Karen Rawlins pulled up outside the Spokane Convention Center Tuesday and popped open her car trunk. It was filled with pillows for the displaced residents —including her elderly mother — of Devoted Care, an adult group home near Indian Trails that burned in the Spokane wildfires over the weekend.
Rawlins lived through the Oregon Fire north of Spokane three years ago, and she remembers it all too well. She said she relived “the pain and the trauma” this week.
Homes spared by past Spokane-area wildfires haven’t always been spared by their insurers. Cancellations and nonrenewal rates in fire-affected ZIP codes have climbed after the smoke from previous fires cleared, regardless of whether any given house actually burned.
As firefighters continue to battle the worst wildfires in state history, with over 800 structures reported destroyed as of Wednesday afternoon, some Spokanites fear history will repeat itself.
After the fire in 2023, her insurance provider dropped several of her neighbors in Elk from their policies, Rawlins said. Their homes — like her own — were not even burned.
Rawlins told RANGE she was scared that her insurance plan would also suffer. Luckily for her, the dreaded notice never came. She still doesn’t understand what made her situation different from that of her neighbors.
In Elk’s ZIP code, 99009, the combined rate of insurer-initiated nonrenewals and cancellations reached 5.7% in 2025 — more than triple the 2023 rate and over four times the current statewide average of 1.3%, according to data from the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner.
On August 3, State Insurance Commissioner Patty Kuderer issued an emergency order temporarily barring insurers from canceling or not renewing property and auto policies across all Washington ZIP codes affected by wildfire damage or evacuation orders, through September 30.
Additionally, insurers now have to provide 120 days’ notice before a cancellation or nonrenewal, double the usual 60-day notice. They must also wait at least 45 days after a missed premium payment before they drop coverage.
But some fear that may not be enough to solve long-term concerns.
“My concern for these people — because I’ve been through it — is getting permits to rebuild and getting insurance,” Rawlins said. ”Who will reinsure them once they do rebuild?”
Calculating risk
Braving the noon heat, Maika Steele and her daughter walked their dog Radar on the lawn outside of the Spokane Convention Center on Tuesday.
After evacuating their home by Nine Mile Falls over the weekend, the family — with four kids and two dogs — is now “bouncing around,” Steele said. They’re staying at The DoubleTree downtown. Steele said her house survived, but the area between their home, toward Bowl and Pitcher, wasn’t so lucky.
In recent years, Steele said she’s seen people in her former home state of California driven out when homeowners insurance providers hiked prices after wildfires — or simply refused to write them coverage.
“‘I’m not gonna rebuild. This is ridiculous,’” Steele recalled them saying. “So they just move out of state. It’s crazy. That is not even their fault. This is a disaster, a natural disaster.”
Insurance companies don’t calculate wildfire risk themselves, according to Aaron VanTuyl, a spokesperson for the Office of the Insurance Commissioner.
He said they typically purchase wildfire risk management metrics from third-party companies like Moody’s Analytics, which combine data from weather patterns and satellite imagery, among other sources, into a score unique to each property. Insurance providers then use that score to help decide whether to offer coverage — and at what price.
“The issue is that there’s nothing that compels insurance companies to disclose those risk scores,” VanTuyl said. “Since they’re part of their underwriting, they’re protected from public disclosure.”
Victoria O’Banion learned that firsthand. Her home near Medical Lake sat nowhere near the Gray Fire, she said, which burned over 10,000 acres and destroyed 259 structures in August 2023.
But in 2024, Farmers Insurance — her provider since she and her husband bought the house in 2021 — declined to renew her policy weeks before it was set to expire.
She said the company told her the decision was made based on FireLine — a tool insurers use to assess wildfire risk that is also not publicly available.
O’Banion scrambled to find an alternative, she said, “running into roadblocks, running into denials,” before finally switching to Allstate in August 2024. She worries that insurers are “self-selecting” the areas they’ll cover.
“I think it’s easy to assume, ‘Oh, I have really nice houses around me — my house is going to be protected,’” O’Banion said. “But the reality is that no home is protected from wildfire.”
In Medical Lake — ZIP code 99022 — insurers canceled or declined to renew 3.9% of policies in 2024, up from 2.2% in 2023.
When private insurers won’t cover a home, homeowners in Washington have one last option: the state’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, an insurer of last resort funded by companies doing business in the state. Homeowners insurance is required for almost all mortgages, so going without is not only risky, but nearly impossible.
According to VanTuyl, 394 homes are now enrolled across the state, up from fewer than 100 in 2022.
“It’s basically so nobody loses their house over not being able to find an insurance plan,” he said. “This is not great coverage, but it is coverage.”
Most stay on the plan for around two to three months and are then able to find other coverage, as different companies score risk differently, Kuderer said.
When people apply for the FAIR Plan, they have to present a reason. Last year, 35% of applicants cited loss of coverage due to wildfire risk. Previously, that number had peaked at 16%.
This pattern echoes California, where enrollment in the state’s FAIR Plan surged 43% between September 2024 and December 2025 as insurers retreated from wildfire-prone areas, according to Bloomberg.
The cost of staying insured
Greg Presley purchased a home in Grandview, perched in the hills above the Latah Valley in 2004. He rented it out for a decade and a half before moving in himself in 2020.
He’d been using Farmers Insurance for roughly 30 years when, in October 2024, he received a form letter saying his policy on the Grandview property wouldn’t be renewed. When he called the office to ask why, he said he was told that the company was no longer writing policies in the 99224 ZIP code.
Presley found a workaround through an insurance broker, landing a policy with American Modern — although he said the coverage is more expensive and isn’t quite as good as his previous plan.
Residents in the Latah Valley have repeatedly voiced concern that infrastructure has failed to keep pace with residential development in the area.
For example, the area’s limited road access may prove to be a bottleneck in the event of an evacuation, according to Molly Marshall, co-founder of Citizen Action for Latah Valley.
“What would happen if we had a fire like they had on Saturday?” Marshall demanded.
During O’Banion’s second year with Allstate, the company asked her to do remediation work to keep her coverage. They informed her in October 2024, detailed what needed to be fixed and gave them until August 2025 to make the changes.
She cleared tree branches less than four feet above ground and showed there were no trees within six feet of her home. She dug down to demonstrate 12 inches of concrete foundation around the property.
“We were able to do that because we’re two able-bodied people with income that can withstand unexpected expenses like that,” O’Banion said.
However, she pointed out, that kind of work might not be possible for households with disabled or elderly residents or those experiencing financial strain.
Although there are resources like the Spokane Conservation District’s Firewise program that conducts free risk assessments for people’s homes, O’Banion said, there is currently no program to financially support those who need to make changes to their property.
Allison Ranusch, a forestry technician at the conservation district, said the organization doesn’t work with insurance companies directly. But when homeowners receive a notice demanding they clear vegetation or lose coverage, she’ll walk the property with them and provide informational resources.
Since the weekend’s fires, the district has also fielded a new wave of outreach. Ranusch said roughly a dozen people have contacted the organization either requesting a Firewise risk assessment or asking for help evaluating whether their scorched trees are likely to survive.
Ranusch encouraged wildfire victims to contact the conservation district directly, saying that a higher volume of inquiries strengthens the organization’s case when it seeks funding from outside agencies.
Kuderer acknowledged that her moratorium is a temporary fix. Once it expires, insurers remain free to cancel policies in high-risk areas.
Her office’s longer-term plan is legislation-based, Kuderer told RANGE.
She wants to reintroduce a bill next year in the state legislature that would require insurers to disclose a homeowner’s wildfire risk score, along with steps residents can take to lower it. A previous bill, sponsored by state Sen. Judy Warnick (R-Moses Lake), failed to pass last session.
The bill would also require insurers to submit their proprietary catastrophic modeling maps to Kuderer’s office. That data wouldn’t be publicly available, she said, but it would let the state see what companies are weighing in their coverage decisions.
“We’ll be able to see it in real time, which will help us target our mitigation efforts more effectively,” Kuderer said.
A second bill would create a wildfire mitigation grant program, aimed specifically at homeowners in “pockets of nonrenewals and cancelations,” Kuderer said. State Sen. Marcus Riccelli (D-Spokane) sponsored its last iteration.
Both bills passed the state Senate with bipartisan support last session but died before they could make it to the House floor.
Kuderer said Riccelli plans to bring the mitigation grant bill back, while the transparency bill will need a new sponsor — as Warnick is set to retire at the end of her term next January — but is also expected to return.
Overall, Kuderer said she’d like to see a “more competitive market” for Washington insurance providers.
To her, that means working to reduce the perception of a home being “susceptible” to wildfire.
“We do that by investing in mitigation upfront,” she said. “That’s where we’re at in our nation’s history because we’ve kicked that climate change can down the road for so many decades.”
For Rawlins, who lived through the Elk Fire, the road ahead for Spokane looks familiar.
“One of the biggest things that people are going to find — it’s actually very frightening going forward — is getting insurance,” Rawlins said. “A lot of insurance companies are folding and they’re pulling out… I want to call it a racket.”
Meanwhile, others warn that Spokane homeowners may find they don’t have enough insurance to actually cover their losses.
In an email statement to RANGE, NW Insurance Council president Kenton Brine wrote that this week should be an “a-ha moment” for Spokane homeowners who may be underinsured.
Brine pointed to a few ways people can end up in that situation without realizing it: some policies factor in depreciation, while others may cap how much they’ll pay for valuables. And some policies won’t cover the full cost of rebuilding a home from scratch, leaving homeowners on the hook for the difference, he explained.
“These are avoidable ‘bad surprises,’” Brine wrote in the email. “But you can only know what your policy covers, what it doesn't cover, and what you can do about any possible coverage gaps if you talk with your insurance company or agent before there is a loss.”
But right now, some homeowners are too busy surviving the first disaster to worry about what might come next.
Steele said she isn’t immediately worried about her own insurance, with the issue seems less immediate considering everything else she’s dealing with this week. Her provider GEICO has been reliable in the past with a car accident, she said, so she's not too concerned about any claims she might have to make — especially since she knows her home survived.
But Steele doesn’t know what her coverage or premium will look like next year.
“I guess we’ll just get there when we get there,” she said.
