By Judy Beust Harrington, Co-Chair, Kensington Fire Safe (KFS)
Kensington’s fire safe council will share researched answers to inquiries from community members here – if you send your fire-related questions to info@kensingtonfiresafe.org. Pictures appreciated!
Q. Is there a measurement showing how San Diego’s fire department stacks up to other fire departments?
A: This time the answer came before the question. Recently Kensington Fire Safe Council member, John Pringle, chatted with me while walking his dog. John happened to mention that our San Diego Fire Department has an “ISO” rating.
Here’s what we learned: the “Insurance Services Office,” is a subsidiary of Verisk Analytics, which provides statistical data for insurance companies. They assign an ISO “Public Protection Class (PPC)” from 1 to 10, based on an evaluation of a community’s ability to protect the public from fires.” (1) (2)
That evaluation involves an assigned value to the following categories and weights:(3)
- 50%: issues like staffing levels, training, firehouse proximity.
- 40%: availability of water and fire hydrants.
- 10%: emergency communication systems.
Extra points may be earned based on community outreach, like fire prevention and safety courses. On the other hand, having areas that exceed five driving miles from the nearest fire station also affects scoring.
How do we rate? Drum roll please… As of the last rating assessment in 2017, San Diego’s was a “2″ — with “1″ being the best. This is very impressive considering only 45 out of 854 California fire departments nationwide achieved a “1” – per the chart and article below. Apparently ISO evaluations are typically done every 10 years, so we’re probably not yet due for another one. (4) (5)
Of course, the next obvious question is – does that rating help when it comes to our homeowner insurance costs and availability?
Does the rate matter?
Based on discussions with John and KFS insurance advisor, Scott Caraveo, the ISO rating may or may not be used by insurance companies in their complex process for determining community rates.
“Insurers don’t really provide discounts for lower PPC scores…safer areas just cost less.” Scott clarified. “Most California carriers work off a combination of both FireLine, parcel-based modeling and PPC, which is community-based risk modeling. Overall, community-based modeling is safer for companies because they can apply a broader rate to a general area, as opposed to setting different rates for each individual household in that same area.
“Consumers might appreciate parcel modeling quite a bit, but that would also be a LOT more tedious for companies (and agents/brokers!), and consumers would likely see a lot more variance on their insurance rates from house-to-house as a result.”
The FireLine data Scott mentioned is also provided by the risk assessment company, Verisk, in collaboration with the National Fire Protection Association. Its FireLine analysis includes property-specific mitigation efforts like defensible space and other home hardening measures, as well as fuel, slope, wind patterns and other factors.
For a past column, KFS asked Verisk about the extent to which density is considered, and a spokesperson confirmed that it is a factor although how much it influences their fire risk scoring is unclear. We are talking to Verisk about a possible presentation to our community — tell us if that’s something you might be interested it. (info@kensingtonfiresafe.org).
Meanwhile, there’s comfort in knowing our fire department is among the few in the top two ISO performance classifications. One website I visited for another California area with a high ISO recommended homeowners remind their insurance company of that good rating.
Seems like it couldn’t hurt — unlike the rate increases or cancellations unfortunately neighbors are seeing these days.
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(4) https://www.newportbeachca.gov/government/departments/fire/iso-class-i-rating