Despite wildfires in Southern California this month burning hundreds of thousands of acres and leveling entire neighborhoods, damages sustained in October were much worse.
The California state insurance commissioner announced last week that wildfires wreaked a record $9.4 billion worth of damage. Official numbers for December, and the insurance claims on the Southern California fires, specifically, will not be out for several weeks. Comparing the amount of damage done, however, California’s wine country, hit hardest in October, suffered much more damage than Southern California has since last week.
Fires that swept through wine country completely destroyed 6,744 homes and businesses and damaged 23,920 others, according to the insurance commissioner’s report.
So far in Southern California, an estimated 1,188 structures have been destroyed. Another 342 structures were damaged, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The wine country fires torched nearly 230,000 acres, according to data from CAL FIRE.
Southern California’s wildfire have burned about 30,000 more acres than the wine country fires, with the vast majority of that from just one fire. The Thomas Fire, the fifth largest in the state’s history, has burned 236,000 acres on its own.
Though December’s fires have covered more acreage, October’s fires destroyed more than five times the amount of structures and damaged nearly 70 times the amount of buildings. An astronomical amount of land would have to burn before the costs were comparable.
A key difference in the totals, however, is that December fires are still burning and are threatening another 20,500 structures. The Thomas Fire is still growing at only 25 percent containment.
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