Comment by tobyhinloopen
1 day 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.
It’s possible that solve the hurricane problems with proper building regulations and lower the risk of huge wildfires with controlled burning. But the US as always prefers to pretend that there’s nothing to be done when other parts of the world has figured it out.
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.
Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
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.
Tornadoes are quite a bit less common outside of North America, and especially the US. Some of that comes down to the absence of people in the places where tornadoes occur, so there's no one there to report them.
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.
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> Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
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
* https://fortifiedhome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-FORTIFIED-...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd-0yAPs6Wc
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=proGT6AtyJc
Tornados might be more intense but only for a short period of time and in a small area. I don't see any of those where the tornado is lasting days, causing sustained damage. There are some where there are multiple tornadoes in a span, but each individual tornado is itself quick and violent but localized within a mile or so at most.
Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example, where it traveled across the span of a thousand miles and lasted a week of damages.
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If you have to be inside one, pick a hurricane. But tornadoes are so much smaller. This list is like... 10-20 per year with an average of less than 1 casualty and a dozen houses damaged? That's basically zero as far as insurance and habitability go. I found a study titled "Tornadoes in Europe An Underestimated Threat" and it has an estimate of 10-50 million euros per year in total damage. That's not even 1 euro per house in Europe.
Let's not be silly here. European tornadoes are not taking apart houses to the foundations. Ripping off roofs or flipping over cars or even when trees are falling on a tourist tent and killing them in process has nothing to do with how houses are built in USA and nowadays even in UK and elsewhere.
The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it: Wealthy coastal landowners believe that the cost of home insurance should be about $2000/year. 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.
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.
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Tornados are indeed scary. I have seen a house cut in half like a knife by one. You could see the doors ripped off the medicine cabinet on the second floor and meds still on the shelf.
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.
the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings. Asian apartments towers are immune to flooding because they allocate the ground floor to parking. Can't blow the roof off a square concrete building either.
Ofc, a sufficiently strong Tornado is destroying everything in its wake. But, they're rare in comparison.
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The 2024 hurricane season damage totaled $128.072 billion.
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-...
As the governments in the US get increasingly incompetent, insurance prices are going to have to rise. Government services are largely there to protect you during black swan events, so if those services get less and less effective, you're going to need more insurance for those events.
This was the whole issue. California made it illegal for insurance companies to raise rates, so the insurance companies stop renewals. Leaving everybody uninsured. Homeowners couldn't buy insurance at any price.
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I don't think it is incompetence of the governments. It appears to be a goal of most US politicians to add to the coffers of private business, insurance companies included, at the expense of all but the most rich Americans.
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These aren’t black swan events. These are swan events, if anything.
I recall reading somewhere that the Indians had done controlled burns before Europeans settled in the parts of the U.S. where fires are now a problem. European settlers who displaced them did not continue the controlled burns and then fires became a problem. Apparently, if you do regular controlled burns, the severity of fires is reduced and healthy trees survive it. When you do not, when fires do occur, all trees die and the fires spread out of control.
I recall reading the same thing, however I do recall that they were East coast native Indians, that cleared oak tree forests as a hunting grounds, so completelly unrelated to the problem in California. The story was about native land rights and if such looking after their hunting grounds can be seen as claims on property rights, which Indians did not knew as a concept, so it is a moot point anyway. The issues that plague CA seems to be chaos in organization level - from what I have read these wildfires are happening in the year, that did had moderate drought(compared to others), so I would look suspiciously in this with the mind, that if politicians are blaming climate, then it is a sign that they are absolutelly responsible for what they have not done and promised to people. But I do not own a house there and I have not voted for these people and I absolutelly would not hang them in the chimney of my house.
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.
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I recall seeing a documentary on TV about this. Indigenous Americans were behind the effort to resurrect the practice.
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-...
> The truth is that the rich diversity and stunning landscapes of places like Yosemite and other natural environments in the United States were intentionally cultivated by Native Americans for thousands of years. And their greatest tool was fire.
https://www.history.com/news/native-american-wildfires
Theory: Damages in the USA have gone up because mold mitigation was incorporated as a serious consideration only fairly recently. If you increase your definition of what damage is and the work required to fix it then 'damage occurring' will appear to suddenly go up.
Wildfires are not the problem. They happen all the time without causing billion-dollar insurance claims. Insurance is always assets x risk. The issue is expensive flamable housing (assets) in a wildfire area (risk). We ask for trouble when we create million-dollar wooden houses surrounded by manicured gardens in desert enviroments. And build on a slope facing pervailing winds. The answer is concrete/brick houses with metal/ceramic rooves surrounded by sand/stone/concrete. Want a big green lawn? Move to the pacific northwest. Want to live near the beating heart of the movie industry, a town where it never rains? Get used to cactuses instead of rose gardens.
That doesn't align with the reality of these areas. To get insurance in these areas you have to demonstrate that you have created a defensible space around your house. This is enforced by local fire department inspections. I know this because I live near a fire prone area. Despite these things the area still burned. The problem isn't "lawns" or "wooden houses". In the case of the LA fires you would have had the burned out husks of concrete houses that would need to be demolished if everything was made of concrete. This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.
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Why is the answer not Japan's approach. My understanding is that because of high incidents of natural disaster they see/build homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments.
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A forward looking (part of a) solution for Malibu would be the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks.
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.
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Wildfire structure losses can be mitigated with cutting firebreaks, building material selection and removing flammable trees and plants from properties. A lot of communities in western Canada have learned this the hard way.
Where is “here”? Are you sure you aren’t confusing hurricanes and tornados? Hurricanes rarely destroy houses in the US, either.
How are you making this claim? Every time a hurricane hits Florida, there are photos of entire neighborhoods devastated by wind and storm surge. How many people were permanently displaced by Katrine? Etc. Maybe many of the homes weren't technically "destroyed", but each storm brings millions or billions in damage.
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Good to know. The news always seems to find footage of destroyed suburbs whenever the US is hit by a big one.
It's so interesting to see the people in awe of that "fire hurricane" video in L.A....
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.
It rather blunts your point when 50km/h winds are a far cry from 160km/h winds.
Specifically, I'm now questioning if your drought was actually more intense. Not exactly sure how you measure that one.
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
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.
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It's not a competition. Both can be sights that people view in awe. Are you "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" wildfires?
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Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc? It at least for me always detracts from the argument at hand. You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.
Well, we are commenting on an article specifically about the spread of fire in urban areas, as we've seen in LA this week.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London
> Here in the seismically stable UK
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.
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Less about the question (that has been asked so much now its tiring) but more on how when people do ask it, they always ask in such a negative way. Its not why are so many homes built out of timber/wood but rather why are they built out of sticks?
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I don’t understand the sense of entitlement towards every nuclear family owning a building constructed with stone, steel, and concrete. None of these things are available in a level of abundance to grant them to every person alive. While concrete only construction is more common in developing countries I certainly question the quality. I lived in an apartment like this in South Asia and it had no weather insulating ability whatsoever, the plaster was constantly crumbling, and the doors would jam up. Not to mention the recurring nearby stories of an apartments roof collapsing on its occupant.
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
It helps with availability of materials if people don't expect to have like 500sqft per person. But that's not how modern houses are built in US, at least not in my neck of the woods (Seattle suburbs). As for the quality of housing, I'm from ex-Soviet satellite state and lived in a prefab apartment block - yeah, it was a bit dated but no major problems with quality that I could tell. The main nuisance was lack of acoustic insulation.
Termites are only a problem if you enable them with a source of moisture. If you have termites eating your house something else has gone very wrong.
One huge problem with respect to fire resistance, in American home's, are the use of truss connector plates. While they have many advantages in cost and allow impressive cheap big houses, they fundamentally weaken the wood when it burns. Often houses just collapse on that joints, not because the overall beam failed, but this interface. In the end the use of "wood" is blamed, but that failed to address the rootcause.
For me it's the result of pent-up anger from the popularity of drywall and particle board here in the US.
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.
Dimensional lumber is often called sticks, in the building industry, probably because it's quicker. For example, if a roof is built from individual pieces of dimensional lumber, instead of pre-built trusses, the building method isn't called dimensional-lumber-built but stick-built.
Brick, stucco, concrete siding are all fire resistant and commonly used in construction in the last 25 years.
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.
Look at houses in California. Most have fire resistant stucco exteriors. It's the style out here.
It’s not just the exterior material. You also need to screen or eliminate openings that embers can penetrate.
Especially when even in wood framed houses your walls are still stone specifically for the fire resistant properties.
If you wanted to make fun of building practices it would probably be the trend of plastic siding.
> You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.
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.
> That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed
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...
A 2x4 is just a big stick. It's smaller in shape than some logs you throw on the fire, and it's nice and dry.
Some of us live in reinforced concrete socialist-built apartment buildings, and our homes don't burn like american houses do. Same for single family houses made from brics and cement (most houses here)
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.
I think you missed the point. Its the same as me asking about the drab prisons you live in. Not to mention your cherry picked examples don't really hold up. A 2500sqft home filled with natural gas has a different explosive potential than a small apartment. I am also not sure it makes sense to build homes expecting for a natural gas explosion, not even a measurable risk. You can absolutely build a home that is fire resistant which most modern homes in fire risk areas are.
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>Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc?
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.
To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
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...
> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
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.
You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
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.
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100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar panels right now covered with snow.)
you cannot win this argument with the average person who lives in a chilly European country. it just does not compute.
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.
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This is such an interesting perspective that I've never thought about. Thanks!
Recently it was -7C where I lived. Even without heating, my indoor temp didn't go below 15C. In regions where cold temperatures are common, isolation and heat retaining materials are very common. Is preventing heat gain as simple as preventing heat loss?
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a greenhouse can heat a space by enough to be comfortable for free, but not cool it. Windows and sunlight matter.
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
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...
Sure Japan did it, so did Mexico. The latter is probably much more important as an example for the US.
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disast...
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I would be interested to know how Japan combats wildfires. Historically at least it was quite a big problem, if I recall correctly.
There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River.
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.
I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change.
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.
Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
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.
Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.
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.
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What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just relocate an entire city.
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.
Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas should be treated similarly.
Do we know why the insurance companies can't simply raise the insurance price to match the risks in those areas that are prone to natural disasters? I mean in general, not as in California where the government imposes strange policies. Speaking of the policy, why wouldn't California allow the insurance company raise the premium by region? Doesn't such policy benefit the rich at the cost of the poor as the rich love to live by the hills, lakes, or beaches, which is very much against the ideology of California?
California's ideology is to protect at all costs the people who already live among its hills, lakes, and beaches. Insurance and property tax hikes are threats insofar as they could drain your wealth. The (other, new) rich are a threat insofar as they could become your neighbors and ruin the view. The state protects you in both directions.
This sounds evil. Why protect the rich when the states always spend huge to help the the poor?
If your house burning down was a near certainty within a few decades, the real cost of insurance would be buying a new house + profit margin.
Insurance only really works when most people don’t suffer a catastrophic event and can cover the few who do.
It's more complicated than that, as always. Here's some (incomplete) background on Florida:
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.
It was based on some reports (or podcast? I can't remember) that the California government didn't allow the insurers to sufficiently increase their premiums in the burnt areas. The government (or the insurers) cited two reasons: there was a rule that the annual increase should be no more than 7%, and that if they want to make an exception then the insurers must increase the premiums for all the insured areas instead of setting the price by risk. As a result, the insurers stopped insurance renewal for about 60% of the burnt properties. I assume the intention is to protect the insured or to ensure certain equity, hence the use of the term "ideology". FWIW, it thought it was a neutral term, implying that it's a strongly held fundamental belief.
California's insurance policies are more strange, due to proposition 103, passed in 1988.
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.
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> There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.
Population is diverse and large, yes, but the state government (including the insurance commissioner) is radically biased left/progressive and has been for decades.
I would assume that earthquake insurance in japan is a reasonable model for "world insurance".
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".
Japan is probably not a good comparison for home insurance because houses in Japan typically only have a 20 to 30 year lifespan. After that they are usually torn down and a new house is built.
Its a country built on seismically active volcanoes.
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/...
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Why would anyone tear down a 20 year old house? Where I live the houses are 80-100 years old and they’re better built and nicer to live in than most newer homes.
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America isn't the only place having an uptick in extreme weather events, though.
Spain just had the worst flooding ever, Australia has massive wildfire issues, coastal areas all over the world are flooding, inland areas are dealing with drought. It's definitely not just the US.
Climate change is gonna be really expensive. Some people have tried to point this out.
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"Pakistan floods: One third of country is under water - minister"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62712301
Pakistan mentioned! Let's go!!
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in here is the ornamental planting of non-native plants all over LA, like eucalyptus which is highly flammable, as opposed to the native coastal oak, which is not. All those iconic, non-native palm trees are fire hazards.
That's because that wasn't a material effect in this situation. It was hurricane force winds blowing over native shrubs and scrub land. It wasn't forests of eucalyptus that caused this. California has a decades long effort to restore native plants in areas. Eucalyptus groves are being torn out. The problem is that the native shrubs and grass are pretty flammable. They evolved to burn and regrow. They aren't resistant.
For sure, they're not fireproof of course, but they do survive and seem to be more resistant than non-native species [1].
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...
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).
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.
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If you actually want to know the answer to this question, this is a wonderful and well-researched book on the topic.
https://tendingthewild.com/tending-the-wild/
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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.
> 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).
>don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires
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.
pretty much any area can get flooded though by freak rainfall
We're bad at so very many things while thinking we're the best at everything.
don't worry, pretty soon you're gonna be great...
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?
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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
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It works for Taiwan and Japan
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It’s not just the West coast, brick buildings are simply not common all throughout the US, in places fault lines don’t exist.
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Building out of wood is cheap and perfectly strong for most areas.
Engineering is always a set of trade-offs.
Given the choice between earthquake-proof and fire-proof I'd go with earthquake-proof every single time since you can't run from an earthquake.
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.
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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).
If I’m choosing building materials to try and resist disaster, I’d just go straight to making a monolithic dome.
Wood is way cheaper and more available at large scale here than in Europe.
Meh, couple this with articles about drone inspection of roofs and properties, and the trend of insurance getting harder to come by emerges.
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.
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...
We don't do this in e.g. aviation, where after every crash we study it and make changes if possible. Not sure why we don't seem to care in housing.
> 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.
Climate change enters the chat...
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).
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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...
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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.
Seems like having the ocean at your door would be bad for the structure? Or burning down in a hot dry period…
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You literally pulled this take out of your ass. Water and fire can shockingly ruin buildings.
Except for Fire?
How did climate change cause vast neighborhoods of single-family wooden mcmansions to be constructed with ~3 meters of separation?
Still waiting for the water to flood New York...
Hurricane Sandy flooded big parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. I have friends who couldn't go back to their apartments or offices for months afterwards.
That happened six years ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/severe-rainfall-hits-new-yor...
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Hurricane Ida in 2019 brought torrential rains which flooded the city, especially the subway.
Pole drift.
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?
Magnetic, rotational, geodetic .. ?
What are you trying to say?
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was that understanding formed by Fox News, perhaps?
Rush Limbaugh zombie in a polkadot dress.
Didn't know that fox news was in charge of forestry in LA.
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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