MALIBU, UNITED STATES, JAN 22 (AFP/APP/DNA):As he looks at the ruins of his home razed when deadly fires tore through the Los Angeles area, Sebastian Harrison knows it will never be the same again, because he was not insured.
“I knew it was risky, but I had no choice,” he told AFP.
Harrison is one of tens of thousands of Californians forced in recent years to live without a safety net, either because their insurance company dropped them, or because the premiums just got too high.
Some of them are now counting the crippling cost, after enormous blazes ripped through America’s second largest city, killing more than two dozen people and levelling 12,000 structures, Harrison’s home among them.
His own slice of what he called “paradise” stood on a mountainside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where Malibu runs into the badly hit Pacific Palisades neighborhood.
The three-acre plot, which contained his home and a few other buildings, was always costly to insure, and in 2010 was already $8,000 a year.
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