The 2024 wildfire season was one of the most stressful experiences of Hannah Rolston's career as an insurance broker.
"Some of the phone calls would be so upsetting that, after we take a phone call we all would just take breaks walking around the block just to calm down so we could still be professional and take more calls."
Rolston is the branch manager at Kootenay Insurance, but at the time she worked in Nelson for a different insurance broker.
"I remember one phone call where the client lost his house, his business, everything, all in one day."
The calls were often from people who had just been evacuated from their homes in the Slocan Valley or the Argenta area. Sometimes they would come to the insurance office in person.
"We had a client who came in with (all her belongings in) just a garbage bag. She said, 'I'm sleeping on a couch with my two-year-old because I got evacuated.'"
Rolston said many public emergency services will not provide emergency cash to evacuees if their insurance policy includes it.
"So some people were calling us because they needed a place to stay. They needed food to eat. They needed to be able to afford it."
There is no such thing as wildfire insurance. Fire is fire, and a home that is insured against it is covered for wildfire damage. But residents with homes in wildfire areas, or people interested in buying properties, may not know how insurance works during wildfire season in B.C.
Rolston said a source of stress for agents and brokers is home buyers applying to insure a house in fire season. Most insurance companies won't provide home insurance if there is an active wildfire within 50 kilometres. (For some companies it's 25 km on a case-by-case basis.)
So for insurance staff during the summer of 2024 in the West Kootenay, the was always open. The map has a tool that will measure exact distances between two points and Rolston said she used it a lot.
Last year was an busy and stressful time for insurance brokers not just in the vicinity of the Slocan Valley and Argenta, but across the country.
"We had total loss fires in Jasper. We had the Calgary hail storms. And in Ontario, there's been a ton of floods. Wildfire is the most common natural disaster in this area. But go to Calgary, we'd probably be having a conversation about hail storms."
$8 billion in damage
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) reports that insured damage in 2024 caused by extreme weather events exceeded $8 billion nationwide, surpassing the previous record of $6 billion in 2016, the year of the Fort McMurray, Alta., wildfires. The 2024 total is nearly triple the insured losses from 2023 and 12 times the average over 2001-2010.
IBC says that the single most destructive weather event in 2024 was the August hailstorm in Calgary that caused $3 billion in insured losses.
As a result all of these expensive disasters, the IBC reports that on average home insurance premiums have increased by 5.8 per cent in 2025.
Rolston says she sends out annual renewal notices well in advance, to give clients a heads-up about the increase they can expect. Not all clients are happy about the increases. She said some insurance workers take training on how to talk to clients about the reasons for the increases.
Not all home insurance premium increases are tied directly to increased risk of natural disasters, Rolston said. If your house is made of flammable material like cedar or vinyl siding, or if you have exclusively wood heat, you will pay more.
Buying home insurance in the face of increasing natural disasters is easier to navigate in person with an agent or broker, Rolston said. The danger in buying insurance online is that all the details of wildfire proximity and coverage might not be dealt with thoroughly in an online application. Rolson says people buying insurance online should get independent professional advice before buying.
"I've heard horror stories of clients setting up policies online. They make a claim and it's denied."
Insurance prices risk
The number and severity of wildfire damage claims are increasing partly because fire seasons are longer with more hectares burned, according to IBC spokesperson Adam Sutherland.
"As we see the frequency and severity of claims growing, that's putting pressure on premiums.
"We know the risk is only going to grow. Insurance puts a price on risk. That's why it's paramount that we do much, much more as a society to reduce that, to better fireproof our communities and better protect our homes."
He said in addition to government action to reduce fire danger in the forests, residents need more incentives to protect their properties.
"But then we also need to rethink our building codes and how we are developing our communities in the first place. That means moving away from wood shingles, wood roofs. No more vinyl siding. We need non-combustible materials on homes and interface fire zones for all new development."
In 2019, the City of Nelson changed its building bylaws new home construction in the city to limit coniferous landscaping as well as to prohibit certain kinds of siding, roofing and other specific building materials.
In California, many insurance companies have walked away from home insurance in certain regions, refusing to insure. Could this happen here?
"A lot is made of the the wildfire risk in California," Sutherand said, "and we've got a little bit of time, but you know, we need to look at them as a warning sign of what could come if we don't take appropriate action today to better protect our communities."
Sutherland said climate change is top of mind for insurance companies.
"They certainly are layering in climate models to their rating systems. They indicate that we're likely to see more properties burned in the years ahead ... recognizing that our summers are getting hotter and drier. They're starting earlier, they're lasting longer. It's that future that insurers are playing in."
Some insurance companies are taking unusual actions to protect their clients, said Rolston.
The Intact Financial Corporation, one of the insurers she works with, partnered in a pilot project with Montana鈥檚 Wildfire Defense Systems to provide loss prevention and and fire suppression in Alberta and B.C. when insured homes are threatened with wildfires less than five km away. Their trained personnel will travel to the home and protect it by clearing away flammable materials, setting up temporary sprinkler systems, and other fire mitigation work.
Rolston said these crews were active in the Slocan Valley and the Argenta area in 2024.
"They're actually out on the ground, protecting homes," said Rolston. "That's what insurance is for. It's for emergency situations to protect your assets, to protect you. I have seen it in action, and I have seen it be incredibly impactful and helpful to people's lives."
