property values. That’s a reluctance he ventures would
not prevail today. “There would be many more voices in
that conversation, because of climate change,” he tells me.
“We’ve got new information. New times.”
That new information hit the town in the form of
California’s disastrous 2017 and 2018 fire seasons. It has
prompted Portola Valley to start reckoning with some hard
choices. In 2019, just as insurers began gunning to update
state policy governing fire-insurance pricing, the town
council created a committee to recommend ways to reduce
wildfire danger. The 2020 CZU fire further fanned local
concern, says John Richards, a soft-spoken architect who
has served on the town council since 2009. “That woke
people up. There was a massive plume over there,” he tells
me, gesturing westward as we sit at the town-hall picnic
table. One wrenching realization this arboreal retreat is
confronting, he says, is that it should no longer allow the
unchecked growth of trees. “The idea that we could let
nature take its course,” he says, “is no longer an option.”
Work crews in the town are scrambling to clear away
brush, but the task is “monumental,” Don Bullard, the
current fire marshal, tells me as we drive around town one
recent morning in his official SUV. “Those are all assets
at risk,” he says, pointing at a line of high-end houses on
a ridge. “A torch,” he adds a bit later, pointing to a dying,
and thus particularly flammable, redwood tree.
The town council has, on the suggestion of the fire-safety
committee, banned the planting of a handful of highly com-
bustible trees: acacia, cypress, eucalyptus, juniper, and pine,
which officials dub the “flammable five.” Another of the
committee’s suggestions is under consideration: prohibit-
ing wood-shake roofs and wood siding, and decreeing that
wood decks and wood fences, basically matches to flames,want the state to let them use models to substantiate their
requests for fire-insurance price hikes, much as other
states do, and much as California does for earthquakes.
They contend that the freedom to use models would let
them more accurately—and, of course, more profitably—
assess wildfire risk and apportion premiums. Rather than
toss Californians off their books, they say, they’d be able
to insure them—at higher prices than many of those con-
sumers have been paying, but at lower rates than the FAIR
Plan would impose. Insurers say modeling also would trim
premiums for some homeowners who are penalized by the
backward-averaging rules.
But in California, a state whose tech giants have spawned
algorithms humanity loves to hate, the notion of com-
puter models setting prices raises hackles. Politicians and
consumer groups deride the idea as just the latest corporate
feint to gouge the public. Lara in 2020 lambasted a bill that
sought to allow the practice, saying it would harm consum-
ers by deploying “secret, confidential catastrophe models
cloaked from public transparency.” Nevertheless, this July a
state task force recommended public hearings on the pros-
pect of using modeling, with an emphasis on openness.
TRANSPARENCY, at least in the physical sense, is a
rarity in Portola Valley. Redwoods and oaks—along with no-
toriously flammable invasive species such as eucalyptus and
acacia—grow prolifically, prized in part for their provision
of privacy. The town was born in 1964 primarily to protect
the landscape; locals incorporated to block the proposed
development of a vast tract. (They won; it’s now an open-
space preserve.) In 1966, a young band called the Grateful
Dead played the annual Christmas dance of a local school.
As nearby Silicon Valley took shape and prospered,
Portola Valley changed too, gradually morping into a high-
priced bedroom community. Today, it brims with technol-
ogy titans and tree-huggers; often they’re the same people.
Porsches and Teslas share its sylvan, serpentine roads
with high-end racing bicycles. The town has a popula-
tion of about 4,600 and a median household income of
$250,000; the median value of its homes, many of which
enjoy stunning views of plunging canyons or of San Fran-
cisco Bay, is $2 million.
Portola Valley’s angst about wildfire insurance dates at
least to 2007. That year it, like communities up and down
California’s hillsides, was served with a new Cal Fire map
flagging about 10% of the town’s acreage as a “very-high-
fire-hazard-severity zone.” The map incensed many locals.
They worried the documents would saddle them with
higher insurance rates. Because the state requires that the
designation be disclosed to prospective homebuyers, they
fretted it would jeopardize their property values, too.
The opposite fear dogged Denise Enea, then the fire
marshal of the Woodside Fire Protection District, which
includes Portola Valley: that the maps underestimated the
town’s areas of greatest combustibility, leaving unwitting