I started off trying to get the LA fires into perspective.
I just want a back-of-the-envelope number
I hate to sound blase, but, OK, parts of LA have burnt.
Not wholly unexpected. Surely more likely to happen as climate change progresses.
But, it’s, you know, California. Stuff happens in California. Earthquakes. Mudslides. Wildfires. Excess rain and snow events. Droughts.
I’m from the Mid-Atlantic region, where the worst we typically face is 17-year locusts and the occasional dry spell.
And this is in no sense a slam on California. California is about as good at dealing with stuff like that as can be.
I just want to know something along the lines of “how does the value of the damage from the current LA fires compare to other disasters?”
I’ll settle for a count of homes lost to fire
Source: fire.ca.gov. Cal Fire?
As of 1/16/2025, the overwhelmingly quoted number in news coverage is 12,000. That appears to be from 12,300+ “structures destroyed”, from Cal Fire. As I understand it, that’s a number from the government of the State of California.
At the same time, a couple of big local banks (Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, cited by ABC News) have already projected $30B in insured losses.
If that projected $30B cost is close, these LA fires will be by far the most expensive fire event in California history, more than twice as expensive as the (now) second-most-costly fire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire.
Source: Cal Fire statistics page, this is their top 20 list.
By the numbers, it’s clear that a high cost per structure contributes to the overall higher cost of the LA fires, compared to the Camp fire. To know that the loss estimate for the 2018 Camp Fire was $12B (reference). That the works out to a $600K cost per structure for the 2018 Camp Fire — the costliest California fire until now — versus about $2.4M per destroyed structure for the LA fires. I’m not sure I fully understand why the difference would be that large, but that’s what the simple arithmetic says. Bear in mind that the $30B estimate is just a preliminary estimate by a couple of big banks.
13.4 million households in California
So says the U.S. Bureau of the Census (reference).
If the Los Angeles area just lost 12,300 plus structures, and if all of that was housing, and assuming (the equivalent of) predominantly single-family homes, then, roughly speaking, (12,300/13,400,000 =~) 0.1% of California households just lost their place to live.
If I had to take it further, it looks like Californians on average pay about 0.4% of the value of housing as insurance premiums each year. Inverting that, this one event — a total loss of 0.1% of California housing — would seem to amount to about a quarter-of-a-year’s property insurance premiums for the entire state of California. But because those LA properties appear to be so expensive per dwelling, it’s entire possible that this one even could cost … about a year’s worth of property insurance premiums for all of California.
Conclusion
A plausible scale of insured costs of U.S. natural disasters puts 2005 Hurricane Katrina at #1 with more than $100B (reference). That’s in current (2025) dollars, roughly speaking.
The $30B projected insured losses for the LA fires would put them 10th on that list, just past the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the one that shook down a section of freeway.
It’s California. I’m sure they’ll deal with it about as well as it can be dealt with.
