LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Amid the devastation in Los Angeles, a little-known industry has come into the spotlight - private firefighters. Here to tell us more about this is NPR's Laurel Wamsley. Hi, Laurel.
LAUREL WAMSLEY, BYLINE: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: So, Laurel, the only time I'd ever heard about private firefighters - if you remember a wildfire a few years ago in the Los Angeles area where Kim Kardashian and her husband at the time, Kanye West, hired private firefighters to save their homes, and it sounded like something only for the most wealthy.
WAMSLEY: Right. So these are back in the news here in Los Angeles. And a lot of the attention is stemming from this single tweet that's now been deleted. Last week, a resident of the wealthy Pacific Palisades area posted on X, asking if anyone had access to private firefighters who could protect his home as his neighbors homes were burning. He said he would, quote, "pay any amount." And, of course, there was a lot of blowback to that idea. It struck a lot of folks as unfair and just crummy. And so there have been media reports of billionaires hiring private firefighters to protect their homes and businesses. But, of course, many wealthy people did lose their homes in these fires. I found that a much bigger part of this story is actually not the individuals hiring extra fire protection, but that insurers are hiring them as part of people's homeowners' policies.
FADEL: Oh, OK. That's something I didn't know - insurance companies were doing this. What exactly do these services do?
WAMSLEY: Yeah, so I spoke with David Torgerson. He's executive chairman of Wildfire Defense Companies (ph). And they work on behalf of nearly three dozen insurers, and they're regulated under California law. So when there's a wildfire endangering homes insured by these companies, his crews arrive loaded with water, but most of what they provide is labor.
DAVID TORGERSON: We clean. We sweep. We clear gutters. We take away the places where the embers can ignite on the property or take away the access that the embers have to get in the buildings.
WAMSLEY: Embers can get into a house through the dryer vent, so his crews will tape those shut. They'll also come back after the fire passes to make sure there isn't a bush or a fence that's burning that could still ignite the house.
FADEL: So for the insurance companies, they are paying for these firefighters, but is this about limiting their losses by the much larger expense of properties burning down in the first place?
WAMSLEY: It's about prevention rather than having to pay for replacing all of those lost homes. So more and more, insurers are including this as a standard part of their homeowner's policies in wildfire-prone states.
FADEL: How does this work? Does a truck full of trained firefighters and water just show up to protect homes that have these specific insurers and then just ignore everybody who doesn't have those insurers?
WAMSLEY: Well, it's obviously sort of hard to know exactly what happens in the field. When I asked a spokesperson at the insurer USAA that question, she said the providers that they work with don't just drive on by a house that's on fire, that they're staffed with a lot of retired fire chiefs, and it's just embedded in them to help the community. But still, private companies obviously might have different priorities than firefighters who work for the public.
FADEL: OK, so stepping back, does this just mean that rich people or people with the right coverage get a separate lane from the rest of people?
WAMSLEY: Yeah. I mean, I asked an ethics expert about this, and he said there are a whole host of ethical questions here - for instance, which firefighters get access to limited water supplies. It can be really divisive in society when it feels like even in a crisis, the rich and powerful get insulated from what's happening. And I asked Torgerson about this, who runs that company that works for the insurers. And he said, well, in a crisis, we need all the help we can get, and it's better to have more structures survive. They're helping to keep insurance in the marketplace, he says, which has been a huge problem in California in recent years. So these are big questions and there are no easy answers.
FADEL: NPR's Laurel Wamsley. Thank you, Laurel.
WAMSLEY: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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