Two days after Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26 last year, Robert Sawyer, a 68-year-old retired airline pilot, returned to inspect his waterside home on Madeira Beach, on a barrier island abutting St Petersburg, Florida. Bridges from the mainland were closed, as police dealt with downed power lines and scoured homes for survivors, or the bodies of victims, so he hitched a lift on a motorboat. After 20 minutes dodging unmoored vessels and other floating debris, they arrived at his dock, from where he surveyed the damage.
The receding storm surge had left 20 or so giant rubbish bins littered on the lawn. His neighbour’s floating dock, detached in the storm, had become a battering ram, smashing a path through his patio doors for the oncoming water. Inside the house, where the toxic mess of gasoline, oils and sewage had reached nearly 4ft, furniture lay upended and strewn among seagrass and mud — a Baldwin upright piano, a grandfather clock, a refrigerator, broken precious glassware.
Florida’s increasingly savage hurricane season had been growing its financial burden for years. Sawyer’s insurance premiums, set at $4,000 per year when he arrived from Cincinnati 10 years earlier, had edged up to $7,500. Earlier in 2024, his fire and wind insurer had abruptly refused to renew his policy, precipitating a chaotic rush for a replacement before his lender arranged its own exorbitantly priced substitute or withdrew his mortgage.
Soon, the dent left by Helene would make those items look like small change. By one estimate, up to $30bn of US property damage from the hurricane would turn out to be uninsured. By October, a neighbour four doors down, whose home had been valued at $940,000 before the hurricane hit, would have agreed to sell it for $699,000, the garden still full of the detritus carried there by the storm, just to get out. By Christmas, only seven of the 65 surrounding homes would be occupied, and half of Sawyer’s immediate neighbours would have left for good.
All of this lay ahead of him, however. On that September morning, his mind was on the lost urn containing the remains of his mother and younger brother that he hadn’t got around to scattering; it was on the thousands of photos he had planned to digitise someday, strewn through the home, matted together in dense clumps, their dyes slowly leaking into the salty water — family weddings, holidays, nieces and nephews growing up.
From the boat, he contemplated the move from Cincinnati, the 10 years spent in the house, the damage its disfigurement would cause to the architecture of his memories. Surveying the desolation he wondered: had it been worth it?
Across the world, a slew of floods, wildfires and storms is shifting the balance of risk and reward attached to homes abutting forests, mountains, coasts and rivers.
The most visible impact is on those affected by catastrophe, who face the trauma and grief of a home’s partial or total destruction, the financial shocks from underinsurance and the growing risk that, once rebuilt, even a new, safer home could be uninsurable.
But increasingly, even in locations seen as safe, homeowners are confronting spiralling insurance premiums and the prospect of a fall in capital values if insurers scale back or withdraw.
$320bnLosses due to hurricanes, fires and other disasters last year
Hurricanes, fires and other disasters caused $320bn in losses last year, 30 per cent more than 2023, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance group. Insurers will be on the hook for $140bn of these, making 2024 the most expensive for the global industry since 2017, when the hurricane trio of Harvey, Irma and Maria struck the US.
Many property markets in regions devastated by natural disaster have stopped in their tracks. Nearly three months after Valencia’s devastating floods, mortgage approvals in the affected areas have almost entirely ceased as lenders await revised surveys to better understand the properties’ risk, according to Juan Villén, head of the mortgage arm of Idealista, the Spanish property website. “Banks have ordered new appraisals to ensure that properties have not been affected by [the storm], before granting the loan,” he says.
As insurers bear the weight of huge payouts across the world, the ripples are being felt in rising home insurance premiums in the safest locations.
Joanna Shipton, one of six owners, has a flat in Marden Hill House, a Grade II*-listed house in Hertfordshire, about 90 minutes north of London, which dates from the 17th century. Given the building’s particular risks — including its age and listing, which makes repairs expensive — only one insurer will cover it, and the premium has increased from £18,000 per year in 2019 to £25,800 today.
“They have us over a barrel,” says Shipton, who is also treasurer of the management company the residents formed to run the building. Her share of the annual service charge is currently £10,800; on top of that, higher energy prices mean bills for heating her poorly insulated home have rocketed in the past couple of years.
She and her husband listed their home for sale in August for £2.7mn. Today, with the price cut to £2.3mn, Shipton worries the high running costs may be putting buyers off.
“Household insurers have lost so much money they have become a lot fussier,” says Clare Blakely of UK insurance broker Weatherbys Hamilton. They are now more reluctant to take on those with risk factors — such as a thatched roof, tall trees or water nearby. Since heavy rains caused extensive flooding in London in July 2021, questions about flat roofs, a cellar, lower ground floor or a basement have become standard, she adds.
Last year, UK property insurance payouts hit their highest level for 20 years, according to Deloitte. Following years of underwriting losses, many are forecasting widespread premium increases: despite a surge for at-risk homes, the average price, adjusting for inflation, of a UK building and contents policy has not changed since 2017. In that time claims have increased by 72 per cent.
Before devastating wildfires erupted earlier this month in Los Angeles, the city’s residents had long walked the tightrope between the glamour of its location and the risks.
“Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, Santa Monica, these neighbourhoods have a charisma — storied, enchanting, so physically beautiful, so rich culturally and historically — despite being earthquake- and fire-prone,” says John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, which tells the story of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire that tore through the bitumen mining area in Alberta, Canada. “That is a tension that west coast Americans are comfortable with.”
Even equipped with Vaillant’s account, however, my conversation with Alisa Ruby Bash is disorientating. For the 49-year-old, arriving in Los Angeles aged 18 was the fulfilment of a dream. “My entire childhood I wanted to be an actress and a singer,” she says. Fifteen years ago, her dream materialised into a home on Enchanted Way on the edge of Pacific Palisades. She had it all: a beautiful detached house in one of the city’s most desirable neighbourhoods, “safe from crime, surrounded by celebrities and successful people”.
But on January 7, with only Palisades Drive between it and Topanga State Park, the house was one of the first to burn. In the rush to evacuate, her family left only with their passports, computers and the cat. “My home of 15 years, every single thing we own, all my belongings from my entire life [are gone],” she says.
Already, she is counting the cost. Twenty-four hours after her family escaped the fire, she looked on Zillow. The website had valued her home at $3.7mn, now it had revised this to $3mn. Her insurer, has been exemplary, she says. But she can’t see the $1mn they are offering covering the cost of the reconstruction, or the $700,000 covering the personal possessions the family have lost.
Despite all this, she plans to rebuild her home next to the park, a location that’s one of the city’s most vulnerable to future wildfire. If she does leave LA, it will be because of concerns over social deterioration and fear of crime (changes she links to the pandemic), not because of the risk of more fires or an earthquake. And her favoured place to relocate to is Hawaii, where the last significant storm led to a major disaster declared in 2022.
Bash does not speak for every Angelino. But this seeming tolerance for future risk is a common feature of those who live in dangerous beautiful places, and humans more generally, according to Justin Angle, joint author of This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat.
A former bond trader, he compares our discounting of natural disaster risk to investors during asset bubbles, so preoccupied with gorging on present rewards, they ignore the possibility the feast could come to an end. “We have acclimated to the ease of not having to deal with the problem, so we don’t internalise how likely it is. It’s a failure of imagination. We’re just really bad at understanding these slow-moving risks,” he says.
Angle’s own case illustrates the tension.
His detached home on the edge of Missoula, a Montana mountain town, abuts a vast swath of forest running 200 miles to the Canadian border and beyond. Dotted with large cotton woods and ponderosa pines, a creek flowing through the property makes it popular with wildlife, including mountain lion, bear, deer, wolf and moose; a rich canopy of bushes and shrubs shelters his home from the summer sun.
Precisely what makes his plot attractive makes it dangerous, he concedes. “That is all material that can and will burn someday. But the sound of the water and the wildlife makes up a lot of why I chose to live here.”
Meanwhile, efforts to nudge each other out of the imaginative deficit that underlies our skewy risk radar are fraught with social hazard, warns Vaillant. His own home in Vancouver, Canada, combines with those of his neighbours to make a fire trap. The houses — around 100 years old and made predominantly of wood — provide excellent tinder; the roughly 2-metre gaps between them would provide an optimal wind tunnel to fan the flames.
Vaillant has fitted a rooftop sprinkler system that should stop nearby embers from igniting his structure for as long as the water supply lasts. But in 26 years, he has not had a single conversation about fire protection with a neighbour.
“We build bubbles around ourselves. When a disaster occurs, we decide ‘that happened to them but it won’t happen to me’. It isn’t climate denial, it’s a psychological survival technique,” he says. To breach those bubbles — to force open another’s imagination to the prospect of losing their most precious possession — amounts to psychological trespass.
“It’s the infando, the unutterable, it’s like talking about cancer, you [thereby] admit to the possibility it could happen,” he says. His job requires he carry with him a sense of the danger he lives among — he calls it his “memento mori”. But to force it upon others would be a bridge too far.
Nearly four months after he surveyed the wreckage of his home from the motorboat, Robert Sawyer looks up at me on our Zoom call, from the sun-bathed terrace of a kava bar in downtown St Petersburg.
He wears a T-shirt, a wood-bead necklace and chain around his neck, and a contained smile that fades briefly at the more harrowing details of the ordeal, which he recounts in a measured, even tone. He is about to move out of the hotel provided to him by Fema, the US federal disaster response agency, into a static caravan in the drive of his old home. On his lawn, the pile of ruined interiors and furniture is 30ft long, 20ft wide and 10ft high.
There’s little to celebrate in his financial position. His mistake on his last insurance application left him with $30,000 of contents cover; his real loss will be closer to $130,000. With the street peppered with “for sale” signs, his home, worth $1mn before the hurricane, would sell for $800,000 today, he estimates. He doubts he’ll get all of the money he has just claimed from his insurer for renovations.
But there have been breaks, too. Three Persian rugs, his most expensive possessions, were due to be returned from the cleaners a few days before the hurricane hit; on a whim, he asked the company to store them until the end of the hurricane season. When the floodwaters receded and he rushed to strip his interiors before mould set in, 20 friends and neighbours worked full days to help. “Within a week of the disaster, the insurer cut me a check for $25,000,” he says. “It kept things moving.”
He plans to spend upwards of $200,000 of his savings on a renovation of the house, using concrete stilts to elevate the living space clear of the minimum height required by Fema to skip obligatory flood insurance. Even in the most extreme storms, his home should hold more of its value.
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With a bit of luck, a room or two will be inhabitable by June, before the hurricane season starts in earnest. “I’ll hang some tapestries on the side of the wall and call it glamping,” he says, chuckling. “As far as being worried about putting myself in a similar situation, I don’t really think too much about that — it’s the cost of living in paradise and a lot of people had it a lot worse than me. In life every day you get up in the morning, take your chances and there’s all kinds of things that could go wrong and no guarantees, and that makes things more interesting . . . [The rebuild] will be another part of the adventure of life”.
Nothing can change his address, though. By 2050, St Petersburg will be underwater 42 days per year, according to Nasa. For now, it is a human victory, but nature will win in the end.
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