A knowledgeable reader took a look at a court filing on the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire. The implication for Los Angeles rebuilding its burned out neighborhoods are not pretty. As you will see below, nearly 2/3 of the homes destroyed in the Santa Cruz Mountains conflagration are not being rebuilt. Fewer than 15% have been rebuilt and are now occupied.
We will need to firm this tidbit as more authoritative sources weigh in, but this informed-looking comment on Reddit suggests that most claims will not be paid out in full due to the State of California being the insurer and lacking the capacity to do so. From Reddit:
The issue isn’t insurance companies going bankrupt in California since, as you mentioned, there are virtually no homeowners insurance plans with wildfire coverage that are underwritten by anything other than the California FAIR Plan anymore. The California FAIR Plan is both the underwriter for virtually all of California’s wildfire insurance as well as the guarantee association that is owned/run by the state.
The issue is that the price controls combined with the state pillaging the FAIR Plan’s funds for “other stuff” means that it only has $400 million to cover the losses. This is combined with the fact that California has a potentially >$60 billion budget deficit for 2025 that they don’t know how they’ll fund (the actual deficit isn’t actually known because the state is deliberately excluding certain items from its calculation of it, such as $20 billion that it needs to pay to the Federal Government this year. The deficit is not less than $38 billion with a middle estimate of ~$60 billion. The high estimate is “who knows?”).
The California Department of Insurance’s official plan on how to now “fund” the FAIR Plan’s multibillion dollar exposure is to prevent insurance companies from non-renewing existing plans as of January 9 and to threaten unspecified penalties for insurance companies that don’t retroactively renew policies that were non-renewed in the past few months. That wouldn’t necessarily do much even if it was able to be implemented, never mind that its unconstitutional and has a 0% chance of going through.
Because there’s very few policies written by insurance companies, their exposure is so low that there isn’t really a concern about any of them becoming insolvent. The real issue is that the FAIR Plan is very clearly insolvent, there is no viable mechanism to fund it, and the FAIR Plan itself is supposed to be the entity covering claims against insolvent insurers.
This isn’t a situation that has ever happened in the modern US and no one knows how it’s going to play out.
So everything is like CalPERS.
On top of the elephant-in-the-room “how meager will my insurance payout be?” another big impediment to reconstruction is shortages and inflation. If that’s in play from a major burn more than four years ago, imagine what will happen with the much greater pressure on building supplies with the unheard of scale of Los Angeles reconstruction when that gets going.
Other considerations complicate this picture. IM Doc sees evidence that many of the super-rich who lost homes in the Los Angeles fires won’t return. Recall that he lives in a high-end holiday enclave. Via e-mail:
I have now had 5 patients and friends as of today with their home in Ca a total loss. These are millions of dollars. 2 are uninsured completely.
My real estate agent patient had some news today. Every single available home in our area was sold this week. She now has over 200 squillionaires fighting over any and every home that is coming up on the market. All refugees from California. They know it will be years if ever that they have a home there again and they went out – to any desirable place in the country. The 18 million dollar high end homes are not involved so far. She told me that twice this week they have bid the home up over a million from asking – sight unseen.
The press is already starting to discuss hurdles homeowners whose houses were burnt out face, from insurance payouts being (legitimately) slow due to claims processing being overwhelmed to insurers trying to lowball payouts and policy-holders (and likely regulators and politicians) going to war with insurers, compounded by high odds of widespread underinsurance. High insurance costs would translate into conscious or accidental only-partial coverage.
Readers who are LA-knowledgeable mentioned other impediments to rebuilding. The wealthy Palisades is a family neighborhood. “There’s nothing to go back to: no schools, no grocery stores.” The implication is that families will be strongly inclined to move to functioning communities and may stay there due to not wanting to uproot their kids yet again.
By contrast, in Altadena, which is more middle class, many of the residents are multi-generational. They could not have afforded to buy the homes they lived in and cannot afford to rebuild. Nearly all will be underinsured, particularly in light of the way building costs will be sure to rise as a result of competition for materials and contractors.
Another potential stumbling point is pressure to rezone. For instance, there will be pressure to allow more multi-family housing, the arguments including climate change benefits (lower materials use, cheaper cooling and heating) and arguably faster restoration of housing for if nothing else, the benefit of businesses.
By A Recovering Californian
Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.
A lot of the problem is that building materials are in short supply and subject to gouging and inflation. Of course, most lumber for U.S. construction is harvested these days in Canada, so tariffs may also come into play. Most of the hardware we used to build our new house came from Mexico or China, so add those tariffs as well.
LA is somewhat different, but expect re-zoning fights over density in the predominantly single-family dwelling areas of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The few who do rebuild will see 5-fold increases in insurance premiums, which is what is being seen in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The hit to the state FAIR insurer of last resort program from the L.A. fires is already estimated at $26 billion.
As I mentioned, my mantra remains population growth and density. When I started high school in 1971 the population of California was 19.9M and remained stable throughout the decade. Today the population of LA County alone is over 20M. Density is up, intrusion into wildland is up, and camping by those living rough has been a factor in many recent fires (we don’t know the cause of the current fires). Of course, everything in LA is quick-and-cheap stick-built construction that everyone knows is going up in flames in a hot minute when embers start blowing in 60-100 mph Santa Ana winds.
Note also that the open lands of the Santa Monica Mountains are not managed by the state of California but Federal government. Seems like this was under Trump leadership 2017-2021. Of course, Congress needed to cut funding so that Genocide Joe could arm Ukraine and Israel.
Management of the rest of this area is under a web of local agencies funded by local property taxes, which are still ridiculously low compared with the rest of the country since Prop 13 in 1978. The San Gabriel Mountains above Altadena are U.S. Forest Service lands — Angeles National Forest and San Gabriel National Monument. All the Newsom-bashing is wrong on this point.
It was mainly the Federal Bureau of Reclamation that allowed LA real estate hustlers to steal millions of acre-feet of water from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada and from the Colorado River. That infrastructure is aging; the big reservoir in the Palisades was offline for repairs (not negligently — this is supposed to be the rainy season).
Here’s the punchline from the June 2024 Santa Cruz County Grand Jury report on rebuilding after the 2020 fire:
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Thanks for this article.
In the case of Santa Cruz, it would be interesting and probably revealing for the bigger picture of California to have a little more info… like what the rationale for no rebuilding is across those 444 residences … or how many permits submitted to the city/county are pending approval, the usual wait time for that approval, and of the houses under construction, how long the construction requires (e.g., why the difference between 253 permits issued and 158 under construction), with further breakdowns on how much time is spent waiting for materials, waiting for local inspectors, etc. etc.
My guess would be that there are some other issues with the rebuilding process that are more visible in the local context, but haven’t been fully flushed out here, and that’s why so many property owners haven’t taken action. For example, the article mentions building materials as an issue, but only 253 permits out of 697 destroyed were applied for. That would be the logical first step, and then sourcing materials, I would assume (though I could be mistaken). Or maybe it’s simply too difficult to find contractors.
Timing would indeed be a factor. Building permits in Santa Cruz County may be extended oncd, for a max of six months, then it’s back to the end of the line for a new application/permit. [Form PLG 203, as of this a.m.] Don’t know/ can’t find basic or max length of initial permit, but years ago in other CA counties, work had to commence within six months or a year.
But it’s been four years for this group.
According to the June 2024 Santa Cruz Grand Jury report, the biggest factor is under-insurance followed by lack of insurance. The payouts have kept up with neither inflation nor building code changes (especially in regard to geologic/earthquake hazard and sewage disposal), which is going to be a similar problem in the L.A. fire zone.
Another significant factor was the unavailability of architects, engineers, contractors, and skilled labor. This will be compounded in L.A. where a significant proportion of skilled and unskilled construction labor will be subject to hostility and deportation under the anti-Latino policies of the incoming administration.
https://www.santacruzcountyca.gov/Portals/0/County/GrandJury/GJ2024_final/2024-6_CZU_Report_with_Responses.pdf
Even though CA property taxes are low, do they need to be paid in full for a pile of ashes?
I know its not something that will ever get on the agenda, but there is one potential model for rebuilding the burnt out areas, and that is 1980’s Beirut (yes, I know it didn’t exactly work out well for them, but there are reasons for this). It was based on a number of other previous development models, including those used in Korea for rebuilding after the Korean War.
Facing a completely destroyed inner commercial district, with rampant squabbling among former proper owners, the government created a publicly owned company charged with building a new financial/commercial quarter. All property within the designated area was assigned (i.e given) to this body, with former property owners being given shares in rough proportion to the value of their previous ownership. They could then either use these shares to buy commercial/residential property of their choice within the new zone, or sell/hold the shares based on what was hoped to be a rising value of the company based on these values.
This sort of model seems to me to be the only fair way (for previous owners) to redevelop those areas in a more appropriate manner. Although from the little I know of Californian politics, I suspect it could never get off the ground.
Mariupol isn’t looking so bad these days. I propose begging the Russians for advice on how to do to large-scale city rebuilds ;).
LA County could hold a referendum on whether to join the Russian Federation.
In Mariupol, state is giving away appartments. You can’t have that. That’s Communism.
Well, if you’re a meritocrat you deserve it, so… (/s)
To PK’s valid point I will add I recall from my landscraping days in seattle in the early 2000’s our loosely affiliated comity had among them a designer who helped design and build cities from scratch in china and I suspect PK’s blueprint could/would work extremely well and the architectural capacity and urban planning chops exist in real time in the USA. We’ll see, as the Chinese saying goes, crisis is opportunity, and the French, Carpe Diem. In the mean time there’s going to be suffering because for every socal jerk who has a lambo or maserati family car, there’s 10 who felt rich due to their homes reported value, which is now zero.
In the end I must reiterate a point I made a few days ago and is noted in the above missive, Cali overdeveloped.
And Grozny.
Your example makes common sense… but that is lacking in the US. My parents and 2 brothers lived in the New Orleans area during Katrina. Parents had several inches of water one brother had 6 feet. Hurricane Katrina destroyed or damaged over 204,000 homes in New Orleans, Louisiana, which is an order magnitude worse than Pacific Palisades.
There were all sorts of great plans put forward for a more resilient, sustainable region. And NONE of it happen. Bush2 was president, the Payush “Bobby” Jindal became governor and Ray Nagin became mayor. One couldn’t ask for a more incompetent, corrupt misleadership.
Long story short, public goods like schools, transit and the Charity Hospital system were shredded and privatized. Redevelopment largely duplicated what was destroyed. Levees were strengthened, but still only for Category 3 Hurricanes and storm surge. And the pumps continue to fail.
Shock Doctrine is in store for California.
Also had parents go through Katrina. There was significant grifting through “Road Home” and other programs at the state level. Sure, there were NGOs with big ideas. For Katrina, they were flooded out on the Westbank. The old neighborhood in New Orleans East took years. It still looks outwardly the same, but much of the economic vitality has left and it is much more down-scale. Schools: since desegregation the decision was taken to abandon public schools so I don’t see change there. Medical: Oschner has pretty much become the dominant hospital system. There still is the VA/LSU-Tulane med school facilities in town. Transit: I remember when the bus system was owned by the power company (NOPSI). Was a pretty good deal back then.
Where my Dad had moved pre-Katrina to the Westbank, after Katrina the USACE did a massive project improving the protection for the Intercoastal Waterway in West Jeff
Parish. FEMA paid to have Dad’s house raised 6 feet. Quite a few neighbors in that area did as well. My Dad was his own GC for the Katrina repairs. Problem was cash flow as insurance claim went to the mortgage servicer, and for example ordering building materials he had to get the invoices and proof of use accepted by the servicer before they would cut a check.
Some things like roofs were really hard to get done. Of course, there were plenty of “immigrants” for labor, but skilled trades not so much.
PK, your musings on a rebuild in Palisades may be prescient. Governor Newsome has intimated that a reconstruction design charette is already in the works in Sacramento (Capital). The non-hill terrain of Palisades may be more amenable to re-design than the uplands. It will be interesting to watch
Newsom has already signed an Exec. Order suspending environment review by the Cal. Coastal Commission and CEQA. Reviews will be essentially local.
The re-design of Altadena may gain traction with those home owners. Since many do not have the funds to rebuild. I’ve suggested they rebuild using modular home construction manufacturing on the exisitng infrastructure grid (street, sewer/water; with electric place underground). Do this using the existing concrete foundations (which are all very similar and capable of accepting modular (off-site) built structures using current fire code regulations and ADA codes. (Implementing ‘day-lighting’ techniques to make these new homes energy conservation optimized would be another plus: see this.
Let me just say that I’m extremely impressed with Yves quick and insightful post on this topic. I live up the coast from Palisades and have friends who grew up in Altadena and her observations are spot-on.
‘See this:’ should go to this: http://www.land2plan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/PV-House.pdf
One thing about a ‘single development body’ model for reconstructing a burnt out area (this sort of problem goes back into early history) is that a single big construction contract for a new urban area is far cheaper than multiple construction projects. From the ones I’m familiar with, residential per sq. foot complete construction costs can be around 40% lower than one-off housing projects, just through scale and standardisation measures. And the costs could be brought down even more if you take account of the great reduction in regulatory requirements and the opportunity to rationalise and simplify service infrastructure.
Some of the worlds great urban areas were the result of this type of reconstruction – London following the Great Fire of 1666, or Lisbon following the 1755 earthquake. You can of course mess it up too – the rebuilding of post-war Seoul was terrible (the beautiful original urban grain of Korean cities was ignored in favour of highways and huge megablocks) and they are still paying the price for it. The Japanese, for better or worse, allowed their cities to retain the original pattern and urban grain from before the firebombing.
California has some of the best architecture firms in the world, many with experience of very large scale projects. So there is potential there. The key thing is for the State to intervene very rapidly. Once people start rebuilding its too late.
Of course. We will Build Back Better with 15 min cities that meet Agenda 2030 sustainable development goals. We will Own Nothing And Be Happy.
Actuaries have been on about fires for some time now.
Here are a few links to peruse.
TheActuary.com
Actuary.org
eenews.net peripherally
What can’t keep going, stops. Then the feds backstop the programs.
Thanks for the links! As you can see, I expect to return to the insurance and “what comes next?” problems, and this will be useful background.
I suspect that this will be an ongoing story that we will see mention from time to time on NC. Take a look at Pacific Palisades. For realtors that area will be far too valuable to just walk away from. For them it will be like an enormous pile of money just sitting there. It will be redeveloped but the question is with what? Will they abandon all the lessons being relearnt and just build quick wooden construction again? Will they go perhaps with high density buildings a few stories tall with concrete facings? Or will they build mansions on acreage in place of all those suburban homes. Personally I will be very much interested to see what gets but there and I do not think that we will have to wait all that long.
The contrast between post-Katina rebuilding New Orleans and the rebuilding of the Palisades should be illuminating. Upstater’s great comment above noted that Katrina was much worse with over 200,000 homes destroyed. So far for the LA fires I’ve heard number like 10,000 structures destroyed. But the “dollar” value of the LA fires will be orders of magnitude worse.
A quick search says California has 14,000,000 million homes, and is short 3 to 4 million housing units. And they are only building 1 new unit for every 5 new residents.
This is a tragedy for all impacted, and disastrous for the middle class and lower. But the real long term issue is we aren’t a serious nation that can provide housing for everyone – a point made in many ways by this blog. Because of our perverse housing as an asset incentives I suspect The Rev Kev is right and the Palisades will be rebuilt ‘cause there is money in it. But what will we do when we lose big chunks of coastal cities? Climate migration is going to break our crappy housing system, as those who can buy up anything in safe areas. Where does that leave the rest of us?
I doubt there were many tract homes in PP-they seemed pretty unique to me, so imagine new construction happening on a onesy twosy basis?
Pacific palisades is already rich area. So it’s not cheap construction by any means
One part of the tragedy in the Santa Cruz mountains is that the underclass of hippies,dealers and various other lumpenproletariat who lived up there and made the area unique will never return.
Mt Lemmon outside of Tucson burned up real good just after the turn of the century destroying 90% of the very basic cabins there, that were replaced by monstrosities in their stead, big houses going out to lot lines and such.
Re: California’s looming $60B+ deficit
Juana suggests Trump negotiate a deal to sell it back to Mexico.
My moms condo complex in SD is well over 50% rich mexican nationals, and the workforce outside of the coffee shop is also predominantly latin. As well, the care home she was in after an accident was a melting pot…I heard one grumpy old lady being wheeled down the hall chastising her nurses to only speak english when attending her, which gave me a chuckle…Archelina Bunker…
So sure, sell it to Mexico, they’re getting it already so why not?
As an additional and larger example, Sonoma County has had four major wildfires since 2017, impacting a total 2548 parcels having structures with 1738 parcels having rebuild activity. This is viewable by fire event and on maps with statistics using their extremely nice public interactive GIS system. On the Sonoma County Rebuilding Permits Data page, click on the map or View Map with Latest Numbers link.
The rebuild activity in higher-density urban-adjacent areas is clearly greater than in the rural areas. I live in the redwood forest myself. A lot of those rural homes are rather casual structures, often built by the homeowner over years. To want to rebuild out in the boonies requires the same independent mindset that caused people to build in the first place, and I think most of the current home-seeking population would prefer a more conventional suburban home location. And the market value of the rebuilt homes reflects this.
The point of this article is still supported by the additional data–it takes a long time to rebuild and only some fraction will be rebuilt in first decade after a major fire.
True that…
My cabin in Mineral King is a fire trap’s fire trap and if a conflagration were to take out our community of 40 cabins, it would take forever to rebuild as there’s the tyranny of distance and 639 significant turns in 21 miles of twisty mountain road to get there.
My cabin was built about 30 years ago by the owner who related that he wore out 3 work trucks in a decade of slowly building his place for me, as it turned out.
I’m insured (for now, but kinda expect a non renewal notice) and would just take the money and call it a day, were things to come a cropper.
Didn’t you say some time ago that there were caves in your area? Maybe ones that could house people from a wildfire until it passed?
We have caves and mines, and if there was a fire, you’d find me in the mine near Black Wolf Falls that goes around 50 feet back and has about 6 inches of standing water in it.
The rebuilding that started pre-2020 would be in a different category, since that would not be affected by the Covid and continuing runup in lumber and other building supplies costs.
I lived for many years in the Laurel Canyon area and fire was always a threat. There are a lot of things you can do to control the risk. The problem is no one is making owners do it. Biden said he would have the Federal government cover the Pacific Palisades fire. I am not sure what he meant but the area is bluer than blue and it has been a fertile area for democratic fund raising for decades. If any group of people can squeeze cash out of the government those in PP are the ones. And given the huge proportion of high dollar lawyers living there I suspect the litigation will be a lot more than in Santa Cruz.
I lived in Glenoaks Canyon, Glendale in the 90s and we definitely had to do brush clearance every summer, on pain of fines and enforced clearance. Not sure who enforced all this, perhaps the city ?
Now I’m in Thousand Oaks we don’t seem to have the same yearly notices.
A friend’s son (approx 30 y.o.) is a newish attorney in L.A. I was told that 4 of the son’s coworkers were burned out — 3 in Pacific Palisades and 1 in Alta Dena. So there should be no shortage of lawsuits.
Isn’t a closed-loop system like earth becoming interesting as we start to see indications of the limits to growth in an over-populated- by- humans world?
I’m seemingly going into shut-down and retreat mode (shock) with the multi-front assaults of the headlines and actions of- especially- the last 8 years.
Did Trump nominate The General to a cabinet position? General Malaise?
May you live in interesting times is getting a little old, why can’t we go back to boring 1978?
It will be interesting to see what develops here in Tiny Town where a few celebs own places. (Angelica Huston and William Shatner)
Cheaper homes have been scooped up by the AirBNB crowd, but at a certain price point they didn’t work, and million $ places simply weren’t selling, but that was then and this is now.
Another potential factor in the insurance reimbursement equation is whether homeowners were carrying the house and possessions under replacement cost or actual cost terms: If the former, there’s also the question as to whether the insured has an extended or guaranteed replacement cost, which is meant to cover increases in the costs of construction above the stated policy amounts. If the latter (typically for possessions), there may well be a lot of people who will be unable to afford rebuilding. Anybody know how the CA FAIR policies are structured and what is offered?
Another question for the taxing authorities is the status of the now empty lot: Is it considered ‘undeveloped’ or ’empty’, and thus taxable at a significantly lower rate? This could have significant effect on the ability to provide ongoing services to the neighborhoods.
This sad CA situation is a reminder that everybody should carefully review their owners or renters policies to see just what you could be getting under various scenarios (fire, flood, etc.) and under what terms and conditions (what you get if you walk away from the property can be significantly different than if you rebuild).
The situation with replacement cost insurance in California is interesting – if you live in the boonies you need to get the best possible replacement cost insurance if you want to be able to replace, because the cost of rebuilding is often much higher than the market price of the new house when you get done. In LA the market value of a simple little tract house vastly exceeds the building cost. If you have a recent mortgage the house should be insured up to the amount of the mortgage, so rebuilding should be possible. If you walk away the bank gets the insurance money, so those folks have a large incentive to rebuild. Meanwhile the Boomer with the paid-off, low-tax Proposition 13 house will almost certainly be underinsured.
There will be a lot of different situations and incentives.
I was curious what the Reddit commenter in the post meant by “wildfire coverage.” Fires are normally covered by regular homeowners insurance, there is not a separate coverage for wildfires like there is for floods. That’s how it was when I was working wildfire claims in northern California, and I had not heard that insurance companies gained the ability to exclude wildfires from regular homeowner policies. Policy forms are strictly regulated in California, but the rules change frequently and I have not been following the situation at all since about 2018.
I looked briefly at the FAIR plan website, and it appears they are writing “named peril” polices now, so maybe private companies are allowed to do the same thing. Or maybe the Redditor meant that virtually all wildfire policies written on a named peril basis are FAIR Plan because that’s the only entity that writes them.
FAIR Plan website here:
https://www.cfpnet.com/policies/dwelling/
Here in central BC we’ve had 3 close calls in last 7-8 years. I’ve been evacuated once and on alert a couple of times. Last winter we had the least snow I’ve seen, and only once temps went below -40. Last summer in my back country travels I was amazed at all the moose meadows and swamps that normally have a couple feet of water were completely dry. This year there is barely 8” of snow , and so far it hasn’t even got to -20C yet. Daytime temperatures have been above freezing for weeks. I expect this fire season may be a bad one if we don’t get a big dump soon. As much as I hate the cold and snow we need both. Given what is happening in California this early it may be bad all over the west.
Buy cement futures!
Forgot to add, I live at 4,000 ft. elevation.
Last nights fire update from the Lookout covered “what comes next”. Grim watching but he speaks from direct experience. Best coverage I’ve found of the actual on the ground fire experience.
https://the-lookout.org/2025/01/12/the-fires-are-out-now-the-hard-part/
Yes, Zeke is great. He has saved our sanity during wildfires. My husband was a long time volunteer engineer/EMT and would often go out on strike teams, leaving me to hold down the fort with the animals we have. So Zeke’s info about what was going on with the fires and the topography was really comforting to have. Zeke also did a great presentation on ‘what if’ Northern California got to too much rain and all the reservoirs flooded and came down Sacramento way. A scary scenario for sure, but entirely possible.
I was living in Santa Cruz when the fire happened in 2020. I remember the night the storm rolled in. The lighting was really intense. It woke me up about 2:30 AM. I was living a block from the beach, so I walked down and sat for an hour watching the show over Monterey Bay. The fires stared that night. Really quite intense for the next few days. The air quality was such that I stayed home. I knew some that were affected. My empathy goes out to all affected from this current disaster. Many are suffering.
I can see a vicious circle forming where you need a mortgage to rebuild, but can’t get a mortgage without insurance. I imagine this will work to the advantage of the deep pockets who can self finance. Wealth channelled upwards, everything working as planned.
California builds 80k homes a year I guess. So a few hundred extra in Santa Cruz should not have inflated the price of building materials too much.
I don’t have much sympathy for those who choose to live in Santa Cruz mountains, and much less for those in Malibu or pacific palisades. It’s a choice, and every adult should know that it’s a risk you are taking
It is tough to find anybody worth having sympathy for.
We can cross off the sympathy list anyone living in a hurricane area, so that is much of the southern Atlantic coast, Gulf Coast, and of course the inland areas in the south, like in North Carolina. Likewise, the well-known risk takers of the Midwest, adults who know well the danger of tornadoes. The west coast of the US — even far inland — is just waiting for earthquakes, so we can rightly harden our hearts. I don’t think we need to spend any time on reckless Alaska, which has volcanoes and earthquakes, and brown bears. Do not forget the volcano risk to Seattle. That the arid intermountain west is plagued with massive fires and hantavirus has long been known to all adults there waiting to burn or die gasping — time to write them off. One reads about the ice storms of the northeast, so too bad for anybody that decides to remain living there next time the power goes out.
There just is not enough sympathy in the world to be giving it out to all these adults that made wrong choices that anybody could see were going to go south — they should have moved to the location where a truly responsible and prudent person would live: nowhere on this planet.
Yeah, not at all the same, but thanks for the effort at tired sarcasm. The people living in Santa Cruz mountains or Pacific Palisades could move about 5 miles, and then I would feel for them. But they don’t want to do that. In the case of Pacific Palisades, it would mean leaving their luxurious gated community, far from the hoi polloi.
But cry your eyes out for the rich if you want. Maybe Paris Hilton has a go fund me?
Kids deserve sympathy by default, becuse they are kids. Adults deserve as much sympathy as they give to others. I am sure that many countries are willing to help USA in the same way USA helped them, by sending weapons (aka. freedom). Foreign economists could come and implement shock therapy.
There were a number of significant wildfires that destroyed homes all over Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia during the 2018-2023 timeframe. Rebuilding on the entire west coast depends on the same Canadian timber and central Oregon mills. Demand added-up and the mills weren’t about to add production facilities for what might have been a temporary spike in demand. I built a home in Western Washington during the same timeframe: wood materials that should have taken 15 days to get took 8 months and costs went up 1000 percent in many cases.
Homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains had been well-protected for over 70 years by the 100-plus minimum-security inmate firefighters of the Bonny Doon Fire Camp — until Covid hit and the crews were sent back into the institutions. CDF was left with 7 engines to fight 22 lightning-strikes. If the inmate firefighters had been available it’s quite possible that not a single home would have been lost.
Just checked Home Depot Huntington Park has framing 2×4’s for 3.74. Those are the 92 inch long suitable for standard framing for homes for the hoi polloi. So studs for a 40×40 hoi polloi habitat would cost less than $500.
Of course you have top and bottom plates, headers, joists, trusses, rafters, etc. But you get a rough idea from that.
1447 boards in stock at this moment. Ballpark: 1000 feet of wall built. Thousands of structures burned. Math don’t add without restock. And there’s your problem.
As grim as the outlook for rebuilding appears to be – apart from the question of whether anyone should be living in such hazardous areas – at least I haven’t heard any mention of whether archaeological values need to be considered before any ground disturbance can occur.
This has been a major factor in the pathetically slow pace of rebuilding the town of Lytton, British Columbia, after its June 2021 incineration.
Provincial mandates require archaeological surveys of every affected property, and individual homeowners are on the hook for what can be tens of thousands in extra costs.
Some coverage:
– a recent appeal from the Mayor of Lytton Bureaucratic delays creating significant obstacles to rebuilding Lytton
– Lytton residents say archaeology work the latest roadblock to rebuilding efforts
– Three years after wildfire wiped out Lytton, residents can’t rebuild due to costly archeological digs
Regarding this specific: “the big reservoir in the Palisades was offline for repairs (not negligently — this is supposed to be the rainy season)”:
“Officials said that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed since about February for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades for nearly a year.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline
From what I can tell, this is begin regarded as a “dog ate my homework” level excuse. Yes, there may have been repairs needed. But why nearly a year for a critical supply? Why no temporary fix?
Exactly. I had those same questions, and it seems many others do too.
My town, Southern Oregon, lost 2,700 hundred structures in the FEMA Fire Disaster, Almeda Fire., era October 2020. The FEMA trailers and camping trailers are just a block away, still. Much rebuilding has been done, yet the fire scar in my town, in the urban interface (tiny town) is quite unsightly. I survived upright by 4 homes. Rebuilding has taken place, SFR, and huge, (tiny town) three story mega apartments. We have a huge community of agriculture workers who have been instrumental in moving things along, at the City Council, Mayor level. I know some, building trades, planning wise. Spent a decade fire fighting, era of the Rogue Hot Shots. Time flies, I grow old and look out the window, like a kat. (Note spelling) ❤️🐴🧲