Rates to decrease with ISO rating

MAT-SU — As fire department news goes, it doesn’t get much bigger than what West Lakes Fire Department learned recently.

The Insurance Services Office, which ranks fire departments nationwide, announced it would be awarding West Lakes a rank of 4, one grade better than its current ranking.

“I’ve got just this incredible group, amazing group of responders that are incredibly dedicated to serving the people of the Mat-Su Borough and doing everything they can to make this fire department the best that it can be,” West Lakes Fire Chief Bill Gamble said of how the department was able to make the grade.

And if that might not seem like that big a deal, it will be for a lot of homeowners in Big Lake and Meadow Lakes who will see lower home insurance rates as a result. These rankings are how insurance rates are calculated. The last time the department reduced its rating the impact was significant.

“I know personally my homeowner’s insurance policy through GEICO with Liberty Mutual went from $1,900 a year to $1,000 a year,” Gamble said.

This time, he guessed he might see another $100 or so in savings.

The new ranking — which takes effect in February 2015 — is a rarity in Alaska. Most departments here are more like 8b. Four is the highest rank you can find in the Mat-Su Borough. Central Mat-Su Fire Department and Palmer Fire Department also are ranked at 4. The Houston Fire Department is a 5 and Butte is a 6.

Gamble said that back in June the Insurance Services Office called to say they would be in Alaska this summer and would like to stop by and just make sure that West Lakes was maintaining its 5 — a ranking it’s had held since 2011.

“I said no,” Gamble recalled. “If you guys are going to be up here anyway then I want to take that opportunity to try and improve our rating.”

It wasn’t an easy task, he said. The ratings are reviewed on regular, five-year cycles and audits are announced six months or more in advance. In this case, West Lakes had two months to prepare for the audit.

“We just lived at the fire station pretty much,” Gamble said.

Reviewers look at everything, from training schedules to the number of responders on your roster, from response times to the number of gallons of water you can bring to a fire. So preparing for an audit also means training people that need it and gathering together all the records you have so you can prove you’ve done the work.

“Summertime in Alaska is precious to us we go out and fish and do those kinds of things but they gave a lot of that up,” Gamble said of the staff who worked on the Insurance Services Office project.

So, what specific factors played a role in the new ranking?

Gamble said the consolidation of the Big Lake and Meadow Lakes fire departments played a role in this improved insurance rating and in 2011 when the department dropped from an 8b to a 5.

“That was the single most important thing that happened,” he said.

But there were two big factors that played into the change this go-round. First was the temporary station the department bought at Mile 52.3, Parks Highway. The station filled a hole in the department’s coverage area between its fire house on Pittman Road and its station in Big Lake. It means that everyone in the coverage area is five miles from a fire station, a key factor in the rankings.

A second big factor — the department took on two big trucks from the North Slope. After the 2011 ranking, Gamble said, auditors mentioned that, with a lot of bigger buildings being constructed in the service area, West Lakes needed a truck that could get firefighters up high — an aerial platform or a ladder truck. West Lakes now has one of each.

“They said you need to have one of these and you need to have a reserve, a backup, so we went out and we found these two trucks that were being surplus-ed by North Slope oil companies and they were gracious enough to just give them to us and all we had to do was help with the shipping,” he said.

When the change goes into effect in two months, Gamble said he will send postcards — on “obnoxiously colored” paper, to grab people’s attention — to every landowner in the fire service area. The card will urge homeowners to call their insurance carriers. A similar move in 2011, Gamble said, earned him some annoyed calls from insurance carriers who don’t use the rankings in their calculations.

“If your insurance company is not going to reduce your insurance rates then I can provide you with a list of insurance companies that do honor the ISO ratings,” Gamble said.

Exact dollar amounts for how much this change will impact fire insurance rates are hard to calculate. Insurance companies don’t release those figures because each policy is different. Mat-Su Borough calculations based on anecdotal evidence put the 2011 change at something like $2 million a year in savings for homeowners. The latest rate decrease will be less dramatic.

Gamble said the goal of the fire department is to save homeowners more on fire insurance than they pay for their fire service area taxes.

“For a fire chief, especially in a volunteer on-call department, it doesn’t get any better than this for me. As a fire chief, this is how I give back to the community,” he said.