Related On an October night in 2019, Scott Newman stood on his Sonoma Valley farm and watched the smoke plumes from the Kinkade Fire over the mountains to his north. He texted a friend, the local fire chief, “It looks like we might be in the fire path.” Minutes later, Newman recalled, the chief replied, “Sadly, yes.” By the following day, the fire had reduced nearly everything on his 500-acre property to blackened rubble. Only a single barn remained unscathed.
Newman’s crop and fire insurance policies covered just about all the damages, including six homes, 14 structures, and vineyard and ranching equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the next year and a half, he built anew on the property that had been in his family for 50 years.