The insurance industry's research arm published a report that says wildfire is no longer a Western problem. Florida, Georgia, and Nebraska set records for fire activity in the first half of 2026. More than 35,000 fires burned over 3 million acres nationwide between January and June — well above the 10-year average. Triple-I CEO Sean Kevelighan put it plainly: wildfire is now a national risk issue, not a regional one.
If you live in Santa Fe County, your first reaction might be a shrug. You already live in fire country. Hermits Peak burned roughly 340,000 acres four years ago. Nothing in this report tells you your risk went up.
Here's why it matters anyway: the people who price your homeowner's insurance read this report too.
The number that moves markets
The finding insurers will fixate on is this one: roughly 46 million homes — about a third of all homes in the continental U.S. — sit in the wildland-urban interface, the zone where houses mix with burnable vegetation. When a third of the national housing stock shares an exposure, that exposure gets repriced. Carriers have spent the past few years tightening wildfire underwriting in California and Colorado. A report telling them Georgia and Nebraska belong in the same conversation doesn't loosen anything.
We can't tell you what your premium will do next year — nobody can, and be suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. What we can tell you is which direction the pressure runs, and that the one variable you control is the condition of your own property. Insurers increasingly look at parcels, not just ZIP codes. A lot with cleared fuels and a hardened structure is a different risk than the lot next door, and the industry is getting better at seeing the difference.
The heat wave finding is the local one
Buried under the headline is the statistic that should change how Northern New Mexico homeowners plan their year: 42% of Western land burned by wildfire between 2001 and 2024 burned during or immediately after a heat wave, and heat-wave days across Western forests have nearly doubled since 2001.
Read that as a scheduling instruction. The fires that destroy homes come on the hottest, windiest days — Craig Clements, a fire meteorologist at San José State, notes in the report that catastrophic fires are only about 1% of all fires, but they're the 1% that arrive under exactly those conditions. You can't schedule the weather. You can schedule the work. Fuel reduction done in April is standing between your house and the June heat wave. Fuel reduction planned for July is a good intention.
What the work actually is
The order of operations hasn't changed, and it starts closer to your house than most people think. NIST's research on how homes ignite found that windblown embers — not the flame front — are the main cause, and embers travel miles ahead of a fire. So you work from the house out: the first 5 feet cleared of anything combustible, then the 5-to-30-foot zone thinned and mowed, then the 30-to-100-foot zone opened up so fire drops out of the crowns and onto the ground.
That middle and outer zone is where we spend our days. Grass, chamisa, and piñon-juniper ladder fuels are exactly what a goat herd removes, on slopes too steep to mow and soils too fragile for machinery. It's not a substitute for hardening your house — nothing is — but it's the part of the checklist most homeowners put off, because it's hot, physical, recurring work. Which is the other thing worth saying: fuels grow back. This is maintenance, like mowing, not a one-time project.
One honest caveat, because we'd rather under-promise: no amount of mitigation guarantees a house survives a fire. It shifts the odds — for your property, and for the neighbors downwind of it.
The country is waking up to something Northern New Mexico has known since Cerro Grande. The useful response isn't dread. It's a calendar with the work on it.
Sources: Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) Issues Brief announcement, July 2026; NIST Technical Note 2205 (Maranghides et al., 2022). Want a walkthrough of your property? Reply to this email or reach us at [email protected].
Carl & Bailey
The Weekly Graze
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