Insurance companies that stopped providing home coverage to hundreds of thousands of Californians in recent years as wildfires became more destructive will have to again provide policies in fire-prone areas if they want to keep doing business in California under a state regulation announced Monday.

The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they’d need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara’s office said.

Major insurers like State Farm and Allstate have stopped writing new policies in California due to fears of massive losses from wildfires and other natural disasters.

In exchange for increasing coverage, the state will let insurance companies pass on the costs of reinsurance to California consumers. Insurance companies typically buy reinsurance to avoid huge payouts in case of natural disasters or catastrophic loss. California is the only state that doesn’t already allow the cost of reinsurance to be borne by policy holders, according to Lara’s office.

Opponents of the rule say that could hike premiums by 40% and doesn’t require new policies to be written at a fast enough pace. The state did not provide a cost analysis for potential impact on consumers.

“This plan is of the insurance industry, by the insurance industry, and for the industry,” Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, said in a statement.

The requirement is under review by the Office of Administrative Law before it takes effect within 30 days.

“Californians deserve a reliable insurance market that doesn’t retreat from communities most vulnerable to wildfires and climate change,” Lara said in a statement. “This is a historic moment for California.”

The ultimate goal of the new rules is to get homeowners out of the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan, which often serves as the last resort when insurance companies stop providing coverage for those living in areas threatened by wildfires, Lara’s office said. The plan could help a homeowner fulfill insurance requirements imposed by mortgage companies, but it is mainly designed as a temporary safety net with basic coverage until policyholders find a more permanent option. The number of people on California’s FAIR plan more than doubled between 2020 and this year, reaching nearly 452,000 policies.

Wildfires have always been part of life in California, where it only rains for a few months out of the year. But as the climate has gotten hotter and dryer, it has made those fires much larger and more intense. Of the top 20 most destructive wildfires in state history, 14 have occurred since 2015, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

— Associated Press

S. Korean plane crash another hit for Boeing

Boeing’s shares fell on Monday, a day after the deadly crash of a 737-800, a widely used model that is a staple of low-cost airlines, at an airport in South Korea. The passenger plane, operated by Jeju Air, was carrying 181 people, and all but two were killed.

Shares of Boeing dropped sharply at the open of trading in New York, before regaining some ground to close more than 2% lower.

South Korea’s transportation ministry said Monday that it would conduct inspections of the 101 Boeing 737-800 planes used by airlines in the country, including Jeju Air. The inspections were set to start Monday and be completed by Friday.

South Korea’s deputy transport minister, Joo Jong-wan, said at a news briefing that the inspections would look at maintenance records of major systems, including engines and landing gear.

Chinese hackers hit Treasury Department

Chinese hackers remotely accessed several U.S. Treasury Department workstations and unclassified documents after compromising a third-party software service provider, the agency said Monday.

The department did not provide details on how many workstations had been accessed or what sort of documents the hackers may have obtained, but it said in a letter to lawmakers revealing the breach that “at this time there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury information.” It said the hack was being investigated as a “major cybersecurity incident.”

“Treasury takes very seriously all threats against our systems, and the data it holds,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. “Over the last four years, Treasury has significantly bolstered its cyber defense, and we will continue to work with both private and public sector partners to protect our financial system from threat actors.”

The revelation comes as U.S. officials are continuing to grapple with the fallout of a Chinese cyberespionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans. A top White House official said Friday that the number of telecommunications companies affected by the hack has risen to nine.

— From news services