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Thousands of Los Angeles homeowners were dropped by their insurers before the Palisades Fire
(www.cbsnews.com)
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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This is starting to feel more and more like a planned property grab.
I think it's much simpler honestly: fires like these have been happening every year in California for the past hmm... at least 5 years, maybe more. Insurances are simply catching on and doing what any for-profit company would do in this situation, avoid losing money.
Wildfires are part of the ecology for basically the whole state. Most of the native plants here have evolved to actually depend on and co-exist with routine fire. It's completely normal and natural for this state to burn. The problem is that for 100 years we decided that it should never ever burn at all, so there were many areas of the state that should have burned at least once every ten years that sat there and accumulated unnatural amounts of growth and fuel for ten times that long. So, when we got hit with a megadrought and a fire finally did happen in those places, it was a crazy slate-wiped fire that nothing survived instead of a manageable brush fire that plenty of things would grow back from next year.
Now, is it all bad land management? No, a bunch of shit came together at once to make this message:
California was caught in a mega drought for the better part of a decade and we're still years from our groundwater returning to where it was before the drought.
The Japanese pine beetle killed a lot of pine trees, and that's most of what there is in the Sierra range (yes, there are some oaks and other things, but, well, we're getting there, hold on). So many trees died where they stood that dealing with them all was a nearly impossible task, and beetle-killed wood can't really be used for anything (don't ask me why, but when I was wondering why nobody had come to get all this basically free wood just laying around, that was the answer I got). So, you had huge, huge stands of beetle-kill just standing there, getting drier and drier, waiting for a spark.
The drought also severely dried out lots of other vegetation. There's people I know in the Sierra who said they didn't even have to season their fresh-cut wood. Just chuck it right in the fire, no problem.
Fucking PG&E decided they didn't need to follow best practices because that costs money and spending the money your consumers pay you on stuff that isn't bullshit makes PG&E a sad panda. So, they stopped cutting around their power lines. As someone who partly grew up in the southeast US, this fucking melted my brain. Georgia's a pretty wet, green state, and Georgia Power clear cuts everything down to shin height for probably 50 meters to either side of their transmission lines. Humid-ass Georgia decided they needed it, but we're totally fine to skip it in the Phoenix state, yeah, that makes sense.
So, is climate change to blame? Mostly, yes, climate change is a big, big part of why we're here. Hotter, drier weather with shorter, more intense rain delivery means that the vegetation gets dry faster and stays dry. It means there's less water to fight fires with. That said, it's not the whole picture. There's other ways we could be doing stuff better.
PG&E absolutely should have faced criminal charges for pulling that... I remember hearing it was also equipment maintenance, which the state even gave them the money to do, and they just gave it to their shareholders as dividends instead
Definitely more than 5 years. I still remember some fires back in 2009 that we're jumping the freeways and I had to wait over a day and travel almost triple the amount of time to make it back home while being worried the whole time that my family's house would burn down.
Yeah I said at least 5 years, cause I haven't been here forever, and also it seems they're getting worse in the last few years, though maybe that's just my biased perception.
There was a wildfire in the area last month. A couple years ago, a wildfire burned down a bunch of Malibu, a few miles away. I would be very surprised if wildfires in the area stop happening.
I think that maybe the most-reasonable solution is for insurers to just ramp rates way up unless a home is built to be extremely fire-resistant -- just assume that there are going to be wildfires that dump embers in the area sooner or later, and that if your home isn't constrained such that it is able to withstand being showered with embers without going up in flames, that it's going to be insanely costly to insure, because it's likely to burn sooner or later.
Insurance companies wanted to raise rates... The insurance commissioner said no. So a lot are leaving.
Same for cars, getting a lot harder to find car insurance in Cali was well.
Even if one specific house is a concrete bunker, if it's in the middle of normal homes, the bunker still faces potentially 1000 degree temperatures from surrounding homes, and shit's going to burn.
You could pave everything; put in some 100-yard paved firebreaks; who know what else. Or you could just accept that there's going to be a lot of climate refugees fleeing high risk US states. All the heads-in-sand people thinking it was just Tuvalu and Kiribati at risk going to wake up and find out it's LA and Miami, too.
Having a house next door burn doesn't entail that your house burns. You can see video from this fire of people walking around next to houses on fire -- they aren't spontaneously combusting. Heck, I had a relative who had exactly the not-burn thing happen to them in this fire -- the house next door burned down, but theirs didn't. And it's not hard to see that that has to be the case, or once one house in a city burns, the whole rest of the city would too. That didn't happen even in this fire, or there wouldn't be a Los Angeles left.
You can constrain how your house is built. You can have one of those counter-wildfire systems that has large tanks of water kept on-site and a generator-driven system that sprays it out over the property in a fire. I'm sure that there are others. They aren't necessarily cheap and some aren't pretty, but you can do buildings that can pull though fires.
Yeah, one house on fire next to you is probably fine, although I've seen that melt the siding off neighbors. All the houses on your block, especially when those houses are only separated by 6 feet, is a completely different situation.
The problem is that it just makes more financial sense to just not insure the area. The property itself is wildly expensive and then the owners are sure to lawyer up if they don’t get exactly what they want. Makes more sense to just not issue policies.
There is always going to be some price at which it makes sense for an insurer to insure a property, as long as they are not restricted in what price they can charge.
They are restricted. California has an insurance commissioner who has to approve any rate increases. It’s probably easier to stop insuring then to get the rates up to the profitability margin their risk models are suggesting are appropriate.
Malibu hills fires happened almost every year 20 years ago. Maybe not in areas with homes but it's hardly surprising from the outside looking in. Still pity the folks.
Unfortunately whether intentional or not I think it’ll play out that way specifically for those who could not afford, with time and money, to re-build their homes and buy a new place to live.
For example, parts of Altadena, CA were exempt from redlining, so there is a majority black and brown homeowners in certain neighborhoods who have owned their homes for many years. They couldn’t afford their $1M+ house in today’s market. Insurance will pay them out, but there’s nowhere to live in Altadena now. Maybe some will lease while their home is being rebuilt, but I think many will cash out and buy a new home somewhere else, leaving a lot of opportunity for investors to buy up land and build for-profit housing.
Of course, we now know that insurance companies will not cover some of these properties so may not be a valuable investment, but the community will be forever changed, and I would be surprised if that didn’t include further gentrification.
What? How is it a property grab if no one can live there? Only the stupidest and/or richest people would buy an uninsurable home. You can't get a mortgage without insurance, because the banks want to make sure they still have an asset to repossess if you default. Even if you were that rich, why would you throw your money away on something that will almost certainly be destroyed, sooner rather than later, without a way to recoup any of the cost? If a company like Zillow comes in and snaps up all the uninsurable homes in these regions, they'll be declaring bankruptcy within 5 years.
Maybe? They're not sure if this guy is linked.
Warning: MSN link ahead:
Alleged Arsonist Arrested In Los Angeles Amid Deadly California Wildfires: What We Know
ETA: Also, 3 fires started all at once looks a little wonky in January.
Edit 2:
Any spark that wasn’t dealt with immediately during Santa Ana’s that severe (60-100 mph gusts, constant wind around 40 mph), and during a severe drought, AND with humidity below 20% was going to blow up.
It is wonky that it happened in January, because historically that’s when we’re getting rain, but that hasn’t happened this water year. For all practical purposes we’re still in the dry season.
Yeah, but they caught a guy with a torch blower trying to start fires. I don't know if it's arson or not. I hope not, this is horrific.
Yeah, it sounds like he is responsible probably for the Kenneth fire, which started after the winds had died down a bit. Still enough wind to kick it off (regular 20 mph gusts), but it wasn’t hurricane force winds like Tuesday when the Palisades and Eaton fires started. I’m skeptical that any arsonist is fire happy enough to also get clonked in the head by flying debris.
I can see why you're pretty confident, but I don't think you can be 100% confident that these weren't all started. We'll have to wait and see. They're usually pretty great about figuring out what happened.
That’s honestly really impressive. The majority of the evidence has been incinerated by thousand-degree fires and covered in sea water and firefighting foam by the time investigators get to it.
Not if their cameras were sent to the cloud before they were engulfed in flames.
I was thinking physical evidence, like accelerants, etc. If they did it in view of cameras, that’s obviously much easier to catch, lol.