Comment by tobyhinloopen 3 months ago
American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?"
The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
You’re a fire management expert? What did LA do wrong?
1. Santa Ynez Reservoir right above Palisades was empty for the past year, depriving fire hydrants of water. (State incompetence)
2. La City defunded fire department removing 100 fire trucks from service due to maintenance. (City Incompetence)
3 Severe fire warnings reported days in advance of the fire. Rather than take precautions and position fire trucks and equipment etc as was done in the past, the Mayor flew off to Ghana. (City Incompetence, Fire Department incompetence (but partly because of cut budget)
4. Forest maintenance has been stopped. (State incompetence)
Competent management is needed or even worse can be expected in future.
1. Santa Ynez may have helped, however (a) you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir, but more critically (b) the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry and (c) Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.
2. 'defunded' -> about a 2% reduction. Also it's not 100 fire engines, 100 appartus, which covers ambulance, command cars, etc, and it's not clear what exactly is waiting for maintainence.
3. The Mayor doesn't drive fire engines. LAFD and LACoFD prepositioned according to their models, per the chief.
4. most of the LA fire wasn't forest, but chaparral, which is lower, scruby-er, brushy-er terrain. It tends to burn on a 30-50 year cycle, but burning too much more often destroys the ecoology entirely. Indeninous practice and some research[1] suggest small patch-burning; others (NPS) avoid prescribed burns in chaparral in favor of natural fire and structure defense. So it's not clear that there's an unambiguously better management practice than "its gonna burn sometime" combined with aggressive brush clearance and defense around structures.
re: 2/3 Los Angeles (City mostly, but also County) clearly need a bigger fire department, with more people, stations, and equipment. But the specific complaints are ticky-tacky at best, and (AFAIK) no one asserts that a differnt pre-deployment, or a few more engines in service would have changed anything but the margins. I will say LAFD letting their first shift go off-duty as scheduled while LACoFD kept their shift on is an unfortunate unforced error.
re: 4 USFS (and maybe Cal Fire too? not sure). did halt prescribed burns in October 24 in the face of opposition on liability and air quality grounds. Hopefully the LA fires drive people to reconsider their resistance to prescribed burns, and creates the necessary risk-bearing structures for Cal Fire and USFS to actually perform them.
[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr05...
re: point #1, the fire command team captain himself refuted this disinformation in an interview with Musk.
I don't know about the other three offhand, but it's absurd to claim that state and local governments in California are somehow not taking fire risk seriously. Do you seriously think that the state that has annual wildfire season just happens to be "incompetent" when it comes to preparing for wildfires?
This is nonsense disinformation. Citations? This wasn't a forest fire so forest management isn't an issue. California makes massive investments in wild lands maintenance. It hasn't "stopped". Also most forest land in California is Federally owned. Perhaps our incoming president will invest some money in maintaining the peoples forests. This disaster deserves better responses.
If you actually want to know the answer to this question, this is a wonderful and well-researched book on the topic.
It's a bit older, but see also [1] for a great survey of research on the topic.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Before-Wilderness-Environmental-Calif...
If you limit the range of disasters to US ones, maybe, but flooding is a big issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods
Coming from the UK, increased flooding has been an issue for 20+ years and still it's a bit taboo to maybe say it's climate change to older generations
> nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
The alternative is to build quadruple-the-price houses out of brick in an area prone to earthquakes.
It's much easier to repair/replace the former. And theoretically would be easier to avoid, if the fed would clean up the brush wood in their land (or give it back to the state, so they can manage it).
As for the hurricanes, stop allowing builders to build SFH in areas that are at or below sea level. They're going to flood. Period. That's not sustainable from an insurance perspective.
There were houses that survived recent wildfires because they were built to be in a fire zone and survive fires. I’m sure there was damage but nowhere near total loss.
I’m sure when homes are rebuilt the majority will not be fire resistant.
It’s possible to build for hurricanes and floods too but few do it. They build houses that get blown away and then tap insurance.
Insurance rates for properties not built to withstand the stresses of their environment will go up.
> I’m sure when homes are rebuilt the majority will not be fire resistant
They are required to be: https://heatmap.news/climate/california-wildfire-building-co...
The problem is that in many desirable places to live in California, many houses are very old and are not compliant with the latest building codes.
we had a huge wildfire in my area in 2021 that burned through a few small towns. In one town, the only houses that survived where the ones that followed the guides out there for creating defensible space. They were also newer homes, which is obviously easier then retro-fitting an existing home, but the town got rebuilt essentially the same as it was, which is kind of sad to see.
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_mars...
I'm always baffled at the fact that Americans don't build houses out of bricks.
I read those arguments of the advantages this method has, especially financial ones, but to me it's nonsense considering that it would prevent an endless number of problems that cause the total loss.
I still remember when New Orleans was hit with by Katrina, large parts of the suburbs where houses where made by wood and plastic where destroyed, yet downtown where buildings where made of bricks required maintenance, sometimes little of it, but none faced a total loss.
Unreinforced masonry is illegal in most of California and extremely dangerous- every brick becomes a projectile in an earthquake.
Despite the news coverage, fires are extremely rare but nearly every home in these areas is guaranteed to face multiple massive earthquakes that would bring down a brick building.
In cusco basin in Peru spanish colons realized their brick made building were falling down at every earthquake. They also realized incas building made of thin walls built on top of large stones that can move relative to each others during an earthquake were resisting much better. They then decided to reuse the foundations of incas buildings and put their brick build constructions on top of it to have earthquake resistant building.
Earthquake resistant constructions made of stones have been known for centuries by the incas and probably other civilizations without having building entirely made of wood, why can't californians?
I don’t know but do they have ~7.9 earthquakes like California? I’ll bet they were not multi story homes with vaulted ceilings, giant glass windows with tons of natural light, and efficient insulation?
Wood is extremely cheap, and extremely earthquake resistant… it is an appropriate material for the area despite a slightly higher fire risk.
The entire west coast sits on top of a fault line. That’s why people don’t build with brick here. There’s plenty of brick buildings on the east coast (and on the west coast like in Oregon, but they have to be seismically retrofitted which is expensive).
I never understood this. We build in Europe, over earthquake-risk zones, with bricks and steel and we follow rules to make them earthquake resistant. It is not a problem anymore since like the 1980. We now have also methods to make old and very old brick buildings earthquake resistant without demolishing them
It works fine for commercial buildings and multi-family structures here too , there’s even a ton of brick buildings in Oregon (which are currently being retrofitted), but not as well for single family homes because of the cost.
There’s a lot of historical context to understand here. The neighborhood that just burned down in the Eaton fire (Altadena), was built up by African Americans and Latinos who were redlined out of Pasadena even after desegregation. Some of them built their houses on land that they bought for under $100 in the 1950s and 60s. They wouldn’t have been able to afford the kind of construction they’d need to be both earthquake and fire resistant. Their choice was between owning an old tinderbox or renting from slumlords.
Bricks have to be manufactured and transported. In denser countries, the transportation cost is lower and there is a factory near you. In the US, you’re damn well sure you can find timber, the US is loaded with timber.
Brick also isn’t some magical building material that solves all your problems without drawbacks. Wood isn’t some evil building material that creates a bunch of problems without benefits.
Both. Older single story tends to be brick.
Newer multistory is typically cast in place with rebar reinforcement from what I can tell.
In the countryside, you might find more masonry block construction, but not in dense urban areas like Taipei and Taichung where the norm is to build up. Most "single family homes" are what we would consider very large condos in the US.
Building out of wood is cheap and perfectly strong for most areas.
Engineering is always a set of trade-offs.
I don't get how can one put his own future in a cheaply built building you're one fire or thougher-than-usual natural event away from losing.
It's normal nobody wants to insure such risky assets, especially as nominal value of this wooden crap is stellar due to the skewed demand/offer ratio plaguing good parts of US.
In my life I've seen my and my family's real estate being hit by a tree, fire, floodings and I've never had to face anything close to a total loss.
Huge expenses? Sure. But never anything close to a loss.
The only thing that could put my real estate on a serious risk are earthquakes, I guess that's a scenario where lighter built houses would have instead an advantage.
This is less like "well, I could get the $10 pants and have to replace them in a few months, or the $70 pants and have them last a decade" sort of cheap, and more the "well, I've been saving a mortgage down-payment for 15 years in the top 30% of individual wage earners, and this is the best built house I can afford" kind.
The options are either pay more for this one thing than literally any other possession you or anyone you know will ever own, or live in a tent or worse.
I feel like criticizing people for pragmatism in the face of (literally) existential threats is some kind of next-level privilege.
Define "cheaply built". These houses are already hugely expensive, to the point that we cant even afford to build more.
It's mostly that there is virtually no one in America who knows how to build with concrete/bricks.
If you built a home out of bricks in New Orleans it will sink. Same (and even worse) for Florida. You can mitigate that somewhat but it's extremely expensive and bad for the environment/water table/aquifer.
For reference, to make a non-sinking, heavy building in Florida you have to drill down into the limestone layer which is usually 100+ feet below the surface. Then you have to create very strong concrete caissons to hold the building up, standing on that limestone layer. It's very similar to if you were to build a structure out into the ocean (LOL).
Wood is way cheaper and more available at large scale here than in Europe.
If I’m choosing building materials to try and resist disaster, I’d just go straight to making a monolithic dome.
I mean, the answer is obviously no as long as you allow insurance prices to rise accordingly. Insurance is always possible if you pay the right price for the given level of risk/cost; if you can't afford the insurance, you can't afford the risk.
Meh, couple this with articles about drone inspection of roofs and properties, and the trend of insurance getting harder to come by emerges.
Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings (other than war, which to my knowledge never was insurable) in most areas of the world.
A significant portion of human structures are located close to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of economic development for a few hundred years) and are exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather systems; see eg massive floods in Europe in the past few years).
I don't know about that. The Iberian peninsula is not historically at much risk for natural disasters, and we now suffer alternating forest fires and floods pretty much every year...
That's not really true. The introduction of so much extra energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that have little history of tornados will start having them, or places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment with no control group and predictions will only become more difficult the harder we push the system into a new state.
> Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings
Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting worse.
More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a political solution is forest management. Lack of water can be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from solar panels because they reduce water loss from evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies.
It is expensive, but that's another problem.
Does it really matter if my house burns because of pole drift or because of climate change? I don't like it burning either way. So if there is something I can do against my house burning, (and I know there are things I can do against that) I will definitely try that. And I believe we agree that we could do things, right?
> What are you trying to say?
Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
That happened six years ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/severe-rainfall-hits-new-yor...
And last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxqswOkZMSI
Didn't know that fox news was in charge of forestry in LA.
>Accusing thousands of people of being incompetent is more telling of you than them.
Not me. Facts on the ground do it. Honest question - if I wish upon you every medical professional from now on that treats you and your family to be as competent as the part of the administrative state that is responsible for wild fire management and prevention in LA - will you take that as a blessing or a curse?
I hope you don't get downvoted for stating the obvious. This tendency of equating the US to the world happens so frequently and it is 99% a non-US person pointing it out.
You also have to exclude areas that are now in flood planes (most cities), subject to freezing when the infrastructure can’t handle it (all of Texas), tornado prone (everywhere in the US(?)), and consider that the wildfire risk area for the US has expanded dramatically in the last few years.
For example, there was a red flag warning that ran from Colorado to Texas at the beginning of this month.
Parts of many cities have always been in floodplains, but after just looking it up, it does not seem that "most cities" are meaningfully in floodplains. This also does not automatically make even the parts within a floodplain uninsurable, depending on the circumstances.
Likewise, the level of infrastructure, tornado, and wildfire risk for the vast majority of the country is not sufficient for them to be uninsurable. "Occasionally a tornado comes through and gets 1 out of 10k houses" is not even a huge pressure on insurance prices.
An
A key issue in the LA fires was bad management at all levels of government that could have prevented an order of magnitude of the damage (If procedures from the past were followed).