At the end of the day life is about balancing risks, rewards and costs.
. . .
The same is true out in Southern California. Fires aren’t new there and the Santa Ana winds are an annual phenomena that have occurred long before the California Gold Rush brought a large influx of humans.
No, humans are not making it worse but we are putting more and more “stuff” of ever-increasing value in the way that can be destroyed. Couple high wind with dry conditions, given that part of the country is borderline desert, and you’ve got a high-risk environment with vegetation which reflects that and in some cases actually requires fire to propagate!
Add to that state government policies that do not clear brush (on purpose!) and in other areas do not conduct control burns during the part of the year when high winds do not occur and you’ve got the natural environment and its oscillations — including much larger fires simply because there’s more fuel available and you refused to reduce said fuel load despite having the opportunity to do so in advance.
Now add deliberate refusal to build out fire-suppression infrastructure (in this case California residents approved a bond issue many years ago to do exactly that but it wasn’t done!) and you have all the ingredients for what is now occurring.
If you want to know why insurance companies left they asked for rates that reflected this deliberate neglect and foolish set of decisions by said government agencies and, when you get down to it, the people who live there and kept voting those government agents into office. (Not me! Grumpy)
The firms had already taken large fire losses as a result and thus they had no evidence any of that would change. The rate adjustments were refused and thus their only sane option was to withdraw offering coverage and leave.
. . .
The remaining question is whether those impacted will force those who had responsibility for said mitigations, in many cases explicitly funded with tax dollars yet they did not act in accordance with their responsibilities and either did nothing or spent the funds elsewhere, to be held personally responsible for any and all of their malfeasance.
There appears to be plenty of that to go around.