In Yugoslavia, in 1969, one of the biggest earthquakes occurred, destroying several cities. After that, the country’s leaders decided to change building codes. Even today, although Yugoslavia no longer exists, the countries that adopted those codes have homes capable of withstanding earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale.
My main point is that if we face major natural disasters, we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy insurance and rebuild later?
This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced right to provide that incentive.
The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble someone else can rebuild your house and it might be cheaper.
These wildfires produce surprisingly few deaths.
Did you know the most destructive wildfire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire, destroyed 19,000 buildings but only caused 85 deaths? [1]
[1] https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/cli...
Yes of course, but everything in life is a risk trade off. Presumably the person you’re replying to understands that.
How about the cost of your life? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.
Building to protect occupants and building to make the structure salvageable afterwards may be two different goals. Think crumple zones in cars.
This is not a good analogy.
Crumple zones in cars exist under the assumption that they will not be occupied by humans. In a house, on the other hand, any place could have a person inside of it during an earthquake, meaning that basically the entire house would need to stand to avoid any human being hurt.
I'm not an architect and don't live in an earthquake zone, but I was under the impression that wooden homes flex in earthquakes and if and when they do fall on you, do less damage than concrete homes which are stiff up until a point and then crack and fall.
So the human surviving may come at the cost of more houses collapsing.
Can personally confirm. Wooden houses do flex and often survive unscathed. The only major damage is usually due to any masonry attached to the house (see: chimney) or the house moving off of the foundation (see: before ties were in the building code).
It absolutely happens in steel and concrete construction in earthquake loading, when loading past the smaller earthquakes.
Plastic/non-linear deformation is intended in shear panels of steel connections and the core of well confined concrete beams/columns. The idea is to provide a lot of energy damping due to the nonlinear nature of the f*D hysteresis curve. This works long enough for the earthquake to go away and the people to get out of the building, at which point, you need a new building but hopefully no one has died.
Nice point. Still, in wast majority of cases, house keeps standing -> habitant survival chance goes up.
Cars being on the move, makes that distinction much much more relevant
For inhabitant survival a sifficient goal is something like “remains structurally intact for ~30 minutes after the end of the earthquake”. Which is significantly leas than is required for staying habitable
Makes sense.
I was fixating on the opposition of goals in the car (if car doesn’t bend/deform, then death risk increases).
We were speaking in the context of fires previously - in which case it's usually more about preserving the neighbourhood and land than anything else, you have to evacuate regardless.
Earthquakes are different and you'd need a house that stood anyway (though I'd guess most houses don't have a problem with earthquakes insofar as not collapsing on inhabitants, though they'd probably be damaged)
Not true. In the 2023 earthquake in Turkey 10s of thousands of apartment buildings collapsed. Official death toll is 60k or so but it's widely known that the actual number is at least twice that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkey%E2%80%93Syria_ea...
Loss of life from fire and earthquake isnt really high enough to be a concern. This is primarily a cost and inconvenience question.
Maybe be there is no longer "cheap" and that's the issue
I don't understand the downvote. I think this hit the nail on its head.
People whine about insurances pulling out. All they want is for somebody else to pay for their risk. It's their choice to live in that area, they should bear the consequences. It's not like it is or has ever been a secret. Climate change is known for decades now. Many people just chose not to "believe" in it. Well, their choice, but now that sh* hits the fan, they shouldn't come whine that everything gets sprayed with poo.
But this cuts both ways. The insurers chose to provide their services in the area for the amount of money agreed upon. If anyone was more aware of the risks and probabilities, it's them.
Why do they get to pull out now when it's time to hold their end of the contract?
That depends on what you mean with "pull out". Typically you pay a premium and that means you are insured for a certain period. A year or so.
Everybody who is insured at the moment of course needs to be paid by the insurance under the terms they had agreed to. The insurances should not be allowed to "pull out" of this responsibility.
But what about the next year? If no insurance wants to offer you another term, especially not for those same conditions, then it's their choice to "pull out" in that sense.
On the other hand, suddenly not offering cover at all is a problem for people who have established interests in a property.
I can see an argument for not writing new policies in an area. But I can also make an argument for allowing existing policyholders to renew -- maybe not at the previous rate, but at an appropriate rate for the risk.
As a matter of public policy, we ought to match the risk put on a homeowner with a mortgage by the bank with the risk assumed by the insurer when the homeowner pays their policies. Not let the insurance company lay the risk on the homeowner if they notice the risk has gone up before the loss is realised.
Alternatively, we need to start treating buildings insurance more like (UK) life cover: I took out decreasing life insurance when I took out my mortgage, it'll pay off the mortgage if I die. The amount of cover goes down every year to roughly match me paying off my mortgage. No matter what happens to my health in the meantime, if I keep paying the premiums then I keep the cover -- even if I wouldn't qualify for new cover.
Or maybe we need to say that if an insurance company declines to renew because they think the risk has risen too much, the customer should be allowed to claim on the expiring policy even if the house is still standing, because it's obviously worthless, and it's obviously due to a risk that was covered by the policy.
If you want a longer reinsurance term, it needed to be agreed to upfront. I'd guess insurance companies are well aware of the risks of writing long-term policies and so don't usually offer them. That being said, your comparison to term life insurance is quite apt - I wonder if such insurance policies actually exist. I would guess they'd cost more than a yearly renewing policy, but who knows.
Your other proposals as extensions to yearly terms certainly go too far. Annual renewal policies are commonplace, and it should be well understood that there's no obligation on any party to continue it.
Oh, definitely. At least not without a lot of discussion around how much the extra insurance would have cost. I'm not in a position to implement it either :).
If we're going to have state intervention though (and it seems at least under suggestion, I've no idea how seriously, in CA) then rather than an insurer of last resort, we (or rather they) should consider what they actually want from their insurance.
There are specialty insurance companies that will underwrite almost anything, for any duration, for a high enough fee.
But if the state regulator sets a maximum cap they wouldn’t be allowed to…
California law limits how high the insurance companies can charge for premiums. Did that law or those limits exist when they started offering coverage in the area?
Maybe they didn't, and then the law or limits were imposed at a time when the insurance companies needed to increase the premiums to match the new risk. But if the law prevents them, then they have no other choice but to pull out. Why would they as a business stay if the risk is to great for the premiums they are allowed to charge? They certainly are not obligated to stay.
Please do let me know where I can live that is guaranteed to be safe from unexpected natural disaster.
Not a guarantee, but it appears there's a nearly 200x difference between the most dangerous and the safest countries in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_d...
In your mind, probably.
More seriously, nowhere of course, but if the risk is manageable (a fluffy term to mean predictable and not too high) then you'll find an insurance that covers you. Those natural conditions are dynamic though, so where such insurance is available can be (and is) subject to change. Predictably so. Nobody will provide you with the same car insurance when your car is new compared to 40 years later (same car). Things change. If you don't want your insurance to change, negotiate a 40-year term. Forcing them is nuts.
Maybe people don't like to restart their lives like that if it's avoidable, even if it costs more.
Only you also take into account your cheap home will likely accelerate the problem. Which never happens.
Hah financialization strikes again. Try explaining this to a person from a third world country, they would say "what are you talking about". Also they would have better health care than your average American.
> As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
"Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones."
Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc.
Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.
(Recently there was a major public building collapse in Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on corruption and caused massive protests.)
What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.
Not really. Old concrete cannopy collapsed. It was minimally modified as part of station reconstruction by adding some glass panels, but cannopy itself and its suspension beams were not rebuilt. It's not clear at this point whether this modification was responsible for collapse, but what is clear is that old cannopy and beams were not even inspected during this renovation. That's a major blunder which lead to loss of 15 lives, and main reason for that is systematic corruption where minimal work is performed while full price is billed by private companies close to rulling party.
Reading up on this a bit, it seems it was the 1963 earthquake that precipitated the change in building regulations? The 1969 one seemed comparatively mild(?)
> Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
It's all considered disposable, much like strip malls.
Yeah, I'm surprised that the damages of the LA fire occurred, because it was known beforehand that California had a fire problem (and also have an earthquake problem I think).
I'm here in Eastern Europe and our buildings can withstand a lot of things.
> we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
As an European, it baffles me as well.
If this doesn't happen to "cheap" homes here, why does it happen in California, to rich people's houses?
All the properties that survived in those LA neighborhoods all had some pretty basic and intentional fire resistance
I’m curious about how many others did that burned down too
But so far the ones highlighted had super obvious mitigations that its astounding to see were not more common
The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance.
When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.
> Gov. Gavin Newsom just released part of his solution to California’s home insurance crisis, and it boils down to a push to allow carriers to move faster to raise rates.
> In most cases, the Department of Insurance would be required to act on an insurance carrier’s rate request within 60 days, unless extensions are necessary.
> The proposed bill expedites the timelines laid out in Proposition 103, which requires insurance companies to have changes approved by the Department of Insurance and dictates how quickly the department must act on change requests.
> Critics fear that shortening approval timelines will allow insurance companies to jack-up premiums without room for public appeals and sufficient review by the Department of Insurance.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/30/california-insurance-crisi...
> The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance.
Obviously. Such a move by the government is just plain stupid.
> When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.
No need to overgeneralize. Not every stupid move is immediately "socialism" and everything smart is "capitalism". It's obvious to every socialist that this move was stupid. In contrast, it's pretty clear that a purely market-based health system costs lives. Nobody is claiming though that "whenever societies dabble in capitalism it results in deaths". Pick your optimization target and then the right tool to reach that target. Sometimes that tool is to let prices regulate risk, sometimes it is laws to regulate risk, and sometimes it's something else entirely.
> it's pretty clear that a purely market-based health system costs lives.
That was literally the take about insurance. And here we are, again.
> It's obvious to every socialist that this move was stupid
Is it? Or is this post hoc rationalization? I really dislike playing the “both sides” card, even for a moment, but it’s hard to deny that there are questionable takes on both ends.
I agree with you that not every regulation equates to socialism, and it’s ridiculous to claim it is. However, the narrative of “insurance companies bad” is incredibly prevalent among left-leaning perspectives, and any regulation around insurance premiums tends to be automatically celebrated as a clear victory.
Ironically (because it's a free market argument), it’s a not-uncommon argument that if insurance companies can’t provide their services for no more than some arbitrarily-decided amount annually, they’re being inefficient or greedy and should go bankrupt and let a new competitor take the market.
> the narrative of “insurance companies bad” is incredibly prevalent among left-leaning perspectives,
Perhaps it is, I don't have enough insight to know. It's obvious (to me) that this is clearly over-simplifying things.
> Ironically (because it's a free market argument), it’s a not-uncommon argument that if insurance companies can’t provide their services for no more than some arbitrarily-decided amount annually, they’re being inefficient or greedy and should go bankrupt and let a new competitor take the market.
Is it actually a free market argument? Maybe it's not possible to provide that service at that price point. I'd think that the free market argument is that the price is already as low as possible, otherwise such a competitor would already exist and have outcompeted everybody. Such an argument has other issues though, like inertia, scaling effects, price-fixing and such, all of which are working against a free market though. Which is why a truly free market needs regulation, otherwise it ceases to be free.
> I really dislike playing the “both sides” card, even for a moment
Honest question: Why? I've found that reality is complicated. It's rare to find saints on "one side" and "pure evil" on the other. The truth is often times that there are many issues, many interests, many world views, and typically even more than two sides. Uncovering the truth usually requires avoiding partisanship and have an open mind about understanding the interests of every involved party. That necessarily leads to "both sides" arguments. Not common in hyper-polarized discourses, unfortunately.
> Perhaps it is, I don't have enough insight to know.
You can spot it in this post, too.
> Is it actually a free market argument?
The argument is:
Large corporation A offers service B at price $C. $C is an extravagant amount, and is due to the greed and inefficiencies of A. A can only charge $C because of regulatory capture, or using capital to elbow out upstarts, or whatever other argument you want to assume (ie it's not a truly free market).
If A should leave the market (forcibly or not), company D can now flourish by offering B at $E, where $E is much less than $C. Because D doesn't have the inefficiencies and greed of A, everyone profits.
Seems like a pretty standard "free markets/Econ 101" argument to me.
> Honest question: Why?
Frequently it’s nothing more than a flimsy pretext for cowardice, a lack of knowledge, or simple indifference.
I don't disagree with you, many topics are complex. Generally though, people dislike those who refuse to take a stance even if it's a weakly-held one (thus Machiavelli's famous advice).
Ah yes. Socialism is when intervention and subsidies.
The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage. Apparently California has been neglecting those two problems for decades.
The problem is the houses.
In lots of pictures from LA, there are green trees right beside burned out houses. The video in this NYT article is a great example: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/15/us/los-angeles-wildf...
One of the biggest problems are vents in the eves. Typically these vents have a single screen with a coarse mesh. Embers from fires easily pass through these vents, land on a surface, and start a fire.
Replacing the one coarse mesh with two or more layers of fine mesh significantly reduces the odds of an ember getting into the house.
This is a trivial improvement that dramatically increases survivability.
The real problem is the FIRE. The houses could be made fire-resistant, but making houses to be fire-resistant is going to be more expensive than managing the forests to reduce wildfires and storing more water. I don't believe that a tiny screen is going to make this huge difference you think it is. These fires are HOT and don't just catch houses on fire with little embers. They are hot enough to set wood and plastic on fire from a pretty good distance away. Green trees don't easily burn because of their high water content. Trees have evolved to survive fires as well.
It could also be helped by not building houses out of cardboard.
The amount of walls in Europe that you could punch a wall into is low enough that you shouldnt try.
And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and they would fall down.
I'm in Christchurch, 6.2 Earthquake in 2011 and wooden framed houses dealt with it pretty good - they flex - lots of the houses survived and are still used.
Just about anything old and bricky was a deathtrap (fortunately many were unoccupied because condemned after nearby 2010 Earthquake).
We had some earthquakes before, I was on the 10th level, you could feel the house "flex" in a way. Nothing happened and it's been standing there since Soviet Union or longer (obviously with maintenance).
We don't get many earthquakes here though, we do get storm but it doesn't cause power outage at all.
And considering most of Europe is basically low risk territory, it makes sense?
Afaik, only Turkey and a small part of the Balkans is considered earthquake territory. And there's no fracking in Europe to induce minor manmade earthquakes either.
Some parts of Italy are at earthquake risk https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...
Despite being hit by earthquakes more often than other parts of Europe, usually only buildings and houses not built up to standard or old ones crumble, other buildings just shake and that's it. Of course, I do not know the exact risk of earthquakes in California and their intensity, but it's definitely possible to build earthquake resistant brick buildings
> And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and they would fall down.
In areas where we don't have earthquakes, yeah, what's the problem?
I think the problem is suggest that an earthquake zone's fire problems would be solved by building houses like they do in a non-earthquake zone
Frankly, this is just an ignorant take. Put Twitter/Elon Musk down for a bit. The Palisades Fire was not a forest fire. Please dispel your myths and learn what 60-80 mph winds, sometimes 100 mph gusts, can do.
While having above ground power lines
While having unmanaged accumulated flammable brush
While having an empty reservoir under repair
While having the public water source unable to maintain water pressure for multiple hydrant usage
While having too few fire fighters dispatched in the area anyway
While having houses made out of wood
is it an ignorant take when the houses not made out of wood with their own watersource were able to withstand 100mph wind gusts and firestorm? it really really makes everyone else look ignorant
All of those are a result of American's favorite hobby though, not maintaining infrastructure, because ooh no taxes. LA has not raised enough revenue for decades it seems. The amount of pot holes in even the most expensive neighborhoods was already to damn high.
At some point the US really needs to do bit of cultural reform so they can start paying for all that low density development and the costs associated with it. So stuff can actually be maintained.
LA and California as a whole have some of the highest taxes in the nation, along with the most mild climate. The amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in California is stunning. The problem is mismanagement above all, not a lack of funds (at least in this case).
> LA and California as a whole have some of the highest taxes in the nation
The City of LA has a lower per capita tax revenue than most large Texan and southern cities, largely due to property tax caps.
Frankly, everyone has been warning about the risk for years. The fire started as a forest fire (whether it was arson or not), and was anticipated by insurance companies who dropped policies on thousands of people in the months leading up to this. The winds are a big problem of course, but if there were not so many acres of kindling around the city along with insufficient water reservoirs, then a fire like this could not spread as easily as it did. I will give you that the fire could have still happened and been bad either way, but insurance people who literally study this stuff for a living and have skin in the game knew it was likely to get out of control well in advance.
In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet.
If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the footprint of the building rather than let it 'slide off' to set fire to the property on the other side of the street.
The parapet requirement did not extend to towns outside London, which makes me wonder why.
The answer to that is to see what goes on in the USA. After a natural disaster they just pick themselves up and keep going. Florida was obliterated in 2024 but nobody cared after a fortnight. Same with the current wild fires, nobody will care next week, it will be forgotten, even though having one's home destroyed might be considered deeply traumatic.
I think that the key to change is to not have too many natural disasters, ideally nobody has living memory of the last fire/flood/earthquake/pandemic/alien invasion/plague of locusts so that there is no point of reference or 'compassion fatigue'. Only then can there be a fair expectation of political will and the possibility of change.
> Florida was obliterated in 2024
That’s an huge exaggeration. FL was not obliterated in 2024.
Stats:
Total storms 18
Hurricanes 11
Major hurricanes (Cat. 3+) 5
Total fatalities 401
Total damage $128.072 billion
(Third-costliest tropical cyclone season on record)
That damage is like 10% of Florida’s GDP.
That’s absolutely nuts.
It’s also a lot worse than the pure numbers suggest because the damage here is taking away actual built up stock, so capacity for generating future GDP. And the GDP in Florida includes a lot of economic activity used to rebuild after past damage.
And all of this without Miami even being flooded out of existence. Miami can’t even build dikes due to the porous ground it’s built on.
The weird part of living near the tropics is we all look at that and go "not too bad a hurricane season". Everyone not-from-the-tropics stares at your list in horror.
I forgot that any exaggeration is not allowed on HN!
128 billion dollars is equivalent to 200,000 homes, or even more, which does not represent total obliteration, however, if that level of devastation happened in the UK, the only comparison would be what the Luftwaffe did during WW2.
> 128 billion dollars is equivalent to 200,000 homes, or even more, which does not represent total obliteration,
As of 2023, FL has over 10.4 million homes.
> however, if that level of devastation happened in the UK, the only comparison would be what the Luftwaffe did during WW2.
If you are referring to The Blitz, the numbers I have access to is that over 1.1 million homes and flats were destroyed in London alone.
> ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...]
Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat them.
Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people today have never come across an iron lung, which is a testament to medical technology, but it means some silly opinions get way more traction than they should.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
Yours is an interesting point as I am now questioning:
> "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
I have expressed that idea with different attribution before now, but, on reflection, it is a 'trite quote' that can be trotted out far too easily!