Last year, Francis Bischetti said he learned that the annual cost of the homeowners policy he buys from Farmers Insurance for his Pacific Palisades home was going to soar from $4,500 to $18,000 — an amount he could not possibly afford.

Neither could he get onto California FAIR Plan, which provides fewer benefits, because he said he would have to cut down 10 trees around his roof line to lower the fire risk — something else the 55-year-old personal assistant found too costly to manage.

So he decided he would do what’s called “going bare” — not buying any coverage on his home in the community’s El Medio neighborhood. He figured if he watered his property year round, that might be protection enough given its location south of Sunset Boulevard.

It wasn’t. The home he lived in for nearly all his life burned down Tuesday along with more than 10,000 other homes and structures damaged or destroyed in the worst fire event in the history of Los Angeles. Sixteen deaths have been confirmed countywide.

“It was surrealistic,” he said. “I’ve grown up and lived here off and on for 50 years. I’ve never in my entire time here experienced this.”

Farmers Insurance declined to comment, saying it does not discuss individual policyholders.

‘A train wreck coming down the track’

Bischetti was far from the only homeowner living in Pacific Palisades, Altadena or other fire-prone hillside neighborhoods who struggled to maintain their insurance amid sharply rising costs and the decision by many insurers to reduce their exposure to catastrophic wildfire claims by not renewing the policies of even longtime customers. Many fire victims reported that insurers had dropped their policies last year.

The fires — expected to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history — have deepened a crisis in the state’s home insurance market that was already reeling before the devastation came.

The state’s largest home insurer, State Farm General, announced in March it would not renew 30,000 homeowner and condominium policies — including 1,626 in Pacific Palisades — when they expired.

Chubb and its subsidiaries stopped writing new policies for high-value homes with higher wildfire risk. Allstate has stopped writing new policies, and Tokio Marine America Insurance Co. and Trans Pacific Insurance Co. pulled out of the state, though Mercury Insurance offered to take their customers.

Liberty Mutual was sued last month by a homeowner who accused the insurer of dropping her over a bogus claim that her roof had mold damage.

“Driven by a desire to maximize profits, property casualty insurance companies … have engaged in a troubling trend of dropping California homeowners’ insurance policies like flies,” said the complaint, filed in San Diego County Superior Court. A spokesperson for Liberty Mutual declined to comment on the litigation.

The inability to get coverage is reflected in the number of policies picked up by California FAIR Plan, which as of September had about 452,000 policies, up from a little over 203,000 four years ago. FAIR Plan’s website says its claims exposure is nearly $6 billion in Pacific Palisades alone.

“The situation has been a train wreck coming down the track for a while,” said Rick Dinger, president of Crescenta Valley Insurance, an independent brokerage in Glendale.

Not enough insurance money to rebuild

Peggy Holter spent decades as a television journalist, a peripatetic career that took her all over the world, but there was one place she called home and always returned to: the Pacific Palisades condo she moved into on Jan. 1, 1978. That all changed after Tuesday’s firestorm, when her condo burned to the ground along with the rest of the 36 units in the Palisades Drive complex.

Holter, 83, who only retired last year, is now facing uncertainty after she said State Farm didn’t renew her individual condo insurance, citing the condition of her roof.

But with the loss of her documents she isn’t sure if and when the policy lapsed — and she hadn’t yet secured a new carrier. The insurance typically covers personal belongings and a unit’s interior and provides benefits such as living expenses if a condo becomes unusable.

“I’m not a big keeper of things, but what I did have was a whole wall of pictures and albums of all the places I had been, family photos. I had a picture of my mother on a camel when she was 52 in front of the Sphinx,” Holter recalled. “The only thing I am concerned about is the future, because that is what you have to do.”

Her biggest question is whether she can rebuild. The homeowners association had a master policy from FAIR Plan, which totaled only $20 million. That would pay out only about $550,000 per unit if the complex were not rebuilt — far below the $1 million-plus the condos commanded in recent sales. The land could be sold off to a developer.

Holter, who is now living with her son in the Hollywood Hills, had paid off her condo.

She went back to the complex after the fires died down to get a closer look at the damage. There was nothing left of her unit, but the complex’s koi pond survived, along with the fish.

State Farm has declined to comment on its non-renewals, saying in a recent statement: “Our number one priority right now is the safety of our customers, agents and employees impacted by the fires and assisting our customers in the midst of this tragedy.”

‘We don’t cover anything in California’

Matt Knight considers himself fortunate: He and his family could have lost it all in the Eaton fire, just like Bischetti and Holter in the Palisades fire.

The trouble started last year he said when he received a notice from Safeco Insurance that the policy on his Sonoma Drive home in Altadena, where he lives with his wife and three children, would not be renewed due to a tree overhanging his garage.

The 45-year-old Covina elementary school teacher said he dutifully trimmed the tree only to be told the ivy growing on the garage also was a problem. After removing that, he said he was told he had to fix his damaged stucco, which forced him to paint his house and in the process replace his old roof. Yet he said he still couldn’t get insurance after spending $30,000 on the repairs.

A spokesperson for Safeco, a subsidiary of Liberty Mutual, said the carrier does not comment on individual policyholders.

“So we went looking company after company after company, and some of them would say, ‘No, we don’t cover anything in California.’ Some said, ‘We’re not doing any new policies.’ Some said, ‘No, we don’t do 91001 because it’s in a fire zone, and we were were like, ‘That’s crazy.’”

Just a day before his policy was set to expire last summer, Knight said he finally managed to secure similar coverage with Aegis Insurance. But in the haste to get the policy in force, the home he has lived in for 16 years was left wildly under-insured for less than $300,000. The home is valued at $1.13 million on Zillow.

The ferocious winds that fanned the Eaton fire started a power outage Tuesday evening, so Knight decided to drive his children over to his parents’ home on the other side of Altadena where they could do their homework. From there, he saw the fire start on a street hugging the mountains near what appeared to be a power line.

“Within minutes it was taken up the hillside. It was unbelievable,” he said.

His parents’ home on Roosevelt Avenue escaped the devastation, and throughout the night he drove over to check on his home. By 6 a.m., he had joined a brigade of homeowners to fight the encroaching flames on Sonoma Drive. “The whole neighborhood was there grabbing hoses and fighting fires,” he said.

In the late afternoon, he said, the water ran out for the homeowners and firefighters alike, forcing him and his neighbors to pack up and go. He was sure he would lose his home, but the winds died down.

“I think that was the ultimate good fortune,” he said, though some other neighbors were not so lucky.

Bischetti was not so lucky either.

On Tuesday, when the fires started in the hills and all of his Palisades neighbors started to pack their cars, Bischetti stayed behind to keep hosing down his property, including his lawn, roof, rafters and walls.

“I thought everything would be relatively safe,” he said. “I was sticking around trying to protect the house with water.”

He gradually started packing his car with a change of clothes, one of his guitars, tax papers, property deeds and hard drives from his computer. He left his computer itself back in the house, along with his amps, music equipment and tools.

His entire street was a ghost town by 5 p.m. By then, Bischetti had already watered down his property multiple times. It was dusty and smoky, and a voice in his head told him it was time to go. “I’m going to come back for this tomorrow,” he recalled thinking. “I don’t want to weigh down my car.”

It didn’t work out that way.

Bischetti drove near Palisades High School and saw a house on the corner of the street start to burn down. He then tried going on El Medio Avenue and drove into black smoke, with flames on both sides of his car. He started panicking and realized he couldn’t get through.

After making it to his sister’s home in Mar Vista, he found out from a neighbor that all of the homes on his block had been leveled.

Bischetti said his siblings lost family mementos and photos and he lost thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and musical instruments. They also had spent nearly $4,000 fixing up the home in order to rent out some of the rooms.

Bischetti and his family have signed up for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds and are trying to get help with cleaning up the property, which he said could cost at least $10,000.

“I was getting ready for this,” he said of his one-man firefighting efforts. “That was the last hurrah.”

When Brigitte Tran arrived Wednesday morning at the Rodeo Drive boutique where she works as a sales associate, she was on edge.

Smoke from multiple wildfires raging across Los Angeles County billowed overhead. The luxury shopping corridor usually bustling with tourists appeared a ghost town.

Tran’s co-worker texted their boss to let her know neighboring stores had closed, and described the acrid smoke in the air. But the woman, at home in Orange County, did not seem to grasp their concerns. “We will not be closing unless the mall instructs us to close,” she replied.

Tran, who, fearing professional repercussions, asked that her place of work not be named, grew more anxious as the hours ticked by. Around 3 p.m., she and the two other employees working that day mutinied. They packed up, told the security guard to head home, and locked the doors a few hours before closing time.

As the wildfires have raged across Los Angeles County, choking the air, closing schools and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate, employers and employees alike have had to manage a difficult balancing act between work and well being. Some employers responded swiftly to the crisis, shutting down offices and shifting to remote work, providing outdoor workers with masks and other protective equipment, and offering support for employees forced to evacuate. Others have been less adept, clumsy in their communications or wholly unmoved by worker concerns — sparking anger among their ranks as a result.

The fires have underscored the need for companies to have a clear plan in place to respond to emergencies, said Jonathan Porter, a meteorologist at private weather forecaster AccuWeather. The obligation, he said, goes beyond monitoring whether an office is in an evacuation zone. For example, as the current devastation unfolds, businesses should be aware of the “copious amounts of dangerous smoke that’s wafting into the air” and be prepared to provide outdoor workers with quality respirators or move them away from polluted air.

Some employers gave employees flexibility. Snap, the Santa Monica-based creator of the photo messaging app Snapchat, for example, kept its offices open on Wednesday but encouraged employees to work remotely, said a company spokesperson.

Others changed course after fielding criticism.

An announcement by UCLA that the campus would remain open for classes and regular operations on Wednesday drew anger from some instructors and students on social media.

Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center and a lecturer on campus, said in a post on X he would ignore UCLA’s mandate and hold an optional class online.

“Students have been up all night panicked about sleeping through evacuation orders, winds still high, branches falling all over Westwood, power outages across city, & our new chancellor (on his 2nd day) thought this should be his first bold call…” wrote Nour Joudah, an assistant professor in UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, in another X post.

That evening, UCLA changed course as conditions worsened, announcing it would close campus.

On Saturday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk released a statement saying classes would be held remotely for at least another week and campus operations would be curtailed. “We ask for continued flexibility and understanding as we all work through these difficult times,” Frenk wrote.

But for many workers, the chaos of the last few dayshas left them feeling like they are fending for themselves.

Tim Hernandez, a driver with Amazon Flex, an on-demand Uber-like program in which people use their own cars to deliver packages, was assigned a route Tuesday along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, which was rife with closures.

When he questioned whether making the delivery was safe, he said dispatchers at a Amazon facility in Camarillo brushed him off, leaving him to choose between concerns for his safety and worries that his rating in the Flex app would be hurt if he refused to go. He decided to try to make the deliveries, battling gusts of wind that knocked him over at one point. He lost cell signal, however, and was forced to return to the warehouse without completing the vast majority.

And when he arrived for his shift Tuesday, Alfred Muñoz, 43, an Amazon delivery driver who works out of a warehouse in the City of Industry, said he was handed an N95 mask but given little other instruction.

“It was just kind of business as usual,” Muñoz said.

High package counts and the number of stops on his assigned routes this week have made work even more difficult. On Tuesday, with wind gusts whipping debris around making it difficult to see, he had about 180 stops and 290 packages to deliver. On Thursday, the air thick with smoke and ash, he had more than 300 packages.

He woke up Thursday morning with a bloody nose and a sooty black crust in the corners of his eyes.

In response to a request for comment, Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was “closely monitoring the wildfires across Southern California and adjusting our operations to keep our employees and those delivering for us safe.”

“If a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so and the driver’s performance will not be impacted,” she said.

At the Brentwood location of popular Italian eatery Jon & Vinny’s, staff complained of headaches and sore throats in a text message group chat. An employee, who asked not to be named fearing retaliation at work, said that on Tuesday, staff huddled around an iPad with a fire map pulled up to keep an eye on the expanding evacuation zone. From the front of the restaurant, they could see the glow of the Palisades fire.

The employee said they were frustrated management kept the restaurant open when the perimeter of the mandatory evacuation zone was just two blocks away. On Wednesday, every server scheduled to work called in to say they were not coming, the employee said.

A spokesperson for Joint Venture Restaurant Group, which owns Jon & Vinny’s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During natural disasters and extreme weather, employers’ choices can sometimes mean life or death, said David Michaels, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health and a former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

He pointed to recent floods from Hurricane Helene that killed several workers at a plastics manufacturer. The tragedy has drawn scrutiny from state investigators, and a wrongful death lawsuit accuses the company of requiring employees to stay on site amid flooding after they requested permission to leave.

“It’s incumbent on employers to ensure the safety of their workers,” Michaels said. “The safety of their employees must take precedence over business concerns.”

Yasha Timenovich, 48, a driver for rideshare app Lyft and food delivery platform DoorDash, is more worried about declining earnings than on-the-job safety. With many restaurants and other businesses closed and would-be customers fleeing the city, he said that rides and deliveries have been slow. Traffic patterns have been strange and unpredictable with families piling into vehicles to flee fires.

Timenovich, who faced an order to evacuate his Hollywood apartment with his fiance and 6-year-old daughter Wednesday night, said he planned to stay with relatives for a few days in San Luis Obispo, where he hopes business will be better.

“I’m going to get out of here because it’s too crazy with these fires,” Timenovich said.