My brother has a vineyard property in Redwood Valley upon which the house, guesthouse, and barn burned down. It’s his project, not mine, though I help out.
I was hesitant at first wrt the concept of turning over the cleanup to the county/FEMA and signing over the cleanup portion of your insurance proceeds to them. If you think about it, that is exactly what you want to do and it’s the best thing that could happen.
Because it means that you, property owner, are now essentially indemnified in case the cleanup costs exceed your coverage. And you can be absolutely certain that they will, because they have to be cleaned up to 2017 standards. These standards will be driven by Northern CA Eco-zealots afraid of your runoff running into the Russian River. If you do NOT do this (turnover the ins-—by the approaching deadline) you could or I should say WILL be on the hook for a multi-year total nightmare of environmental testing and sampling and issuing lab reports and if you don’t think that will cost well into six figures, my estimation is you’d be wrong. Your ins coverage is probably in the $25K-$50K range which I have no way of knowing but the critical point is, that (amount of) coverage is designed to pay for a burned down house in Des Moines where a loader comes in and hauls the debris to the dump and you’re done. There is no way that amount of coverage will produce compliance with what 2017 CA eco dudes and dudettes will make you do. Nuff said.
Although I can’t predict the future, I would imagine that as the co & FEMA gather more steam, they will impose more and more limitations and yet those limitations will change over time. As you noticed with the car disposal. The important thing, in my non-legal opinion but which matches my bro’s opinion, who IS an attorney though not an insurance atty, is that the more they do whatever they do, the more they take over the entirety of what they intend to take over, the more they assume legal and financial liability and you should want that, big time. That is my take on his take.
That makes sense. I can see why a person would prefer that.
I’ve been doing an in-depth review of our homeowner’s insurance the past few weeks and when you say “[California] coverage is designed to pay for a burned down house in Des Moines” you are exactly right. I find we are modestly underinsured if a single disaster hits, i.e., our house burns down by itself. But we are grossly underinsured if a major disaster like Santa Rosa or an earthquake hits and materials prices shoot up 50% to 100% and labor is scarce as hen’s teeth. The broker I’m working with says lots of people in and around Santa Rosa are discovering this when it’s too late. There’s a special coverage item on our policy to specifically pay the costs of rebuilding compliant to today’s building codes. Their “replacement cost” analysis includes a specific line to cover the cost of clearing away the debris and it wasn’t very much, probably at the low end of your estimate. I think your advice is sound.