Four fires the record still argues about,
a fault that broke under Napa in 2014, and
a FAIR Plan share that runs from 21 percent to zero across one valley.

Markets

334

Google rating

5.0

CA DOI licence

6013787

Family

3rd gen

Start with the honest part: we are 400 miles south, not on the Plaza

Bollinsure is an independent brokerage operating from Westlake Village, on the Ventura–Los Angeles county line. We do not have an office in Santa Rosa, Napa or Healdsburg, and a broker who fudges something that easy to check is telling you what the rest of the relationship will be like. We serve Napa and Sonoma the way we serve the Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and the Central Valley: you send a declarations page, a licensed broker reads it, and the conversation happens by phone or on a call, which is how most of this work has been done for years anyway.

Independent means we are not one carrier's agent. We place with admitted carriers, with non-admitted surplus lines markets through a licensed surplus line broker, and with the California FAIR Plan where the standard market has stopped writing. In these two counties that range is the whole job, because they are at least four markets that share two names.

The Santa Rosa plain — Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, Windsor, Cotati — is the valley floor, including Coffey Park, a flat tract neighbourhood that burned to the ground in 2017 and was rebuilt under a new code. The Mayacamas and the eastern hills — Fountaingrove, Glen Ellen, Kenwood, Calistoga, St. Helena, Angwin, Deer Park — are where Tubbs, Nuns and Glass started and where the FAIR Plan shares climb. The west county — Guerneville, Cazadero, Sebastopol, the Russian River towns — is a flood market first and a redwood-fire market second. And the Napa Valley floor — Napa, American Canyon, Yountville — is the 2014 earthquake's ground and the wine industry's front door.

Each of those is a different product to a carrier. A rebuilt Coffey Park house, a Fountaingrove hillside home, a Guerneville riverfront cabin and a St. Helena winery residence are not variations on one policy; they are placed in different markets, priced off different maps and excluded in different ways. That is why the address on our letterhead matters less than the range of markets behind it.

October 2017, and the four fires CAL FIRE's own records still disagree about

Carriers underwrite a region's record, and in these two counties the record is unusually well documented and unusually inconsistent. The Tubbs Fire started at 9:45 on the night of 8 October 2017 off Highway 128 at Calistoga and ran into Santa Rosa; CAL FIRE's live page gives 36,807 acres in Napa and Sonoma, 5,636 structures destroyed, 317 damaged and 22 civilian deaths, with no cause field; its Top 20 Most Destructive list, where Tubbs ranks fourth, gives the same acres and structures with cause electrical, and its Deadliest list gives 5,643 structures. The Nuns Fire and its merged neighbours started the next night north of Glen Ellen; the live page gives 44,573 acres in Napa and Sonoma, 1,355 destroyed, 172 damaged and 3 deaths, while the Destructive list gives 54,382 acres, Sonoma alone, cause powerline. The Atlas Fire, the same night in Napa and Solano, is 51,624 acres, 783 destroyed and 6 deaths on the live page with cause under investigation, and 781 structures with cause powerline on the Deadliest list. We quote each rather than average them.

Then the Kincade Fire: 23 October 2019, northeast of Geyserville, 77,758 acres in Sonoma County, 374 structures destroyed, 60 damaged, the largest fire in California that year, cause under investigation. The Glass Fire: 27 September 2020 at Crystal Springs Road, 67,484 acres in Napa and Sonoma, 1,528 structures destroyed on the live page and 1,520 on the Destructive list, 282 damaged. The LNU Lightning Complex of August 2020: 363,220 acres across a header of five counties — Napa, Solano, Lake, Sonoma, Yolo — with no damage assessment on the live page, while the Top 20 lists give 1,491 structures and 6 deaths and name six counties including Colusa; the Walbridge Fire that burned the west county is inside that record, and CAL FIRE prints no separate figure for it, so neither do we. Since then, the Pickett Fire north of Calistoga, 21 August 2025, 6,820 acres (6,803 in its 30 August update), cause debris burning, five structures destroyed — four outbuildings and one home, by that update. The Steele and Dutch Flat fires of 2026 in Napa County carry no destroyed count on their records.

The rebuild is the insurance story. Santa Rosa's Resilient City Standards named Coffey Park, Fountaingrove and Hidden Valley as the Tubbs and Nuns rebuild areas and expire on 31 December 2025; the city page prints no rebuilt-home count, and we borrow none from news. What every declarations page in those neighbourhoods carries is a dwelling limit set either before the fire or at a builder's price after it, and extended replacement cost — the percentage above the limit a policy pays when the estimate was wrong — is the line we read first, because a same-neighbourhood rebuild after a mass loss is priced by scarce contractors, not by the last appraisal.

Every city got a new fire hazard map in February 2025, and Santa Rosa's ordinance has a number

On 24 February 2025, in the second of four phases, the Office of the State Fire Marshal released its recommended Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps for the Local Responsibility Area in Napa and Sonoma counties. Permit Sonoma states that the maps automatically become official 120 days after release and notes that its existing Fire Safety Ordinance 6396 of 2022 is a separate instrument; Napa County said its Board would adopt within 120 days and prints no ordinance number; the City of Santa Rosa adopted Ordinance ORD-2025-006 on 1 April 2025, designating the zones as CAL FIRE recommended them under Government Code section 51179; the City of Sonoma scheduled its hearing for April and adoption for May. We did not open the ordinances for Petaluma, Healdsburg, Calistoga or St. Helena, so we quote no numbers for them.

What the map changes is not your premium directly; carriers in these counties have used their own wildfire scores since 2017. What the map changes is the rebuild: a home inside a Very High zone that burns is rebuilt under Chapter 7A of the building code — ignition-resistant materials, ember-resistant vents, tempered glazing, defensible space a plan checker will inspect — and every one of those costs more than the house it replaces cost to build. The line on your declarations page that pays for that difference is called Ordinance and Law, and on most policies it sits at a percentage of the dwelling limit chosen before anyone had seen the 2025 map. In Fountaingrove, on the Mayacamas side of the valley, in Angwin and Deer Park, it is the first thing we read.

There is no non-renewal freeze here, and there has not been one since 2021

California Insurance Code section 675.1 lets the Insurance Commissioner freeze non-renewals for one year in ZIP codes inside or next to a fire the Governor has declared an emergency for. The statute that made the freeze mandatory, SB 824, is Chapter 616 of the Statutes of 2018 — after October 2017 — so Tubbs, Nuns and Atlas never had one. Two freezes have reached these counties since. The Department's 18 December 2019 bulletin, after the Governor's 25 October 2019 proclamation for Sonoma County, froze non-renewals for one year in twenty-nine Kincade ZIP codes as it prints them — 95403, 95404, 95492, 95448, 95425, 94515 and their neighbours across both counties — and that clock ended on 25 October 2020; the Department's consumer page lists the same event with one extra ZIP, and we quote the bulletin. Bulletin 2020-11, after the Governor's 18 August 2020 declaration for the LNU Lightning Complex and his 28 September 2020 declaration for Napa, Sonoma and Shasta after the Glass Fire, froze them for one year from each date; both clocks ended by 28 September 2021. No bulletin from 2024, 2025 or 2026 names Napa or Sonoma as the fire county, and the Pickett Fire has none.

What that means in Fountaingrove, Glen Ellen or Angwin is blunt: if a non-renewal letter arrives, there is no statutory pause to wait out. The date on the letter is the deadline. A non-renewal is not a cancellation — you are covered to the date printed — but replacement coverage in the hills takes longer to place than it did in 2017, and a home that ends up on the FAIR Plan needs a second policy beside it, which is the next section. Our non-renewal guide walks the letter itself.

Angwin at 21 percent, Rohnert Park at zero, by the state's own count

The California FAIR Plan's county-by-county table puts Sonoma County at 8,748 policies in force across its residential, commercial and business-owner lines as of 30 September 2025, up 39 percent in a year from 6,304 — and before that 3,996, 2,628 and 1,363, a sixfold rise in four years — and Napa County at 3,042, from 2,424, 1,922, 1,484 and 877, against 642,010 statewide. The Department of Insurance's 2022 table of residential dwellings by ZIP shows where those policies sit — the share of dwellings the FAIR Plan insured that year:

• Angwin (94508) — 21.2 percent
• Cazadero (95421) — 11.9 percent
• St. Helena (94574) — 8.9 percent
• Calistoga (94515) — 8.7 percent
• Guerneville (95446) — 7.9 percent
• Glen Ellen (95442) — 7.1 percent
• Healdsburg (95448) — 5.5 percent
• Kenwood (95452) — 3.0 percent
• Santa Rosa (95404) — 2.5 percent
• Napa (94558) — 1.7 percent
• Santa Rosa (95409) — 0.5 percent
• Petaluma (94954) — 0.1 percent
• Rohnert Park (94928) — 0.0 percent

Those figures are from 2022, before the county tables grew by half again, so the hill shares today are not lower. Angwin and Rohnert Park are forty minutes apart and, to a carrier, different planets.

What the FAIR Plan is, and is not, decides how you buy it. It is a fire policy: fire, lightning, internal explosion, with optional extensions, written to a residential ceiling that our FAIR Plan page states as $3 million at one location under Division I — a number a great many Napa Valley homes are above, which makes the placement a surplus lines conversation. It is not a homeowners policy. There is no liability, no theft, no water damage, no loss of use in the plan itself; those come from a separate Difference in Conditions policy that wraps around it, and a house “on the FAIR Plan” without a DIC companion is a house insured against exactly one thing. When we review a hillside declarations page here, the DIC is the second document we ask for, and its absence is the most common finding.

August 2014: the West Napa fault broke under the city, on strands nobody had mapped

At 3:20 in the morning of 24 August 2014 an earthquake the U.S. Geological Survey titles magnitude 6.0 — 6.02 in its catalogue, Mw 6.0 in Brocher's paper and Mw 6.1 in Wei's, and we quote each — struck 11 kilometres deep, 6.8 kilometres northwest of American Canyon, on the West Napa fault. The survey's one-year review records a surface rupture of about 8 miles, surface slip of up to 18 inches with afterslip of up to 14 more, peak ground accelerations of 45 to 61 percent of gravity, intensity VII to VIII, one death and economic losses of at least $500 million; it notes that some strands that broke had not previously been mapped, that a magnitude 5.0 on the same fault had damaged Napa in 2000, and that the drought inhibited the landslides and liquefaction that a wet year would have produced. It does not print an injury count, so neither do we.

The regional odds are the Bay Area's. The survey's fact sheet on the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast gives a 72 percent probability of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake somewhere in the San Francisco Bay region before 2043, and 33 percent for the Hayward or Rodgers Creek faults together; it does not isolate Rodgers Creek, which runs under Santa Rosa, and neither do we. The survey's own study of that fault gives a minimum slip of 2.1 to 5.8 millimetres a year and a record of past magnitude-7 earthquakes. A homeowners policy excludes earth movement, whichever fault produces it and whether or not it was on a map. Earthquake coverage in California is a separate policy or endorsement, most often through the California Earthquake Authority via your existing carrier, with a deductible expressed as a percentage of the dwelling limit that you choose; for a 1900s Victorian in downtown Napa, a rebuilt Coffey Park house and a hillside winery residence it is three different questions, and we read which one you are before we say whether the premium is worth it.

The Russian River has a flood stage of 32 feet and a record of 49.5

The west county is a flood market before it is a fire market. The California Nevada River Forecast Center's gauge for the Russian River at Guerneville sets the monitor stage at 29 feet and the flood stage at 32 feet; its flood of record is 49.5 feet on 18 February 1986 at 102,000 cubic feet per second. On 27 February 2019 the river crested at 45.38 feet and 85,300 cubic feet per second — the Weather Service's forecast that morning had said 46.1 — the sixth-highest flow in a record that begins in 1940. The last three water years peaked at 38.79 feet (February 2025), 28.91 (2024) and 31.83 (January 2023), the last of them just under flood stage. A homeowners policy excludes flood; along the Russian River a flood policy is a separate purchase whether or not a lender asks, the federal program's building limit stops at $250,000, and the thirty-day waiting period on a new policy does not care what the forecast says.

Napa built its answer. The county's Napa River and Napa Creek Flood Protection Project, authorised through the Corps of Engineers, terraces about seven miles of the river through the city and a mile of the creek, restores tidal wetlands the county's pages put at more than 600 acres in one paragraph and 650 in the next, and is designed to protect 2,700 homes, 350 businesses and more than 50 public properties from a 100-year flood, against $542 million of property damage since the 1970s. A project that reduces flood risk does not remove the exclusion from your policy; it changes the price and availability of the separate one. We read whether a flood policy sits beside the homeowners form on any address near the river, in either county.

A billion dollars of grapes, four million visitors, and medians above $800,000

Napa County's Agricultural Commissioner reported 2025 gross production of $974,204,600, of which winegrapes were $968,687,700 — 144,807 tons from 42,937 bearing acres at $6,690 a ton — down 6 percent on 2024's $1,034,798,400. Sonoma County's 2024 report gives $857,620,400 with winegrapes at $626,550,200 from 211,511.6 harvested tons, down 12.6 percent. Napa Valley Vintners counts nearly 550 members on its about page and 539 wineries in its listing; we quote both. Visit Napa Valley's 2025 study counts 3.8 million visitors spending $2.2 billion and supporting 15,300 jobs; Sonoma County Tourism counts 10.5 million visitors and $2.4 billion of spending. That economy changes what a coverage review has to cover: the owner of a St. Helena or Healdsburg home is often also a grower, a winery, a tasting room, an inn or a restaurant, and those are commercial placements — property for the winery, the barrel room and the stock, inland marine for wine in transit or in a third-party warehouse, general liability with liquor liability, workers' compensation for a harvest crew, commercial auto — with their own carriers and forms, and after 2017 and 2020 the winery property market is a specialty placement with smoke-taint and crop questions of its own. We handle them through the same review; we do not pretend a homeowners conversation covers a vineyard.

The housing carries the medians the Census Bureau's 2024 one-year survey prints: owner-occupied values of $870,100 in Napa County and $822,400 in Sonoma, with 49,477 and 193,185 households; the 2020–2024 five-year survey counts 125,301 owner-occupied and 67,884 renter-occupied homes in Sonoma and 17,704 units built in 1939 or earlier, and 31,872 owner-occupied and 17,605 renter-occupied in Napa. We quote the counts and do not compute a rate the Census did not print. For owners, a median that high against a post-fire rebuild market means the dwelling limit and its extended-replacement-cost percentage decide whether a rebuild is funded; for the 85,000 renting households across the two counties, an HO-4 renter's policy for a premium that is usually less than a month's utilities is the most under-bought coverage in wine country, and in an evacuation it is the difference between a hotel bill and a claim.

What a coverage review actually is

You send a declarations page — and if you are on the FAIR Plan, the Difference in Conditions declarations too; if you carry flood or earthquake, those policies; if you grow, make, pour or host for a living, the business policies. A licensed broker reads them and tells you what they do: the dwelling limit against a current single-lot rebuild estimate in a market that has rebuilt two neighbourhoods at once, what your Ordinance and Law and extended replacement cost mean under a 2025 hazard map, whether a FAIR Plan policy has the companion it needs, how your earth-movement and water exclusions are worded on the West Napa fault and beside the Russian River, whether your winery's smoke and crop exposures are placed anywhere, what your deductible schedule applies to, and whether you are in the market you should be in. There is no fee and no obligation, and the commission we would earn is printed on any quote we send. If your current policy is doing the job, the honest answer is that it is doing the job — that is a common outcome, and we would rather say it than manufacture a reason to move you.

Napa & Sonoma insurance questions