There is one fire hydrant in the entire Four Mile Fire Protection District. This backcountry northwest of Boulder, Colorado, is full of switchback canyons and nearly-dry creeks late into the fall. A 2010 wildfire funneled through the canyon and destroyed 168 homes. At the time, this was the most expensive wildfire in Colorado’s history. 

Yet, still only the one hydrant. 

“Water is our Achilles heel,” Bruce Vaughn said as he showed off the department’s 2,000-gallon tender. When used on full blast, the fortified fire truck may only last for two minutes before needing a refill. 

“It teaches us to fight fire a little different than city departments. They can have semi-endless water. We have to use our water very wisely,” Vaughn said. 

Insurance isn’t exactly the go-to topic when the firefighters meet for coffee in the kitchen, complete with glossy red cabinetry to match the polished fire trucks downstairs. For many Colorado homeowners, however, insurance has become something they very much want to talk about – the increasing likelihood of not being able to find a policy altogether. That burden has snaked its way up Four Mile Canyon, along with many other rural fire districts with gorgeous views of the mountains. 

For some of these folks, there is newfound hope of reduced homeowners’ policy premiums and insurance security. A new state law, ‘Risk Model Use in Property Insurance Policies,’ makes the insurance industry offer transparent premiums savings on official websites, plus deliver written notice to all applying for a policy of their inherent fire risk. 

“We can make homeowners insurance more affordable. That’s going to bring more insurance companies into the market because they’re going to want to compete in that space,” Mike Conway said. He’s Colorado’s state insurance commissioner. Over the course of our 20-minute in-person conversation, Conway used a form of that word, ‘competition,’ more than 15 times. He wants more insurers to come to his state, thus lowering prices. 

The insurance industry itself isn’t fully sold. 

Conway’s counterpart in the lobbying world is Carole Walker, the executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. In our own 25-minute chat, she had her buzzword ready: mitigation. It also got more than 15 mentions. “Companies will either be giving mitigation discounts for wildfire prepared homes or be calculating for it in their wildfire risk score model,” Walker said. That score will determine whether an insurer would even offer up a policy. 

“Those models are really making most of the decisions for the insurance companies. On where insurance are going to write business and how much they’re going to charge. The problem was that we couldn’t, at the same time, assure homeowners that the mitigation work they were doing” would end up reducing premiums, said Conway. Hence this section of the law summary: If an insurer does not incorporate property-specific and community-level mitigation actions into its models, the act requires the insurer to provide discounts to policyholders who demonstrate actions taken on the property to reduce the risk of loss.

The push for high-impact mitigation comes directly from the firefighters at Four Mile Canyon, as well. “We’ve got a chance to save your home, if the forest isn’t right up to your porch,” Vaughn said. “And that’s a hard ask sometimes, because we live in the mountains, because we love the forest and the trees, and why would you want to destroy these things of beauty? But they will kill you if you don’t…”

While the “Risk Model Use” law will be installed in the coming months, the insurance industry’s surrogates are not backing down from this or other proposed regulations. “What we’re concerned about as an industry is stabilizing the market. And anything that you do to push insurance companies to not be able to make business decisions, that’s when you get in trouble,” warned Walker, who also called the moment a ‘tipping point’ for whether more insurance companies decide to abandon home insurance policies in Colorado.

Insurance companies fought another bill in the legislature – one that ultimately failed – that would have established a state-held last resort funding pool. Conway, the insurance commissioner, promised the state would attempt a version of that bill in the future, one he hoped would lower premiums immediately. But Walker said that insurance companies are not willing to lose more money in such a volatile time of disaster.

“Everyone says to me all the time: ‘We don’t want to be like California.’ Well, we’re a few bad public policy decisions from being California,” Walker said. 

Both the special interest lobby and the state’s team agree that mitigation – that is, protecting homes and neighborhoods from risk with direct action like tree trimming – is the big answer. The quandary is who will pay for it?

“Right now, if you live in a high-risk area, it’s not necessarily about reducing your premium. It’s about maintaining insurance,” Walker said.

Coupling the new law with increasing adoption of fire-proofing neighborhoods, getting an actual reduction in premiums for a Colorado home seems like a long shot – even when the chance of the next big wildfire is increasing.

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