Comment by chillfox

Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last nearly as long, but high intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is literally underground.

Yes.

Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we just need to deal with the individual catastrophes that occur.

Hurricanes… I mean, there are different sized hurricanes in different areas. For the ones that hit Florida, part of the solution is probably legitimately that we should have fewer people living there, because there’s going to be a widespread devastation there occasionally. And if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you are going to get hit by one eventually. (So like what’s the bet here? The insurance company knows they’ll probably have to pay out eventually).

Just to put a number to it, 2024 was apparently an unusually busy year for tornadoes, around $6B. That isn’t nothing! But one single hurricane cost $7B in 2024… and there was a $34B one… and a $79B one… who’s insuring the southern coast of the US? Seems rough.

> If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.

Or build something adapted to the risk it faces. In my home town there are houses that were built on flood plains that have recently been flooding every 5 years or so. Luckily they are brick and in order to get these covered you now need to install flood barriers over the doors, and your ground floor has to be adapted to flood without sustaining damage (tile floors, special plaster etc.)

Now when we have a severe flood warning people will move their valuables upstairs if they're house floods they just have to clean out the mud. There are also a couple new houses right next to the river that float and rise and fall on stilts when the banks burst.

> we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it

This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago but aggressively deploying technology that worsens floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.

> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it

A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.

I talked to somebody who owned a beach house in South Carolina about 5 years ago and if he wanted flood insurance it would cost $5,000 / month.

The real issue is global warming causing an exponential rise in tail risk events. It's exponential because even a linear shift in temperature causes an exponential rise at the tails (look at how a normal distribution works).

Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.

Global warming is going to mess up insurance as we know it for that reason. Not sure property insurance, but all kinds of insurance.

>the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings.

What do you mean by this?

Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere). At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.

It’s regulated, not illegal.

“Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/05/what-homeowners-need-to-know...

Then why are private insurers being pushed out of California?

I'd finish your comment with "it's a goal of most US politicians ... to enrich the most wealthy Americans".

I thought that the idea that they did not understand property rights was a misconception. The different tribes had their own territories, and they clearly had an idea of the territory belonging to one or another. This is also why people negotiating with them for land would use underhanded negotiating tactics such as getting their leaders drunk for the negotiations so that they would agree to absurd deals. If they did not understand property rights, there would have been no point to doing that.

We had a lot of rain the last couple of years (before 2024), which got us out of severe drought for several years back into "moderate". 2024 has been QUITE dry, relatively speaking, but because of the previous years of a LOT of rain, it's only back to moderate drought status, AFAICT.

The years with lots of rain caused MUCH extra plant growth, and anyone who's been here a while expected several bad fires during our fire season in 2024 as the first "dry" year after a "wet" year. The fact that it's only been 1 major one and a few minor ones has actually been a bit of a surprise.

Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.

> East coast native Indians

This is false. Fire was unambiguously part of the practice of native Californians.

> opportunists

What is this slander.

From the recent events in California I have seen many photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around. I think those houses were especially flammable more than some vegetation around it seems. After the fire nothing remained but the chimneys. I have never seen any house burn like that in Europe.

I live along the Mediterranean sea in France, many wood fires every summer, with wind above 100km/h; never seen so many houses burn like in California even when most of our houses are concrete but with wooden framework.

I'm pretty sure that if houses were built like here (concrete / concrete blocks with terracota tiles on wooden framwork) at lot less would have burnt. Maybe those near the wooded slopes but not in the middle of a neighborhood block.

The reality is the fires didn't make it far into the city grid sections of LA proper. This is because these areas have less flammable material, and are more defensible.

> Despite these things the area still burned.

I suspect the rules for making a defensible house were wrong. For example, I read an article recently that posited that most of the fire was spread by burning embers on the wind, and not by intense heat from nearby flames.

The idea is to look at where embers accumulate and eliminate or fireproof those areas. For example, a low masonry wall a few feet from the house can stop a lot of heavier burning embers from piling up against the house. If you've got a swimming pool, add a pump to it that feeds sprinklers in the yard and on the rooftop.

There are a lot of homes that did not burn - look at them and figure out why they didn't burn.

For a related example, every airplane crash is looked at, and we always discover overlooked vulnerabilities. The tsunami that devastated Japan a few years ago also provided a lot of information about what worked and didn't work.

We're a long way from needing to give up. There's a lot of low hanging fruit.

>This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.

Taleb would have a field day with this one. Broadly, I think a big part of the argument is driven by the assumption that the area will be rebuilt, despite being a known fire risk.

Those protections are all about keeping a structure from catching fire. That is different than designing a structure not to burn. A wooden house surrounded by fire protection is OK under current rules. But it is still wood and will, eventually, burn when faced by a wild fire on all sides. A house built out of rock/brick/concrete/sand will not. We need to go beyond flamability and start reducing the actual number of calories availible to be burned.

Partially because that story about Japan is incorrect.

In reality, it is Japanese condos that get gutted periodically or when sold, and it's driven by their real estate tax code.

Japan takes enormous effort to prevent and mitigate natural disasters.

There may have been some truth to it 200 years ago, with the idea that wood was the only economical way to build a house that could last.

Legal Eagle claims that embers can travel up to 2 miles:

https://youtu.be/5h1H36rdprs?t=1m51s

That would easily jump a 10' fire break.

That would only account for the small amount of homes right on the beach itself - the majority of Malibu is in the hills above

I would prefer no bailouts.

If insurance wants firebreaks for insurance, that is their choice.

If the city wants buy RE for access, that is between tax payers and the land owners. Cash talks

> the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks

Ooh, and make a bailout conditional on homeowners (or counties) agreeing to eminent domain.

That would not have solved the problem in this fire since wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can be made safer, like being underground in some places.

The break would need a low masonry wall to stop embers from being pushed along the ground.

Hurricanes are common. The general case is they hit hundreds or thousands of square miles and destroy none or at worst a tiny fraction of the homes they hit.

Take Katrina from my friends and family living in New Orleans, you’ll find city streets where none of the houses go significantly damaged. They lost power long enough you don’t want to open the fridge, but most of the city was fine in the hardest hit city from one of the most expensive storms on record.

A lot has to do with infrastructure.

In most of South Florida basically anything left standing is pretty well built to withstand hurricanes.

A category 1 storm hitting NYC or North Carolina is an unbelievable disaster. A category 1 storm hitting Broward County is usually disruptive to everyday life but that’s it.

Hurricanes usually don't affect the structure of a house. They might damage the roof, parts of exterior cladding, perhaps windows, and the flooding which accompanies hurricanes destroys personal possessions, interior furnishing, electrical wiring, and appliances.

In the US, manual labor is very expensive, home construction or repair is highly regulated and requires permits and multiple inspections from the local government, and the amount of flood-destroyable stuff - material possessions, furnishings, appliances - in a typical home is massive. As a result, a cyclone which a poorer country would survive with a shrug in the US becomes an extremely expensive disaster.

The 50 km/h was sustained, not peak, but ok, I don't think we reached 100.

We have 7 million people living around, and yeah, only 6 months without a single drop of rain (19X days, where I don't remember what X was). Fire often destroys some homes, we got luck last year.

Look, the annual fire disasters in California are not a normal thing.

If people just point out it's not normal, people complain that nowhere else has fire so nobody else understands the problem. If people point out similar places, looks like it's "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" (whatever that is). So, yeah, let it keep burning, whatever.