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.
Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature.
What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case.
New Orleans is a future Atlantis.
San Francisco is a city built by Monty Python. Don't build it there it'll fall down, but I built it anyway, and it fell down, so I built it again...
That said, there are literally hundreds of historic pre WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat different "survey map pole".
Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function of datums.
The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment .. which pole and what does that have to do with climate change? etc.
Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities) and have steep rises anyway.
There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice.
Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this.
> Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case.
Relevant: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disast...
Even just 1000 years ago the coastline here went four miles out to sea compared to today.
In the last 20 year we've seen the erosion of the coastline here accelerating - regular news stories about people losing their houses to the sea: https://www.norfolk.gov.uk/article/56352/Challenges-of-coast...
It doesn't matter if you think it is human caused or not, the sea level is undeniably rising:
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha....
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.
Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
Of course they’re insurable at some premium. The question is whether there is any premium someone is willing to pay that can also cover the risk.
It looks like it's a reinsurance program:
https://www.mof.go.jp/english/policy/financial_system/earthq...
So, I think the answer is "no".
The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C).
The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C).
I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.
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.
But when those high tides plus storm surges hit, we really notice sea level rise.
So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.
Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.
So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
Engineering is always a set of trade-offs.
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.
https://weatherspark.com/y/75981/Average-Weather-in-Berlin-G...
https://weatherspark.com/y/2460/Average-Weather-in-Phoenix-A...
But if you look in places like Florida, the ground conditions there are substantially more porous. If you try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it’ll just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from flooding due to sea level rise. Something that’s unbelievably cost prohibitive to do.
The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the country using technology available in the 1740s. If the ground conditions weren’t basically perfect for this kind of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn’t exist as it does today.
You’re using an example that exists purely as a result of survivorship bias, as an argument that it’s practical to apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your example only exists because a unique set of geologic conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places we humans would like to protect.
Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.
When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.
Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.
I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.
This is your most accurate/relevant point:
> All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper).
Whereas this is plainly wrong:
> It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it.
And then the following is correct but the marginal reduction in load is minimal except in relatively crowded spaces (or spaces with very high equipment power densities):
> Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
The truth is it is generally easier to cool not heat when you take into account the necessary energy input to achieve the desired action on the psychrometric chart, assuming by “ease” you mean energy (or emissions) used, given that you are operating over a large volume of air - which does align with your point about the jumper to be fair!
Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation (simplified ELI5). It is only spending energy to move heat, not make it. On the other hand, a boiler or furnace or resistance heat system generally uses around 1 unit of input energy for every 0.8-0.9 units of heating energy produced. Heat pumps achieve similar to coefficients of performance as A/Cs, because they are effectively just A/Cs operating in reverse.
Your point about a jumper is great, but there are local cooling strategies as well (tho not as effective), eg using a fan or an adiabatic cooling device (eg a mister in a hot dry climate).
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space.
Once you move to cost, it now also depends on your fuel prices, not just your demand and system type. For instance, in America, nat gas is so cheap, that even with its inefficiencies relative to a heat pump, if electricity is expensive heating might still be cheaper than cooling per unit of thermal demand (this is true for instance in MA, since electricity is often 3x the price of NG). On the other hand, if elec is less than 3x the cost of nat gas, then cooling is probably cheaper than heating per unit of demand, assuming you use natural gas for your heating system.
Same for eg. gas explosions, this is one one looks like in us:
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/23081219122...
And this is one over here:
https://www.prlekija-on.net/uploaded/2018_11/eksplozija-plin...
Same for eg floods, pump the basements and ground levels, repaint, move stuff back in. Someone from US I work with on a project had a pipe burst while on vacation, and insurance wrote off their whole house, because of a few days of water.
I mean, sure, you could that, but looking at the photos from fire-affected areas, nobody did that, it's all burnt to the ground.
If there's earthquake insurance in japan, it should be do-able.
"In and around Japan, one-tenth of earthquakes in the world occur. " https://geoscienceletters.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/...
The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.
The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.
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.
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.
I thought any place that is significantly cold can still dig underground and at some point you can get enough heat to run your heat pump?
This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat.
My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones do 0.98, the best you get with electric resistive heat is 1W.
On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
We have cyclones here similar to the hurricanes in the US and usually it just blows over some trees maybe causes a power outage. The absolute worst I have experienced was 3 days without power. I have never seen a house destroyed by a cyclone here.
As for wildfires, they do unfortunately claim a few houses most years.
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.
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.
That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed. They are pre-fabbed timber frames with a brick facade. It's quite common for British people to be snobby about building materials. I wonder how many don't realise their house is timber framed.
* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.
* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.
* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/80-percent-german-house... (original report is on German)
Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood).
The scary ones are tornados.
And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper building regulations. If you're interested, go look at the recaps of tornado damage where they hit Europe here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and...
Note the number of homes destroyed and people killed - plenty of both, even in those countries that prefer brick/concrete homes.
Hurricanes throw branches. Tornados throw cars.
So you are spot on, in winter temperature deltas are larger, and efficiency goes up.
They're also smaller, which makes construction costs cheaper which means people are more likely to make dramatic changes when fashion changes. And then there's more of a culture of prefab house building rather than extensions etc. Planning is also a lot more liberal which allows the rebuilt house to be more different and also reduces the cost of the process.
I think even in Europe some of the older houses are houses of theseus though. The exterior shell is the same, but there's plenty of buildings in the local city centre that were tenements, then small business offices, then apartments, with significant remodeling that occurred. Or the house I used to live in was built in the 1880s, extended in the 1950s and significantly modernised in the 2000s. Each time there would have involved largely gutting the interior and rebuilding.
Here in the seismically stable UK, we had problems with fire spreading in urban areas [1] in 1666. So we banned wood exteriors on buildings. It works pretty well if you don't need to worry about earthquakes or hurricanes; brick doesn't burn.
This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
Accusing thousands of people of being incompetent is more telling of you than them.
We had a way more intense drought than they in my city last year (theirs are not that intense). We also had 50 km/h winds. We also had higher temperatures... And all of those to levels that we never saw before. Also, we have more trees in our cities. We had new "fire hurricane" videos every week (normally, every other year somebody films one).
And we had to evacuate dozens of homes, luckily no one was destroyed and people could return 2 months later.
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?
We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap.
You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.
This claim struck me as unlikely, so I did a quick fact check.
Accroding to the most recent report I could find[1]: "Figures from the National House Building (NHBC) suggest that timber frame market share has developed from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2021 and that market conditions, as described above, present the opportunity for this to develop to circa 27% by the end of the forecast period (2025)"
This appears to be driven by Scotland where 92% of new builds were timber framed in 2019, while in England (where the majority of new houses are built) it was just 9%.
[1] https://members.structuraltimber.co.uk/assets/library/stamar...
Wood is extremely cheap, and extremely earthquake resistant… it is an appropriate material for the area despite a slightly higher fire risk.
Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).
One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.
You can also look at some states like Chiapas in Mexico. There are daily earthquakes in Tuxla. Last 8.2 was in 2017 in Tapachula. They typically live in small building made of mud bricks and stones. https://earthquakelist.org/mexico/chiapas/#all-latest-earthq...
https://backend.daikincomfort.com/docs/default-source/produc...
It's not a big leap to go from complaining about the furniture and the walls being made from what seems like highly compressed dust to also complaining that underneath it all is a bunch of sticks.
It so often feels like a house of cards.
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.
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've always treated cars like houses are in the USA- I buy an older higher end car like a Porsche, keep it in perfect shape, and expect it to appreciate- and it does. Most cars I've owned I ultimately sold for much more than I paid. I've never understood why anyone would waste money on a depreciating car, especially when a fully depreciated high end car is so much nicer and cheaper than a low end new one. Airplanes are not mechanically that different than a car, yet generally last and hold value if maintained.
I've also never understood why people in the USA assume houses will always appreciate, as if it is a law of nature or something- when at its core houses can't appreciate forever relative to inflation, because there is a hard cap somewhere below people paying 100% of income for housing. This basically proves it is just a combination of a culture that values older housing in the USA and regulatory capture preventing new construction. New houses are often seen as "cold," "sterile," or "lacking character" in the USA- and the stereotype of a successful wealthy person is in a giant old mansion.
Europeans are jealous that they clearcut all their forests 1000 years ago and want to brag up their cinderblock homes that no one can actually afford to buy anymore. 40% down on their 50 year mortgages yadda yadda.
https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_mars...
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 Santa Ana wind is extremely dry and this one hit 100kmh (not 50). And it hasn’t really rained for 8 months (since May 2024). And we had a very wet winter last year, so there’s extra growth to fuel any fire. And finally, there’s 10 million people live in LA County, it’s a target rich space.
Please let me know where else is having the same sort of fire without destroying homes.
“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...
For each day, use the average high and the average low. Subtract the desired maximum dwelling temperature from the average high: if the result is positive, add it to the cooling degree-days total. Subtract the average low from the from the minimum dwelling temperature: if the result is positive, add it to the heating degree-days total.
Over a year, that gives you comparable figures on how much you will need to cool or heat the space. Many agencies calculate this for specific areas.
Here, for example, are the current season numbers for Boston: https://www.massenergymarketers.org/resources/degree-days/bo...
Generic regional numbers for the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/units-and-calculators/de...
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.
Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example, where it traveled across the span of a thousand miles and lasted a week of damages.
The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations.
Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
there are whole important cultural lifeways related to opening and closing windows at proper times for efficient cooling and ventilation. these work really well — in Europe — and are treasured traditions.
getting people to accept AC is sort of like trying to convince the average American to go grocery shopping on a bicycle. some may accept the idea but only the most European influenced already.
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.
The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America that don't make sense economically, but that persist because of momentum, with each generation receiving an inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to nothing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_of_New_Orleans
Not sure how that is a "tiny fraction" of homes. $125 billion in damage (2005).
I couldn't find data for tornadoes in aggregate, only individual storms.
> Economically, tornadoes cause about a tenth as much damage per year, on average, as hurricanes. Hurricanes tend to cause much more overall destruction than tornadoes because of their much larger size, longer duration and their greater variety of ways to damage property. The destructive core in hurricanes can be tens of miles across, last many hours and damage structures through storm surge and rainfall-caused flooding, as well as from wind. Tornadoes, in contrast, tend to be a few hundred yards in diameter, last for minutes and primarily cause damage from their extreme winds
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/how-...
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?
There are multiple relevant temperatures for a heat pump, and the pump is more efficient when some of those are higher and some lower. A heat pump has two heat exchangers, one on the inside of the building and one outside. Each of those heat exchangers has two temperatures: the refrigerant loop temperature at that point, and the ambient temperature (air for air source heat pumps, ground for ground source heat pumps). There's also a fifth relevant temperature that has indirect influence: the setpoint (the desired indoor ambient temperature).
Efficiency increases when the temperature delta between the refrigerant and ambient temperatures is higher (both indoor and outdoor). But those temperature deltas vary inversely with the delta between the indoor and outdoor ambient temperatures.
So, in summary:
- Heat pumps get less efficient when the temperature delta between indoor and outdoor temperature is higher.
- They get more efficient when the temperature delta between refrigerant and ambient temperature is higher.
The net effect of this is that heat pumps become less efficient as the temperature becomes hotter outside in the summer and colder outside in the winter.
The issue is most to the city only sustained water damage, a solid chunk of the city is above the water level and was absolutely fine. Moving outside the city most homes in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama etc don’t need to worry about flooding.
This solves the fire problem AND the limited access to a public resource that is common in Malibu.
Ideally a permeable surface without any growth, cleared at least 2x a year.
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.
Insulation plays into combustability as well, where mineral / rock wool has thermal mass, does not ignite, but us construction has recently favored fiberglass and cellulose for the the costs.
There's something distorting your economy. Concrete is incredibly cheap as a material, extremely prone to use in a large supply chain, and requires way less labor than wood.
You make houses siting over finely built wood lattices... how much do you pay to the people building those? Because I can't imagine it being justifiable with Brazilian salaries.
The largest share of the illegal wood extracted from Brazil goes to the US.
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.
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.
Tornados are almost the perfect example of an insurable hazard: Very low probability, very high damage, very widely distributed across the affected areas:
https://mrcc.purdue.edu/gismaps/cntytorn#
Click around that neat interactive map, you'll see that the tornado is typically a few miles long and a few hundred yards wide, there are a few thousand severe tornadoes scattered all over the Midwest and somewhat fewer on the east coast in the past 70 years. It's not feasible to build houses everywhere that will stand up to an F5 tornado throwing cars. But they only cause a total loss of a tiny fraction of all houses in the country, and there are relatively few choices anyone east of Texas can make that would meaningfully impact their risk.
You could price insurance premiums at the risk of a tornado times the cost of the insured assets, plus a 10% administrative fee/profit margin, and those rates would be affordable. Maybe a handful of people would choose to live in Colorado instead of a few hundred miles east in Kansas because the cost of this 'tornado insurance' was higher in Kansas, but even in Tornado Alley it wouldn't be unaffordable.
Conversely, if you look at the hurricane incidence and storm surge risk map:
https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#map=4/32/-80
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...
and population density along the gulf coast:
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#7/28.541/-88.011
It's clear that people are choosing to build houses in the narrow strip of low-lying land that's right along the coast and vulnerable to high-probability storm surges! If insurance was priced at cost of assets + administration times risk of loss, it would be really, really expensive.
California already a dumb communal insurance thing, the "California FAIR Plan" for people who can't get insurance due to high risk. They force insurance companies who operate in the state to fund it. So basically everyone has to subsidize the high-risk people... but then the insurance companies leave.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-fair-pl...
> plural in form but singular or plural in construction
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thermodynamics)
I think American and British English treat words like this differently.
Because Santa Ynez was empty (for the past year), water was supplied from downhill water sources and the pressure needed dropped off to the point there was no longer any water out of the hydrants.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pacific+Palisades,+Los+Ang...
Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its identity to a significant degree as being opposed to cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to move to even if we could just move the cities.
When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading.
So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.
How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
On the other hand, depending on the humidity, heats over like 85F start becoming a health risk for some activities.
Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances. Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in the developing world and continental Europe.
On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is more expensive because heating is unnecessary.
The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60 degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees below body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient than the technologies used most commonly for heating (resistive or combustion).
> when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice water).
And certainly as it relates to insurance, the trend sure seems to be well on it's way towards "coastal Florida is insurable" (either the price goes up beyond the means of the residents, or the insurers leave the market). Something like 5% of the state is covered by Citizen's Property (the government insurer of last-resort). Some coastal areas are ~10%. I have to imagine it won't be long before it's cheaper to pay people to move elsewhere than rebuild where they are.
We get what we allow or deserve here in the US. Citizens United led to our current awful outcome.
https://youtu.be/5h1H36rdprs?t=1m51s
That would easily jump a 10' fire break.
I live in an area that had a special warning last summer, we had a very very dry summer and there was a period with low humidity and high winds for a few days, it was considered an unusual scenario with extreme fire risk - but nothing happened this time. Now that I'm writing this I'm wondering what I'll do if it feels like an annual occurrence. Another parallel, the power company warned us they might shut off the power to reduce risk but I guess it didn't get that bad.
And, like all things, of course there are many interdependent pieces in play, like those hurricane force winds, but oak trees don't burn the same as a palm [2]. I just keep seeing that viral video of a firefighter trying to put out a palm while a guy escaped his house on a bike -- it was shedding embers like crazy. [3]
[1] pdf warning: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr21...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/elderly-couple-battles-flames-la-f...
[3] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/pali...
[1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2024/24-1600_rpt_bfc_12...
Fireproof concrete bunkers would be worse for insurance because when the firestorm blows through and shatters the 7-centimeter windows slits your fireproof design calls for and ignites the interior you have to demolish steel reinforced concrete with machinery instead of knocking down wood with a sledgehammer and muscles.
A Caterpillar D9 is more expensive per day than a migrant laborer.
There are so many images of concrete buildings being burned out that if I search "california fires" the 9th image is of a steel-reinforced concrete building has ~10 meter fire jets blowing out one of its windows.
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).
Plus, I and most people wouldn't personally want to buy a any type of stone or brick house- it would take a lot of evidence to convince me it was earthquake safe, and I'm not sure how one could produce such evidence. Resale value and demand would be very low for something unusual.
Wood houses in practice aren't a big problem. There is something like a 3% chance per century of a wood house burning down in California, and almost all of those are centered on specific locations that are known to be very high risk and can be avoided if desired.
In most cases you would escape safely and be covered by insurance (neither of which would be the case with a stone house in an earthquake). In California almost everyone has fire insurance, almost nobody can get earthquake insurance. Probably if a stone house was in a large fire, it would still be burned to bare walls and still be as unlivable and expensive to rebuild.
The wild areas near Malibu and Pacific Palisades are more a mixture of chaparral and hilly grassland. There may be some oak trees scattered about, but it feels like more trees exist in the private home landscaping than in the actual wild areas.
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.
This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago but aggressively deploying technology that worsens floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.
PS Also, there are many opportunists, that were burning their houses to receive insurance or compensations, so not all of those houses were burned by wildfires. It all looks ugly, regadless from what angle you look, because if there is no responsibility - even from the ones that have taken upon resposibility, then catastrophe is expected - sooner than later.
The Tornado Archive (https://tornadoarchive.com/) has a pretty well executed map to illustrate that. They report that between 2011 and 2021 (just the dates I punched in, so its possible the actual ratio is a bit different from that), the world saw ~20,000 reported tornadoes. North America reported 12,000 of them.
So its not just that Americans maybe don't know how to build tornado resistant structures. Its that the US and Canada's per-capita tornado rate is quite a bit higher than the rest of the world.
I am thankful to live in a county where land and building ownership are more available to the common man than most and many people can escape being perpetual renters. Wood construction enables that. Plus North Americans love to adjust and remodel their homes and have unique shapes with high ceilings etc etc etc which is really helped with our construction techniques. The only thing I hate is termite risk and that could probably be resolved by allowing framing with pressure treated wood
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-...
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.
I mostly agree with the article that insurance is grounded in statistical measures of risk and there's no point railing against it. Norms are going to have to adapt to increased risk and how we build homes and infrastructure needs to shift away from short-term, low-cost thinking to longer-term solutions with a higher-upfront cost and lower TCO given the new constraints. Things like burying power lines, aggressively managing fire danger, and homes that are built to be more sound to natural disasters have to become the status quo.
Most of these things are already possible today. In my neighborhood, PG&E did an assessment and it would cost every homeowner on the street ~$25,000 to have the power lines buried. I would have opened my wallet immediately to reduce the fire risk, but it got caught up in politics and policy. When we had some renovation on our house, my wife and I insisted on some of the work being done in ways that would make the house safer and easier to maintain over the long work. The contractor balked at first saying it would cost us an extra couple of thousand dollars. I had to point out that an extra $3000 to make sure things lasted an extra 5 - 10 years and was easier to maintain and upgrade meant nothing. But people have to insist on doing better because right now the norm is to cut corners on everything to save in many cases a negligible amount of money over the life of the work or against the cost if there is a disaster.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g&pp=ygUkaG91c2VzIHR...
especially for this fire, jumping doesnt mean that everything 2 miles down wind also burned down. buildings that far had the opportunity to burn, and if they dud, had the opportunity to burn their neighbors, and another 2 miles down.
i imagine ember density is more interesting than distance?
The only thing that public insurance would do is to provide a way for the state to incur another massive unfunded liability. Except, unlike healthcare or pensions which have the somewhat laudable goal of taking care of poor people and old people, this would go to bailing out rich homeowners who made a bad investment of a house in a flammable area and then refused to spend money on fire safety measures, either in their home or their municipality.
Of course these fire zone bag holders are now clamoring for the state to take on their bad investments by pushing conspiracy theories about the evil insurance companies.
That only guarantees you have insurance. It does not guarantee that you will be covered or made whole in an incident or emergency.
See FL Citizen's insurance and other insurances of last resort as examples.
What really needs to happen is premiums go up with the cost of risk. But this also means pricing people out of homes, vehicles, businesses, etc. And no politician will allow this.
This is California’s FAIR plan [1]. It’s a wealth transfer from non-homeowners to homeowners, homeowners in low-risk areas to high-risk homeowners, and from low-value homeowners to rich ones.
Ooh, and make a bailout conditional on homeowners (or counties) agreeing to eminent domain.
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.
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.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/03/how-floridas-home-insuranc...
Re: California, I don't understand the context for your question, or why you would think the California government is more strange than any other US state government. There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.
tl;dr, though: California does allow insurers to do that, but is using currently an antiquated set of rules that don't allow for modern risk management approaches. It's been rewriting those rules recently to fix this; I think the new rules are supposed to be in effect starting this year.
Most disasters follow power laws and other fat tail which don't have the same effects in the tail as a Gaussian. If you shift 1/x^a by c, you "only" get a polynomial increase.
But also, if you shift the mean of a Gaussian, the increase isn't exponential, it's super exponential (e^(x^2) to be specific).
> 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.
Sure they can, that's why they hire statisticians. They routinely deal with insurance of much rarer events where we have much worse models than climate change. They're just banned from charging the actual rates, because it's politically unacceptable.
Population is diverse and large, yes, but the state government (including the insurance commissioner) is radically biased left/progressive and has been for decades.
For example, there was a red flag warning that ran from Colorado to Texas at the beginning of this month.
There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then.
If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles describing it. The basic idea is that you take standard dimensional lumber (like 2x4s), bring it onto the site, and assemble it into the frame for the house. Timber construction uses larger pieces of timber to make the house.
I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners. If you tried to make a stick-built house in the 1800s it would fall apart, but this is the 2000s, and they make a million of them every year.
What is not to say that most of the wood in the US is illegal. It's probably a small share. But some of your houses do pretty much chop forests down. (And your government does help fight that, but it's hard to completely stop it.)
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.
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
Average home age in Japan is 30 years. I think, maybe once or twice, I’ve lived in a building less than 30 years old in the US. I’ve spent most of my life in buildings built pre-war. There aren’t so many pre-war buildings in Japan, but the US takes the blame for that one :-(
You can also think about it as far as actually moving heat. Cold is the absence of heat, and so when the air is colder, there is less heat moved for the same effort and you have to work harder -- less efficiently -- for the same amount of head to get moved.
The availability of engineered wood products like plywood is a big part of it too. Being able to attach what's effectively a solid sheet of wood to a wall adds a ton of shearing strength, for example. (And that's without getting into fancy modern engineered wood products like parallel-strand lumber or glulam, which give you something even better than raw wood.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
Some people on reddit are reporting quotes of 125k for larger (>3000 sq ft) houses.
As someone who lives in a 4-season environment that can get down into the single digits F on occasion in the winter (forecast to be there for a couple of days next week), and has an air-source heat pump, I just suck it up and eat the $400-$500/month heating costs for the auxiliary (electric resistive) heat in Dec/Jan/Feb. If someone gifts me a ground-sourced heat pump I'll gladly accept, but I've got kids to raise so setting aside money for one is a long way off.
It's not just gas explosion, it's 'everything', fire, structural rigidity (only ground floor houses are rare, almost non existant here), and well.. they're built to last.
https://www.metropolitan.si/kronika/tovornjak-trcil-v-hiso-s... <- a truck hit a building, and old one, and you can see the damage... one wall. The girl in the room survived.
I mean... again.. you could build a home that is "fire resistant", and we do, but most americans don't, as we see in LA.
Also in sunny climates it's easy to use solar energy for cooling making it carbon net-zero. Cold places typically burn natural gas for heating, it's much harder to make heating carbon net-zero.
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
They're simple (not a lot of corners for burning things to wedge in), they tend very well sealed with smaller windows (so less chance of a window breaking and allowing embers in), and the amount of thermal energy it takes to light a full log on fire is quite high. Radiant heat from a forest fire isn't going to bother a log cabin. It might darken the wood somewhat, but it won't light smooth logs on fire. Even random firebrands and such lack the energy to bother wood.
The only concern would be a shake roof - that would catch fire easily and burn the place down. But a well built and "tight" roof (no massive eaves with vents into an attic, just minimal overhangs) of Class A fire resistance would work just fine.
Metal roofing is not inherently fire resistant, either - it depends on the materials, and what's below it. Some metal roofing can transfer enough heat to the wood below to light that on fire, even without direct flame spread. And, non-intuitively, a lot of asphalt shingles are Class A fire resistant when properly installed.
What doesn't work well, obviously, are the sort of expensive homes with "all the architectural features," lots of inside corners that trap debris, and an incredibly complex roofline.
Are you suggesting we build houses inside concrete cubes with walls 10 m thick?
The same goes for floods. Most of the problem with floods, is that the house frame and flooring are made of wood. And wood rots. If you live in a flood prone area, the first floor at least, should be brick or stone for just about everything. Yes its expensive. But so is is $800/month flood insurance. Or having the federal government bail you out and passing the cost on to the taxpayer
But building things correctly is more expensive, and Americans love their cheap McMansions.
Also, on an individual level there is less incentive to build correctly, because you will almost certainly not get a discount on insurance. 99% of the population is at the whim of either buying a used house, or whatever the builder's models are for new construction. Its really only possible if you are very wealthy and build your own house on your own plot.
Insurance only really works when most people don’t suffer a catastrophic event and can cover the few who do.
From what I've read, the houses in LA that did survive were modern or heavily remodeled houses incorporating recent code changes to prevent embers from entering the eaves and suchlike.
It really doesn't help that most of LA was built up in the early to mid 20th century; requiring code updates during remodels can only help so much, because if the cost/change is too much/invasive the homeowners either don't remodel at all or do it without permits, bypassing the more costly safety improvements.
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.
The insurance companies have done research on the topic (including building giant 'labs' with a large number of fans)
* https://fortifiedhome.org/research/
and have developed standards/techniques that home builders/owners can do to fix a bunch of problems, starting with roofing:
* https://fortifiedhome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-FORTIFIED-...
the issue for Florida is that the state is made of permeable limestone, so it’s not possible to engineer around sea level rise. not so much an insurance issue exactly though, because it’s not a one-off disaster.
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.
It creates a condition where the state can prohibit insurers from selling to residents, if it doesn't like their prices, which has recently lead to a lot of insurers no longer selling in the state, as construction prices in the state have risen significantly faster than inflation, leading to insurance premiums that the state doesn't like.
Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than the plans it rejected from private insurers.
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.
Ofc, a sufficiently strong Tornado is destroying everything in its wake. But, they're rare in comparison.
I think some of that can be attributed to the fact that buildings are stationary structures that have ample square-footage for embers to land and cause fires, where as trees have less stationary surface area for embers to land, remain and build into fires.
It killed more than 70 people.
I suspect that a major factor is that the great plains of North America are at a lower latitude than e.g. the Eurasian steppes, so 1) there are fewer people living there and 2) the confluence of meteorological circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and therefore a larger population of very destructive tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the world.
This whole line of reasoning "Americans must be bad at house construction, look at all the destruction wrought by hurricanes/tornadoes/etc" just feels disingenuous to me. Like observing "look at how much better the British are at building volcano/earthquake proof buildings, you never hear about people losing their houses to lave in the UK!".
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).
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.
"Earthships" or other hobbit-hole like houses are almost completely fireproof as long as the entries are handled correctly - anything that can start a fire through three feet of earth is probably a volcano anyway.
Everyone's talking about fire insurance, but the earthquake insurance question is even bigger and basically untenable in a worst-case scenario. So in that case, CA wised up and the state is much more earthquake resilient than it was 30 years ago.
This is in fact a huge part of our tornado risk in the US. The long north-south region of mountainous/high elevation (i.e. the rockies) going into a large low elevation flat region, helps create the 'layering' of different air temperatures that cause tornadoes once the current changes enough for the top/bottom layer to turn into a column.
But tornados are also significantly smaller. A hurricane will damage a thousand square miles while a hurricane will mess up 50. It’s not quite right but the proportions are in that ballpark.
I'm not old enough to have seen Great Britain and relate isles pressed down by the weight of kilometres of ice though .. that'd be a great great great grand something that saw that.
This is false. Fire was unambiguously part of the practice of native Californians.
> opportunists
What is this slander.
Phoenix is a slow-rolling disaster regardless of whether it's easier to heat or cool a room to comfort.
I don't think the US has enough seismic activity to be much different. Chile and Japan do fine with solid construction and periodic 6-8 Richter earthquakes. California is allegedly a seismic state within the USA and it rarely sees a 4 degree one, and when it happens it makes it to the US national news (and sometimes even to the news back home, but as a comedy break because people don't even think about getting out of bed if it's not a 6).
I'm not sure about hurricanes, but maintenance can't be much different as rotten wood and moldy bricks are both a problem. Maybe insulating bricks is more expensive?
> This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
Cultural differences don't help here, in the US people think about rebuilding homes way more often than people in Europe, so there's this mindset that the home doesn't need to last that long because it will be rebuilt anyways. This shorter life span, "freedom" and profits thanks to lower costs also call for little regulation that forces the building code to aim to survive the regional disasters from the past 60+ years. California's fire code is probably an outlier, but SF had to burn down for the regulation to come out.
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.
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...
If a country with 1/10th of the worlds seismic activity can have (earthquake) insurance, then well dammit, I think it can be done.
Insurance, afaict, is just gambling, and well darnit you can gamble on anything.
The odds might be terrible, but there's ways of hedging your bets I've heard.
I am not a gambler.
Do you agree that if Santa Ynez reservoir had been full as it should have been, that there would have been no issues with fire hydrant water flowing for the Palisades?
Also, do you agree that in the case of private providing of water during the fire, that an entire mall was saved because of that? [1]
Do you agree that a mayor who promised during the election that she would not travel out of country, that then does travel out of country after extreme fire warnings, is not ideal?
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14280517/Palisades-...
Water is quite important for fire fighting. Why spin this, the facts are just too clear this time.
Even if you support the entire governmental structure involved ideologically, do you really want to trust them with your life at this point?
When you build you civilization on active volcanoes having long-lasting buildings may not be a reasonable assumption.
And, yes!, they have insurance. So if you can insure buildings in volcano country, you can insure anything, anywhere, maybe?
This almost seems designed to maximise fury. You're still taxing low-risk homeowners to pay for high-risk damages. And when a catastrophe hits, you aren't paying enough to rebuild (or avoid bankruptcy, in which case you're just routing taxpayer funds to creditors). Add to that you've branded it a tax increase it's almost something the GOP would run as a false flag against a Democrat.
I don't care about Bass. She has no role to play in an emergency besides telling the LAFD chief 'go fight the fire with all available resources' LAFD wasn't even the largest fire department responding, and we haven't heard a peep about LACoFD or the county supervisors.
> If the reservoir had been full
>> you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir
>> the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry.
To expand for your benefit, they were 6-8 hours into the firefight before the hydrants became an issue and ~15-17 hours in before the tanks were fully exhausted.
>> Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.
So no, I don't think water supplies supply made a difference at all. If you have the people, and the apparatus to dedicate to wholly one structure, you probably can save it. The actual firefighters were simultaneously fighting hundreds of house fires while a linear hurricane blew it all further and and further down the hill. They had to make the deploy the (region's worth of) resources had they could in the face of an awful situation that would have overwhelmed a state's worth of firefighters.
> Water is quite important ... Why spin this
Please engage with the reality of the situation instead of the simplified fantasy you've imagined in its place.
> why you would
Because I started seeing these talking points on night of the 7th. Certain factions were and are absolutely thrashing to attach blame anyone and anything they previously disliked. There are policy lessons to take from this disaster. LACoFD and LAFD need to be bigger, we need much more brush clearance, we need fewer NIMBYs to complain about the smoke from prescribed burns, ... the list goes on. But these real, essential changes are not shaped like 'one simple trick to stop the LA fires' or a getting gotchas all the woke dem pols.
What do you mean by this?
Look, it's known that reservoir was empty, but it's a covered reservoir. You're looking at the the _cover_. That image tells you nothing about the state of the reservoir at the time.
> primary uphill source of water for those fire hydrants
was 3x 1M gallon water tanks. Hydrants were gravity fed until the tanks ran out (8-15 hours into the firefight), at which point water tankers supplied responding companies.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Before-Wilderness-Environmental-Calif...
The entire western third of the US is has several M7+ earthquakes per century, with a M6 every couple years, and the occasional M8-9+. The 1964 Anchorage earthquake was stronger (M9.2) than the 2011 Japanese earthquake that caused the great tsunami.
In the eastern US, there is a giant seismic zone that had multiple M8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. These were so powerful they changed the path of the mighty Mississippi River. People forget about it because it hasn’t had a large earthquake in over a century.
A lot of R&D is done on new construction techniques for extreme earthquake risks. The challenge with reinforced concrete is the absurd amount of reinforcement and steel you need to make it survive an earthquake that strong, which makes construction slow and expensive. The state-of-the-art doesn’t use reinforced concrete at all, even in skyscrapers; they use specially designed welded steel plates and fill the empty spaces with poured concrete.
The US has an anomalously high exposure to natural disasters as an accident of geography. For example, people often forget just how many active volcanoes there are in the US, including multiple super-volcanoes. While I live in an area well-known for its M9+ earthquake and tsunami risk, I can see three active volcanoes from my kitchen window.
