AUBURN, Calif. — Sheree DiCicco's first response to a notice that her insurance would not be renewed because her landscaped home in the Sierra foothills was too close to brush was to wonder aloud: How on earth did inspectors get past the guards of my gated community?
A phone call to her insurance company 400 miles away in Orange County revealed that the inspection had been conducted by satellite, and the determination that brush was a quarter-mile from her home had been forwarded to her mortgage holder.
"I was shocked," DiCicco said. "I didn't know insurance companies would, or even could, do such a thing."
At a time when Americans can watch satellite images of Hurricane Ivan bearing down on the Gulf Coast and government agencies across the country are doing mapping surveys with their eyes in the sky, insurance companies are availing themselves of the technology to weed out high-risk customers.
DiCicco's carrier, First American Property and Casualty Insurance Co. of Santa Ana, is using satellite imagery to reexamine about 10% of its outstanding policies, most of them scattered across brush lands in California, Nevada and Arizona, a spokeswoman for the company said.
"It's part of an effort to identify high-risk properties in high-brush areas," said Jo Etta Bandy, a spokeswoman for First American. "In the event of a question as to the determination, we can do a field inspection, which could trump any reports that had been generated."
At the same time, however, the carriers are hitting people where they live by threatening to cancel insurance policies and placing mortgages at risk.
"This is an emerging and serious statewide problem," said California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi. "Insurance companies are using satellite imagery and just plain photos to red-line vast areas of the state without taking into account the individual circumstances of an individual home."
Garamendi said he is warning companies not to do it, but he doesn't have the legal authority to stop it.
"There are companies that have said they will not insure a home within 2,000 feet of brush," he said. "By those guidelines, they would not be able to insure anyone in the Santa Monica Mountains, or all of San Diego County. Essentially, these computerized databases and satellite technologies are cheaper than sending someone out to visually inspect a property."
