Rachel Torres has been adjusting property insurance claims in California for fourteen years. For the first decade, that meant hail damage, kitchen fires, the occasional earthquake claim. Now it means something else entirely. We met at a coffee shop in Sacramento on a September afternoon when the AQI hit 167—unhealthy, but not bad enough to cancel plans anymore. She'd just finished processing her third total-loss wildfire claim of the month.
How did you end up in this line of work?
Pure accident, honestly. I was working retail management after college, hating it, and my uncle mentioned his insurance company was hiring. I thought it would be boring and stable. She laughs. Got the boring part wrong.
I liked it at first. You're helping people through genuinely difficult moments—house fires, storm damage. There's something satisfying about being the person who shows up and says "we're going to make this right." You're doing math and negotiation and human psychology all at once. Every claim is a little puzzle.
The job was exactly what I thought it would be until about 2017. That's when I started noticing the maps changing.
The maps?
Our risk models. Insurance companies are basically in the business of predicting the future, right? We have these incredibly detailed maps showing fire risk, flood zones, wind exposure, all color-coded by probability. I'd been using the same basic maps for years—they'd update occasionally, but the changes were minor.
Then suddenly they weren't minor anymore. Areas that had been yellow were turning orange. Orange was turning red. And the red zones were spreading like... well, like wildfire. She catches herself. Sorry, occupational hazard. You start thinking in insurance metaphors.
What does it mean when an area turns red on your maps?
Technically, it means the actuarial models show elevated risk that affects pricing and coverage decisions. Practically, it means we're starting to have conversations about whether we'll insure properties there at all.
I remember this one claim in 2018, a house in the Sierra foothills. Beautiful property, been in the family for thirty years. They'd had the same policy that whole time, premiums barely changed. Then the Camp Fire happened—not their house, they were fifty miles away—and suddenly their renewal came back at triple the premium. They were furious. Kept saying "nothing happened to our house, why are we being punished?"
I had to explain that from the company's perspective, everything had changed. The fire didn't have to reach their property to prove that the entire risk model for that region was wrong. We'd been underpricing fire risk across the whole area for decades.
That must be a difficult conversation to have.
It's the worst part of the job now. You're telling people that the place they've lived safely for twenty or thirty years is suddenly considered too dangerous to insure affordably. And they're not wrong to be angry—their house didn't move, the trees didn't suddenly appear. But the climate did change, and our models finally caught up to reality.
The thing that gets me is how many people still don't connect it to climate change. They'll say "fires have always happened here" or "this is just a bad year." And yes, fires have always happened, but not like this. Not this often, not this intense, not burning through areas that used to be too wet to carry fire.
I've stopped arguing about it. My job is to assess damage and process claims, not convince people about climate science. But I see the data every day. The patterns are unmistakable.
What patterns are you seeing?
The frequency is the obvious one. I used to handle maybe two or three fire claims a year. Last year I processed forty-seven. This year I'm already past thirty and we've got two months left in fire season. Well, "fire season" is kind of a joke now—we had significant fires in January this year.
But it's also the severity. Houses that should have survived with moderate damage are burning to the foundation. Fires are moving faster, burning hotter, jumping containment lines that should have held. The ember cast—that's how far burning debris travels ahead of the main fire—has gotten insane. I've seen embers start spot fires two miles ahead of the fire front. That didn't used to happen.
And the geography is shifting. We're getting fires in places that our models said were low risk. Wetter areas, higher elevations, regions that historically didn't burn. The 2020 fires in the redwood forests—those trees are supposed to be fire-resistant. Some of them are a thousand years old and they burned.
How do you assess a total loss claim?
She pulls out her phone and scrolls through photos. This is what I see most days now. The image shows a concrete foundation with a brick chimney standing alone, surrounded by ash. Everything else is gone.
Total loss is actually the easiest claim to process, mathematically. The house is gone, here's the policy limit, here's your check. It's the partial losses that get complicated—what can be salvaged, what needs replacing, how much smoke damage affects value.
But emotionally, total loss is devastating. You're walking through what used to be someone's home and it's just... ash and twisted metal. I've learned to identify objects from their melted remains. That's a refrigerator. That was a piano. This pile of glass used to be their wedding china.
People always want to find something. One photograph, their grandmother's ring, their kid's baby book. Sometimes we find things—a fireproof safe that protected documents, jewelry that survived in a drawer. Usually we don't. The heat is just too intense.
I had a claim last year where the only thing that survived was a cast-iron skillet. Everything else was gone, but this skillet was sitting in the ash, perfectly intact. The homeowner cried when I showed her. She said her mother had cooked with that skillet for forty years. It's the only physical object she has left from her childhood home.
How has your job changed your own life decisions?
She's quiet for a moment. I moved last year. I was renting a house in the foothills—beautiful place, great views, affordable. But I kept looking at it with my adjuster eyes. The vegetation was too close to the structure. The access road was narrow with no turnaround. The nearest fire station was twenty minutes away.
I started having dreams about assessing my own claim. I'd be walking through the ash of my rental, cataloging my own belongings in that detached professional voice I use for work. It got to me.
So I moved to an apartment in Sacramento. It's smaller, more expensive, no views. But it's in the city, surrounded by irrigated landscaping and wide streets. The fire risk is minimal. I sleep better now.
My boyfriend thinks I'm paranoid. He grew up here, he's seen fires his whole life, he thinks this is just part of living in California. But he doesn't see what I see. He doesn't spend his days walking through the ruins of people's lives, listening to them say "we never thought it would reach us."
What do people say when you're processing their claims?
A lot of shock, even when they had warning. "It happened so fast" is the most common thing I hear. Even people who evacuated early, who watched the fire approach for hours, they're stunned by how quickly everything disappeared.
There's anger, obviously. At PG, at the Forest Service, at the government, at God. Sometimes at me, which I understand even though I'm just the messenger. I'm the face of the insurance company telling them that their payout won't cover rebuilding to the same standard, or that certain items aren't covered, or that their policy had limits they didn't understand.
But there's also this weird pragmatism that emerges. People start making decisions really quickly—we're not rebuilding, we're moving to Oregon. Or, we're rebuilding but with different materials, different design. Or, we're taking the insurance money and buying an RV, we're done with permanent structures.
I processed a claim a few months ago for a couple in their sixties. They'd lost everything. And the wife said to me, very matter-of-factly, "Well, I guess we're climate refugees now." Just like that. Climate refugees. In California. In America.
Are people rebuilding in the same locations?
Some are. Some aren't. It's splitting along lines that are hard to predict.
Older folks, especially if they're retired, often don't rebuild. They take the insurance money and move somewhere else—out of state, to the city, closer to family. They're done. They don't want to spend their remaining years worrying about the next fire.
Younger families are more likely to rebuild, but they're doing it differently. More defensible space, fire-resistant materials, better sprinkler systems. Some are building smaller, keeping more cash liquid in case they need to evacuate permanently next time. It's like they're rebuilding with one foot out the door.
The people who surprise me are the ones with deep roots—multi-generational properties, family land. They'll rebuild almost regardless of cost or risk. There's an emotional attachment that overrides the rational calculation. I get it, but it's hard to watch. Because I know I'll probably be back in five years processing another claim on the same property.
What do you tell people who ask if they should buy property in fire-prone areas?
She laughs, but it's not a happy sound. I tell them I'm an insurance adjuster, not a financial advisor. But off the record? I tell them to look at the insurance costs first, before they fall in love with a property.
If you can't get coverage from a standard carrier and have to go to the FAIR Plan—California's insurer of last resort—that's a red flag. If your premium is more than one percent of the home's value annually, that's a red flag. If the insurance company requires specific fire mitigation measures as a condition of coverage, that's a red flag.
People don't want to hear this. They want the mountain views, the forest setting, the peace and quiet. They think "it won't happen to me" or "I'll be careful" or "I can always evacuate." And maybe they're right. Maybe they'll live there for thirty years and never have a problem.
But I've processed enough claims now to know that everyone thinks that until they don't. The family who lost everything in the Tubbs Fire had lived there for forty years without incident. The couple in Paradise had survived three previous evacuations and thought they knew what to expect. They were wrong.
How do you think this changes over the next few years?
The insurance market is going to keep contracting. More companies are going to stop writing new policies in high-risk areas, or pull out entirely like State Farm did. The FAIR Plan is going to get overwhelmed—it's already covering way more properties than it was designed to handle.
Premiums are going to keep rising, which means more people will drop coverage or reduce their limits to save money. Which means when the next big fire hits, we're going to have a lot of underinsured or uninsured losses. That's going to be a disaster on top of a disaster.
I think we're also going to see more communities just... not coming back. Paradise is trying to rebuild, but the population is a fraction of what it was. Some of these smaller mountain towns, after the next major fire, people are going to decide it's not worth it. The infrastructure won't get rebuilt, the services won't return, and the town will just fade away.
And I think—she pauses—I think we're going to see a lot more people like me. People whose jobs used to be routine and are now about managing climate catastrophe. Emergency managers, firefighters, public health workers, city planners. We're all becoming climate workers whether we wanted to be or not.
Does that feel like a burden?
Sometimes. I didn't sign up to be on the front lines of climate change. I wanted to help people with their insurance claims, not bear witness to the collapse of entire communities.
But there's also something clarifying about it. I'm not wondering if climate change is real or what it might mean someday. I'm living in it. I'm documenting it. Every claim I process is evidence of what's already happening.
And weirdly, that makes me feel less anxious than I used to. When it was this abstract future threat, I didn't know what to do with that feeling. Now it's concrete. These are the risks. This is how they manifest. These are the decisions people face. I can work with concrete.
What's the hardest claim you've processed?
Long pause. There was a family last year. Young couple, two kids under five. They'd bought their house in 2019—their first home, they were so proud. It was in a moderate-risk area, not the highest fire zone, and they'd gotten a good deal because the previous owners were older and wanted to move closer to family.
The fire came through in August. They evacuated with the kids and their dog and a few bags of clothes. They thought they'd be back in a few days. The house burned to the foundation.
When I met with them to process the claim, they were living in a motel room. Both kids were there because they couldn't afford childcare on top of the motel. The kids were bouncing off the walls, the parents were exhausted, and we're trying to have this detailed conversation about policy limits and replacement costs and depreciation.
The husband kept apologizing for the chaos. The wife was just... numb. She'd answer my questions in this flat voice, like she was reading from a script. At one point the older kid asked when they were going home and she said "we don't have a home anymore" and the kid started crying and she just sat there, not comforting him, not crying herself, just staring at nothing.
I finished the assessment as quickly as I could and got them the maximum payout their policy allowed. It wasn't enough to rebuild. It wasn't enough to buy another house in the same area. It was enough for a down payment somewhere else, maybe, if they could get a mortgage while living in a motel.
I think about them sometimes. Wonder where they ended up. If they're okay. If the kids remember having a house or if this is just their normal now.
Do you think you'll stay in this job?
I don't know. Some days I think I can't do this anymore—it's too much grief, too much loss, too much evidence of how badly we've screwed things up. Other days I think this is exactly where I need to be. Someone has to do this work. Someone has to bear witness.
My company wants me to train new adjusters. They're hiring a lot of people because the claim volume keeps increasing. And I think about what I'd tell them. How do you prepare someone for this? How do you teach them to walk through someone's destroyed life and stay professional while also staying human?
I guess you just do it. You show up, you do the assessment, you process the claim. You try to help people navigate the worst day of their lives. You go home and you try not to dream about ash and foundations and melted metal.
And you watch the maps keep changing, the red zones keep spreading, and you wonder how long before there's nowhere left that isn't high-risk. Before we're all just living in different shades of red, waiting for our turn.
She checks her phone. I should go. I've got another site visit this afternoon. House in Grass Valley, partial loss, family wants to know if it's salvageable. She stands, gathering her things. Probably not, but I'll do the assessment. That's the job.
One last question—what do you wish people understood about what you do?
That I'm not the enemy. I know people are angry when their claim doesn't cover everything, when the payout isn't enough, when the process takes too long. I get it. But I'm not the one who wrote the policy or set the limits or created the risk models.
I'm just the person who shows up after everything burns and tries to help people put the pieces back together. And I wish people understood that I'm seeing the same thing they are—that the world is changing, that the risks are getting worse, that the old assumptions don't hold anymore.
I'm not an activist or a scientist or a policy maker. I'm just someone who processes insurance claims. But I know what I'm seeing. And what I'm seeing is that we're not ready for what's coming. Not even close.
She pauses at the door. The AQI is supposed to hit 200 tonight. You should probably stay inside. Then she's gone, heading to her car, to her next claim, to another family's disaster that's become her routine.