136 FORTUNE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021power to destroy: In 2008, a blaze ignited by a short circuit
in old wiring destroyed the 106-year-old, wood-shingled
house in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood
in which she then lived; luckily, no one was home. Today,
Aloisio and Babb blame themselves for having bought a
wooden house encasing a massive tree on a wooded hill-
side near worsening wildfires. “I think we were ignorant,”
Aloisio says. (A spokesman for Liberty Mutual Insurance,
which owns Safeco, says the company has “taken the dif-
ficult but necessary step to reduce our overall exposure to
wildfires” but continues to sell California policies that it
thinks don’t “present an unacceptable wildfire exposure.”)
After a while, Babb and I stroll up her street, a wind-
ing, one-lane affair that, she notes, would be hellish to
drive down if everyone in the neighborhood were fleeing
oncoming flames. We pass house after wooden house
perched on steep terrain and fringed with vegetation. At
the crest of the hill, we come upon a ranch gate. Beyond it
stretches one of the many stunning trails that Babb loves
to hike. But the trailhead, she notes, has a second purpose.
In the event of wildfire, the gate is to be flung wide open
and the path used as an evacuation route.may not be connected to houses, so as not to ignite them.
Some town officials expect a fight but predict passage.
More battles are brewing. A group of worried residents
recently hired Moritz to produce an updated report. He
believes the town in 2008 “buried” his findings, and he
says his new research finds that the fire hazard in Portola
Valley has since only worsened: Not only has wildfire
activity in the vicinity intensified, but vegetation—what
firefighters call, simply, “fuel”—has thickened on the slopes
of the town’s many so-called box canyons. Those V-shaped
ravines form the backyards of many Portola Valley houses;
in the event of fire, they act as chimneys, speeding the
uphill spread of flames. Moritz says the situation brings to
mind an aphorism that’s a firefighter favorite: “If you stick
your head in the sand, you’re going to get your ass burned.”
Heads are poking up over new fears about uninsurability.
Another round of updated Cal Fire fire-risk maps is due
out starting later this year, and those maps are expected to
label as very-high-fire-hazard-severity zones a much greater
portion of California. Because of the money riding on the
maps, discussion around them has been “lively,” notes
Daniel Berlant, chief of Cal Fire’s wildfire planning and
engineering division. But he says the maps, in the works
for about five years, will be based on science—specifically
a new Cal Fire model designed to better reflect increased
fire danger, largely from climate-linked increases in wind.
The specter of that model prompted Dennis, Richards,
and another Portola Valley council member to write state
officials in August declaring themselves “very concerned”
the updated maps will put the town in a vice grip yet again.
One of their worries is that the maps will make it harder
to comply with another Sacramento requirement: that
California localities add a specified number of new housing
units—in Portola Valley’s case, 253—to help ease the state’s
housing crunch. “If insurance nonrenewals continue,” they
wrote, “it may prove impossible for newly constructed
homes to be insured, let alone existing properties.”
Babb, the Portola Valley homeowner now relegated to
the FAIR Plan pool, knows that threat firsthand. When I
drive up to her house one recent morning, she points to
the tree jutting out of her roof and deadpans a greeting:
“There’s the candlewick.”
After she and Aloisio give me a tour of the place, we take
seats on soft outdoor furniture on a second-story deck—
made, naturally, of wood. As blue jays chirp, Babb recounts
how summers seem to have gotten hotter in the six years
she and Aloisio have lived in the house, how recent wild-
fires north of San Francisco have destroyed the homes of
not one but two families who are their friends, and what
the heavens over Portola Valley looked like as the sum-
mer 2020 CZU fire approached. “The sky was orange,” she
recalls. It evoked “a nuclear winter.”
Babb and Aloisio decided to flee that fire, driving to a
hotel near relatives in Los Angeles, where they stayed until
the smoke subsided. Babb needed no education about fire’s
HIGH ALERT Fire marshal Don Bullard refers to many Portola
Valley homes as “assets at risk”; a dying tree can be “a torch.”