La Pine Fire District gets insurance rating boost
Effective Sept. 1, the Insurance Services Office (ISO) has announced it is re-rating the communities protected by the La Pine Rural Fire Protection District to an ISO Public Protection Class 4.
This is a two-step improvement from the previous ISO 6 rating for structural fire protection.
Many insurance companies use the ISO public protection classifications as part of their risk assessment and underwriting process for determining insurance rates for residential and commercial property. Communities whose ISO rating improves often see more competitive and lower insurance rates.
ISO evaluates a community’s structural fire protection based on three main criteria: 911 communication services, water supply (i.e. available fire hydrants), and the capabilities and location of fire district resources.
ISO uses a classification scale of 10 to 1, with 1 being the least risk. ISO evaluates the fire protection efforts of over 40,000 communities across the United States. The ISO 4 rating puts the La Pine Community in the top 18 percentile nationwide.
The ISO rating system does not evaluate the community’s rescue, EMS or wildland fire capabilities and is slanted to more urban type environments.
Even though significantly rural in nature, the La Pine communities showed improvement in water supply development, fire sprinklering of large and high risk buildings, maximizing mutual aid and cooperative working relationships with regional agencies and fire districts, as well as improvement in personnel, equipment, and training.
Neighborhoods that now have recognizable water supply systems by ISO are the City of La Pine, Ponderosa Pines, Wild River, River Meadows, Oregon Water Wonderland I &II, Thousand Trails, Vandervert Ranch, Crosswater, Caldera Springs, and Sunriver Business Park.
