With much of California, Texas and Florida property damage is concentrated where folks built where they shouldn’t have [1]. (At times nudged on by subsidised insurance [2].)
Is that true in this case, too? (Being so close to LA, it doesn’t strike me that it could be.) If not, is my general thesis off?
Unfortunately there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable. The PNW also burns regularly now, never mind the enormous earthquake looming under us that we're terribly unprepared for. Even the northeast is starting to get buried in smoke in the summer and hit by storms like Hurricane Sandy. Tornado Alley knocks out much of the midwest. What's left of the US? Desert and mountains?
This has been well-studied by disaster recovery and business continuity boffins. There are sites that are known to be (1) effectively disaster-free, whether earthquakes, severe weather, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, flooding, etc, and (2) sufficiently connected to commerce and the economy that you can reasonably build and fully operate a business from there. Climate change has relatively little impact on the suitability of these sites, both in theory and in terms of modeled scenarios.
The two cities I’ve seen most commonly used for these purposes are San Antonio and Salt Lake City. Phoenix and Las Vegas are also sometimes used. Most of the sites are in the western US away from the coasts. I believe parts of the upper midwest are also sometimes used for these purposes, though these areas have to contend with extreme cold (which is more difficult to deal with than extreme heat).
Phoenix and Las Vegas may be a great place for a secondary data center. But for humans, they are very vulnerable to water shortages, and power outages during the summer can be deadly. I have seen them referred to as places people weren't meant to live, more than once.
Nobody wants to live here, but Ohio is pretty safe. There are tornadoes but they're very localized and not common. Really not much else to worry about, aside from being in Ohio of course.
South Texas? We lived in San Antonio for last 5 years, and the weather does not really get extreme. Well you get consecutive weeks of 105-110 highs in summer. But it is far enough from the gulf coast so no hurricanes, and apart from the 2021 snowpocalypse, we didn't get any extreme weather. Austin is also okay. If you get too far north up to Dallas you start to get the snowstorms and tornadoes though.
Phoenix and Tucson are pretty mild for disasters. There are sometimes violent storms in the late summer but nothing that ever rises to the level of requiring evacuation as far as I know.
On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.
Yea, the potential disasters in the south west are mostly man-made in the sense of underinvesting in the electrical grid to make sure the months of 100+ degree high temps don't kill you, or a snap freeze in the winter doesn't take down power either.
The lack of a real need for natural disaster planning feels like it's left local governance complacent about issues that would barely be a problem anywhere else. I know folks in Dallas, Houston, and Austin who have been without power and water longer from a few hours of freezing rain than folks in Florida that got direct hit with a Cat 4 hurricane. There's certainly disasters that you can only do so much prep for, but there's rigor that comes with having to prep for something that generally helps you not totally fall apart when more minor stuff happens.
I took a look at a map of the Eaton fire and its evacuation area and warning area, then looked up several houses for sale in those areas on Redfin. Redfin includes a section that lists environmental risks.
In the northern parts of Altadena it says the fire risk is 33% chance of a fire within the next 30 years. Going south toward Pasadena it gets lower. At the southern parts of the evacuation zone I'm seeing it mostly range from "minimal" to numbers under 1%. "Minimal" is the category for the places with the least risk, and is described as "Unlikely to be in a wildfire in the next 30 years".
In the warning zone south of that, which looks like to goes south to the 210, so far all I've found is "Minimal".
Many of these houses are decades old and were built in areas that weren't fire risks when the houses were built; Altadena had the opposite problem: it generally received a lot of rain so people were concerned about flooding and mudslides and so a lot of the infrastructure is designed to maximize the channeled flow of water down the hillsides.
Also, a lot of the houses burning in the Eaton fire (especially in Altadena) are surrounded by miles of development, but very-low-humidity hurricane-strength Santa Ana wind gusts can carry (and keep alive) burning embers for miles.
LA is surrounded by high fire risk areas. The wildfire risk is also really unpredictable. The rule of thumb is the closer you are to the beach, the lower the risk.
We were looking to buy a house in Orange or Anaheim Hills because those areas are comparatively affordable. But after the airport fire we steered clear. I took a fire insurance quote on an Orange property, their model says the fire risk is 4 on a scale of 15, but they treat it like 10 because the variance is too high.
My sister lives in Anaheim Hills. A couple years ago a brush fire burned right up to the property line behind her house. Fortunately her house was undamaged. Last year the insurance company declined to renew her policy. I think you made a wise choice to avoid that area.
I guess so. I hope your sister is doing alright. Nobody wanted to insure properties in Orange or Anaheim Hills for me either, only option was to get calfair policy. We ended up buying in Aliso Viejo.
To start with the last first, I would argue your general (and not uncommon) thesis is off in one key respect: it's not primarily (though in some percentage it may be) a matter of people building where they shouldn't have per se, but that they built what they shouldn't have where they did. Ie, it's 100% feasible as a matter of architecture/engineering/construction to build a structure that will shrug off a Cat 5 hurricane including storm surge. And while it adds a real premium, it's also not at some impossible cost either. People have done it, and it works. Same with most other natural disasters. It's "only" a matter of cost and standards. It's worth noting too in many cases societies have indeed done exactly that, like with earthquakes, or in areas of high risk tornadoes. Building standards have been set to match the risk. There is plenty of low hanging fruit that can severely diminish the impact of a lot of the disasters causing massive damage if it's just standard upfront.
Also, there's the complete polar opposite approach: build something "disposable". In the "old days" (including with my extended family) there was a style of "summer camp" for example that was ultra simple. Some small single floor deal, uninsulated, maybe some power but often not even that, composting/pit toilet, some simple wood furniture, that's it. People bring their own everything, be there for a few weeks/months a year, and then go home. Such a structure can't survive much of anything but that doesn't matter because it's so cheap, if it burns/blows down/washes away once every 5 years or whatever so be it. It's a problem though when people convert what should be cheap into some full fledged thing, but then don't take environment into account.
I think this distinction is super important, because a lot of these places are beautiful and desirable much of the time, and a blanket "no you shouldn't build there ever" isn't likely to be heeded and does not get to the root actual problem, which is that the true costs of doing so aren't being priced in. The reasons for that distortion are myriad, but that's the actual issue. I think it's much more productive and convincing to the public to say "it's fine to build where you like, but it's not fine to hit other people up for money to cover it or cause unreasonable costs to safety services/environmental damage (homes burning or floating away means massive pollution), you just need be responsible in how you build."
FWIW to specifics:
>With much of California, Texas and Florida it seems pretty clear people built where they shouldn’t have.
In some cases sure but in others I guess it'd be reasonable to say that things built long enough before anthropogenic global warming really kicked off can't be reasonably blamed for that, particularly if they correct gauged the risk for themselves (ie, someone built something 50 years ago as a life thing and it did indeed last the remaining 40 years of their life, well you can't really say they got it wrong and built it wrong or it's still their problem). What is bad though is new stuff getting built or worst of all things getting REbuilt after destruction but not to updated standards each time.
I never experienced an earthquake, in Tokyo, but those who have, say that the buildings wave around like drunk dancers.
Things fall off of shelves, but the buildings seem to come out OK.
The Japanese are hard core about building standards.
Compared to other nations (deliberately not gonna name them), that have corruption problems, as well as frequent earthquakes, you always have a bunch of buildings fall down, there's a surge of anger, a couple of unpopular scapegoats get jailed, then, it happens again, the next time.
I have a bunch of friends in the LA area. So far, none of them have been in the line of [literal] fire, but everyone is freaking out. These fires are under no control, whatsoever.
>The Japanese are hard core about building standards.
Note that this has been built on their fair share of blood and tears[1].
Japan gloated in the wakes of the 1989 Loma Prieta[2] and 1994 Northridge[3] earthquakes that such structural destruction[3][4] would be impossible for them, but then they got their gloating ass burned off.[6]
Japan has been dead fucking serious about earthquake measures ever since, never taking anything for granted and certainly never ever pretending they are kings of the earthquake world anymore.
David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was quoted as saying “It's hard to bullshit the ocean. It's not listening, you know what I mean.” True for wildfires under windy conditions as well. Probably the reason why the word “wildfire” in American English is used as a simile to refer to any fast, destructive, uncontrolled phenomenon, appearing back when those earlier generations lived though them without modern firefighting tech. Your friends’ go-to attack and defense strategies, perhaps their entire realities, are just words…but wildfires have no online presence and can’t read. Umm, earthquakes don’t read either.
Side note: modern media has used exaggeration and hype to make a myriad of small or remote things sound scary. Wildfires are actually scary…what words do we use to describe the clear and present threat of death within minutes when the media has described minor inconveniences as “horrors” and “catastrophes”? People today should refamiliarize themselves with the story of the “boy who cried wolf”.
The problem with fireproofing one building in a fire-prone area is that neighboring buildings that aren't fireproof will build, and they will release toxic substances that make your fireproof building toxic.
Right; and houses release those toxic fumes when they're on fire. If poisoning other structures with your house fire was an actionable tort, insurance would incentivize owners (and builders) to make houses that were less likely to catch on fire and poison others, and/or find less toxic building materials and furnishings.
Fireproof to what level? Pretty much anything will burn if you get it hot enough. The cost will depend on what level of fire resistance you want to target.
Presumably that property is worth more in the first place. Damage by value is a poor metric to use here. Aside from that is there any indication that the fires occur because people "build where they shouldn't have?" Or is it just the case that more "value" is destroyed when a fire eventually reaches them?
Your thesis is way off, and people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled. And really, we still don’t know how to or can’t politically manage wildfires well.
Part of climate change is that this man-induced change is making previously hospitable areas much less so.
> people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled
Agree on Palisades. My original thesis is about new construction in Florida and Houston and in e.g. the middle of the California woods. That is settlement done when we did know the risks.
Deserts are generally uninhabitable by their very nature, but these persistent fires are primarily due to lack of proper underbrush care and other preventative measures.
California fires are a classic case of "We tried nothing and we're out of ideas!", speaking as a former Californian I honestly think the faster solution at this point is for enough of the state to burn down that pretending the problem doesn't exist is no longer good enough.
A lot of the risk in the high desert of the western US is the ubiquitous sagebrush. Old growth sagebrush is basically a short tree and it burns pretty easily and very hot (excellent wood for grilling though). Fortunately, the large plants of the high desert (sagebrush, juniper, etc) grow very slowly.
When lightning or people start a fire in the desert, both relatively rare, they tend to be limited by two things. First, if areas that have been burned out sometime in the last century or two, the plants haven’t grown back enough to really support a proper wildfire, so it is easier to contain. Prior burns are a natural firebreak and they last a really long time. Second, the high desert of the US is an active volcanic province. There are fresh basalt flows everywhere, some less than a thousand years old, in the terrain. It takes tens of thousands of years for these to support enough plant life to carry a burn. These natural barriers place limits on where they can go and how far they can get.
The desert does have fires but they tend to be muted and often self-limiting because large contiguous regions of dense fuel aren’t as common.
Deserts absolutely have wildfires, and are even pretty common in California deserts. The second largest fire in the state for 2023 was the York Fire in the Mojave Desert[0]. There have been many other sizable desert fires in recent years as well.
As with many other landscapes, climate change, drought, and aquifer depletion have made deserts increasingly vulnerable to large wildfires.
Lightning strikes and humans are probably the most common causes for fires in the desert.
Most desert areas in the US are a lot more lush than the blank sand dunes many people think of as desert. Usually there are a lot of bushes and grasses, and higher elevations can pine, juniper, oak, and other trees.
But PJ high desert areas don’t have the same level of destructive wildfires as, say, the Ponderosa pines found at higher elevations or cottonwood bosques. My impression is the fire load per acre in PJ is much lower and the fires are just not destructive. Adobe/masonry construction probably helps too, as does lower density urbanization. Probably easier to fight such fires too. (Limited experience)
I'm speaking of the reality of man. The path of least resistance will be the path that is taken, and so far it (apparently) makes more sense to cry "Climate Change!" than actually do something about preventing these fires.
If it takes enough of the state burning down for another path to gain lesser resistance, then so be it. That is certainly going to happen if California keeps going down the same path. I'm certainly not pleased that a piece of my childhood is burning down in unprecedented terms.
Is that true in this case, too? (Being so close to LA, it doesn’t strike me that it could be.) If not, is my general thesis off?
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/06/1204923950/arizona-california...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...