Read more: State Farm's California freeze: Looming insurance apocalypse or political ploy? Flood insurance typically has to be purchased separately.Īllstate, another major insurer, also has pulled back in California and, last week, declined to reverse course even as state insurance officials agreed to let the company raise premiums by 4%. State Farm, California's largest home insurer, announced in May that it would no longer take on new residential and commercial properties, a devastating blow that will be felt most keenly in fire-prone areas where coverage is costly and hard to find. It's a big part of the reason several insurance companies are refusing to issue new policies and otherwise limiting their financial exposure in the Golden State. Our most vulnerable communities often lie in our most vulnerable regions: mountains marred by years of unprecedented wildfires, or Central Valley farm fields drowned in record rains and now epic snowmelt.
But if it does, and if families like the Bedollas do rebuild, we can be certain that the town and its beleaguered residents will remain vulnerable to future floods.įrom Planada to Paradise, the urgent fallout of climate change on California's already terrible housing crisis is undeniable - except perhaps to our state politicians who pay it lip service but have dodged the big questions about where we should build and rebuild in the future. In a community of mostly undocumented farmworkers, no one is sure whether Planada will recover. But after a few months, Bedolla already felt as if the rest of California had “forgotten this happened.” “It was so quick,” she told our Times colleague Jessica Garrison, recalling the speed with which the water rushed into her town and then her home, destroying almost everything and displacing hundreds. (Noah Berger / Associated Press)īack in January, on a dark night of pelting rain, Erica Lopez Bedolla had only minutes to evacuate her family from the impoverished Central Valley town of Planada after a levee broke. Only about 230,000 homes and buildings in the state are covered by flood insurance. Brenda Ortega salvages items from her flooded home in Merced during California's catastrophic winter storms.
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