6 ms·

the unspoken and incredibly politically toxic truth is that a lot of people's homes, including many whole towns, are simply at too high of a wildfire risk to co

the unspoken and incredibly politically toxic truth is that a lot of people's homes, including many whole towns, are simply at too high of a wildfire risk to continue existing. there is no price that makes them a good risk for an insurer, and the state would rather those people moved somewhere else because they don't have enough firefighting resources to protect all the outlying sprawl. a price cap on insurance means that properties in the urban cores should be able to continue to get policies, and properties in the woods will be essentially uninsurable. if you can reduce the number of houses being built in the woods, you can let a wildfire burn without having the bad press of losing so many homes.

civilized 3y ago
Have we considered whether standard best-practice wilderness management, like controlled burns, can address issues like this, or is that still ignored/dismissed?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  One of the big fires last year I heard about was a controlled burn that turned into an uncontrolled burn so I guess it is not being totally ignored.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- twoodfin 3y ago
  My understanding is that the current liability structure makes most potential controlled burns effectively impossible. I think you’d need an act of Congress to limit liability as long as certain easily justiciable standards were met.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  good topic but ugly truth behind it -- a US Interior agency near New Mexico had a scheduled controlled burn on the books.. apparently they can schedule things multiple years in advance.. but .. the drought got worse and covid hit. The department had personnel and morale problems.. lots of uncertainty.. they stalledxxxxx "waited patiently" for two more years as the drought got still worse but the documents describing physical risk were not updated. The Federal department executed the burn and it went wild, and is the largest fire in recorded history in that area now, taking out an entire town plus other structures and causing the evacuation of Los Alamos National Laboratories at the same time. you can find the details easily.. there is a 70 page "final report" from the agency perspective. This is reality.
  - swalling 3y ago
    The simple reality is that not only does human incompetence get in the way of safety here, but burns probably just aren't a very viable option. Historical controlled burns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...) worked because they happened frequently and kept fuel in check while encouraging trees that were resistant to or even dependent on low grade fires. Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however. Now we've also got massive areas of forest dieback due to climate-driven bark beetle outbreaks. Trees that do survive burns but are stressed by them are more vulnerable to pests, just like drought stress. https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/bark-beetles-and-climate-change-united-states https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/bark-beetles-and-climate... So controlled burns even done effectively may still result in unwanted tree dieback. A much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads, but this is also a nonstarter politically in many areas especially in National Parks. We are still maintaining this myth of virgin wilderness untouched by the hand of man. State and federal government simply isn't competent enough to handle this given the political realities in a democratic system. Basically what's going to happen is that the most vulnerable communities will get scorched out of existence, and we're just going to have to live with the impact of more wildfires until nature sorts itself out. Americans just can’t psychologically accept being told they don’t get to develop anywhere they want.
    - riversflow 3y ago
      > Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however. Yup! I live in the Sierras. Everyone in this thread talking about controlled burns needs to say "California has just spent a century pursuing a policy of fire suppression" a few times. The fuel loads are insane, these fires have been turning into giant firestorms with their own weather systems in a matter of 2 or 3 hours during the summer. I've watched it happen a few times, frightening. I suspect you can't solve this problem with fire because even if you are burning the brush wet there is still enough fuel to dry the forest out and burn it to ash. I personally think the state should tell insurers that they only have to provide insurance in wildlands if the home/property meets stringent fire safety rules around defensible space. My house isn't even in the coniferous forest (I live in the chaparral) and it has set backs, greenzones, the works. I get so frustrated when I'm watching news coverage of the fires and the house is surrounded in pine duff and has giant pine trees right next to it. > much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads Yeah, my dad, a California native, who studied forestry at Davis always says that the solution in millions of goats. Ironically this spring the local Sacramento news reported that there was a shortage of goats to clear brush and that was just for commercial landscaping in the greater metro area. So not only is not feasible because of green hand wringing but also because we just don't have adequate goats.
- notatoad 3y ago
  controlled burns require weather conditions that allow them to be done safely, as well as people knowledgeable enough to keep them controlled. and the amount of the time in the year when temperatures are cool enough and the ground is dry enough keeps shrinking. controlled burns are only really a solution for a very small percentage of a space as big as california if you want to do them safely. What they sometimes do up here in canada is just monitor and let the fires burn out of control as long as they're not moving towards a populated area, to reduce fuel in a large area. but you can only do that as long as the area is truly unpopulated, if one person builds a cabin in the woods you have to move to suppression. as i understand it, there's been a fair bit of progress in the last couple years regarding best practice for wildfire protection in populated areas. you can do a lot by removing underbrush and building firebreaks around a town, as well as relatively simple measures like disallowing cedar-shake roofs. there's probably a future where properties in towns that implement strong wildfire protection plans can continue to be insured, and towns that don't cease to exist. but that only solves the problem for towns, i don't see what can be done for properties in the woods outside a town's firebreak.
  - lumost 3y ago
    I’d imagine that it is feasible to defend any area with greater than x people per square mile from fire, aye? At some point you could install multiple fire hoses per block, build river beds to create fire breaks, and clearcut the surrounding area, no?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Schiendelman 3y ago
      Sure, at far greater cost than the houses themselves. Who pays for that?
      - lumost 3y ago
        We wouldn’t debate fire risk with a city as dense as Manhattan. There is a cutoff where the population density and size makes fire prevention/risk management economical.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  Best practice wilderness management is to not allow people to build houses there.
vasco 3y ago
> there is no price that makes them a good risk for an insurer To a naive mind that doesn't know much about insurance this sounds untrue. I'd be willing to insure houses myself with as many funds as I could get at 33% of the property value per year, for example.
- lumost 3y ago
  How much do you need in savings to handle the maximum number of properties destroyed in a once per hundred year, bad year? If the number is greater than 100% of home value, clients are better off holding savings funds.
- rich_sasha 3y ago
  There's also the correlated risk issue. Say 10% of your claims are against some natural disaster, and they will either not get triggered at all, or all get triggered at the same time. That's an uncomfortable situation - this is what is called catastrophe risk. Ideally as an insurer you want lots of uncorrelated risks and the strong law of large numbers is on your side. Insurers typically outsource such catastrophy risks (to some extent anyway) to reinsurers, ie insurers to insurers, but (a) that's not a hard guarantee of risk mitigation and (b) they still have to pay for it. I can imagine that in this whole quagmire, and considering what people would pay for insurance, it's easier to just pass.
  - __turbobrew__ 3y ago
    That is what reinsurance is for
    - ahahahahah 3y ago
      Oh gee. Thanks for repeating what the parent said...
- lozenge 3y ago
  Who's going to pay that much for insurance though?
cameldrv 3y ago
Politically though if those houses are uninsurable, if there is a big fire, the government will bail the homeowners out, so it’s effectively zero cost fire insurance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bandrami 3y ago
Unfortunately if people ever realize that, even in CA the answer will be "bulldoze all the trees"
- creato 3y ago
  I think that’s unrealistic. If you want to get rid of the fuel for fires, the best way is prescribed fires. If things get that bad, we’ll just see the regulations around prescribed burns loosened, the way they should be anyways.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  Nah, if you bulldoze the trees, you get fire-based shrubs in however many years and those aren't necessarily better. Also, California cities don't even have the money to bulldoze the trees in an N-mile radius around them. California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago, yes but those trees were valuable and there actually weren't as many of them (due to the fire ecology). A hundred years of fire suppression forestry and logging have turned the Sierras into a giant thicket - filled with small trees and shrubs with no market value, not easy to remove and ready to explode.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    > California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago insufficient detail, plus people lied in writing to get paid in Sacramento because "who could know" basically a BS statement, right?
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Are you saying they didn't log all those trees? I don't know the specifics, but I know that where I am up in Oregon there is very little of the old growth left. Almost everything got logged at one time or another. We still have plenty of forests, but they are all second growth.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
Yep, in New Zealand, we're already looking at managed retreat in seaside / riverside communities that are proving untenable in the face of increasing erosion/flooding events due to climate change. We have a national disaster insurance entity[0], but coverage from them is tied to insurance from an insurance company. So as insurers start to refuse to insure houses at proven high risk of natural disaster, then the EQC coverage isn't applicable either. It will suck for some communities, but it's the reality of climate change that some of those changes are gong to suck. And I just can't believe that California, like Australia, has allowed so much residential development in ecosystems where fire is a natural part. Not sure if it's the triumph of hope over facts, or just plain ostriching. [0]: https://www.eqc.govt.nz/about-eqc/ https://www.eqc.govt.nz/about-eqc/
LorenPechtel 3y ago
Except the state normally (I have no idea of the current situation with California) won't let the insurance companies accurately price the high risk areas because the voters will scream at the insurance bill. Eventually it reaches a point where the state puts so much burden on the insurance company that they decide it's uneconomic to operate there and leave. Any insurance company refusing to write should be interpreted as a whack with a clue-by-4.

civilized 3y ago

Have we considered whether standard best-practice wilderness management, like controlled burns, can address issues like this, or is that still ignored/dismissed?

emodendroket 3y ago
One of the big fires last year I heard about was a controlled burn that turned into an uncontrolled burn so I guess it is not being totally ignored.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
twoodfin 3y ago
My understanding is that the current liability structure makes most potential controlled burns effectively impossible. I think you’d need an act of Congress to limit liability as long as certain easily justiciable standards were met.
mistrial9 3y ago
good topic but ugly truth behind it -- a US Interior agency near New Mexico had a scheduled controlled burn on the books.. apparently they can schedule things multiple years in advance.. but .. the drought got worse and covid hit. The department had personnel and morale problems.. lots of uncertainty.. they stalledxxxxx "waited patiently" for two more years as the drought got still worse but the documents describing physical risk were not updated. The Federal department executed the burn and it went wild, and is the largest fire in recorded history in that area now, taking out an entire town plus other structures and causing the evacuation of Los Alamos National Laboratories at the same time. you can find the details easily.. there is a 70 page "final report" from the agency perspective. This is reality.
- swalling 3y ago
  The simple reality is that not only does human incompetence get in the way of safety here, but burns probably just aren't a very viable option. Historical controlled burns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...) worked because they happened frequently and kept fuel in check while encouraging trees that were resistant to or even dependent on low grade fires. Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however. Now we've also got massive areas of forest dieback due to climate-driven bark beetle outbreaks. Trees that do survive burns but are stressed by them are more vulnerable to pests, just like drought stress. https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/bark-beetles-and-climate-change-united-states https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/bark-beetles-and-climate... So controlled burns even done effectively may still result in unwanted tree dieback. A much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads, but this is also a nonstarter politically in many areas especially in National Parks. We are still maintaining this myth of virgin wilderness untouched by the hand of man. State and federal government simply isn't competent enough to handle this given the political realities in a democratic system. Basically what's going to happen is that the most vulnerable communities will get scorched out of existence, and we're just going to have to live with the impact of more wildfires until nature sorts itself out. Americans just can’t psychologically accept being told they don’t get to develop anywhere they want.
  - riversflow 3y ago
    > Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however. Yup! I live in the Sierras. Everyone in this thread talking about controlled burns needs to say "California has just spent a century pursuing a policy of fire suppression" a few times. The fuel loads are insane, these fires have been turning into giant firestorms with their own weather systems in a matter of 2 or 3 hours during the summer. I've watched it happen a few times, frightening. I suspect you can't solve this problem with fire because even if you are burning the brush wet there is still enough fuel to dry the forest out and burn it to ash. I personally think the state should tell insurers that they only have to provide insurance in wildlands if the home/property meets stringent fire safety rules around defensible space. My house isn't even in the coniferous forest (I live in the chaparral) and it has set backs, greenzones, the works. I get so frustrated when I'm watching news coverage of the fires and the house is surrounded in pine duff and has giant pine trees right next to it. > much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads Yeah, my dad, a California native, who studied forestry at Davis always says that the solution in millions of goats. Ironically this spring the local Sacramento news reported that there was a shortage of goats to clear brush and that was just for commercial landscaping in the greater metro area. So not only is not feasible because of green hand wringing but also because we just don't have adequate goats.
notatoad 3y ago
controlled burns require weather conditions that allow them to be done safely, as well as people knowledgeable enough to keep them controlled. and the amount of the time in the year when temperatures are cool enough and the ground is dry enough keeps shrinking. controlled burns are only really a solution for a very small percentage of a space as big as california if you want to do them safely. What they sometimes do up here in canada is just monitor and let the fires burn out of control as long as they're not moving towards a populated area, to reduce fuel in a large area. but you can only do that as long as the area is truly unpopulated, if one person builds a cabin in the woods you have to move to suppression. as i understand it, there's been a fair bit of progress in the last couple years regarding best practice for wildfire protection in populated areas. you can do a lot by removing underbrush and building firebreaks around a town, as well as relatively simple measures like disallowing cedar-shake roofs. there's probably a future where properties in towns that implement strong wildfire protection plans can continue to be insured, and towns that don't cease to exist. but that only solves the problem for towns, i don't see what can be done for properties in the woods outside a town's firebreak.
- lumost 3y ago
  I’d imagine that it is feasible to defend any area with greater than x people per square mile from fire, aye? At some point you could install multiple fire hoses per block, build river beds to create fire breaks, and clearcut the surrounding area, no?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Schiendelman 3y ago
    Sure, at far greater cost than the houses themselves. Who pays for that?
    - lumost 3y ago
      We wouldn’t debate fire risk with a city as dense as Manhattan. There is a cutoff where the population density and size makes fire prevention/risk management economical.
lazyasciiart 3y ago
Best practice wilderness management is to not allow people to build houses there.

vasco 3y ago

> there is no price that makes them a good risk for an insurer To a naive mind that doesn't know much about insurance this sounds untrue. I'd be willing to insure houses myself with as many funds as I could get at 33% of the property value per year, for example.

lumost 3y ago
How much do you need in savings to handle the maximum number of properties destroyed in a once per hundred year, bad year? If the number is greater than 100% of home value, clients are better off holding savings funds.
rich_sasha 3y ago
There's also the correlated risk issue. Say 10% of your claims are against some natural disaster, and they will either not get triggered at all, or all get triggered at the same time. That's an uncomfortable situation - this is what is called catastrophe risk. Ideally as an insurer you want lots of uncorrelated risks and the strong law of large numbers is on your side. Insurers typically outsource such catastrophy risks (to some extent anyway) to reinsurers, ie insurers to insurers, but (a) that's not a hard guarantee of risk mitigation and (b) they still have to pay for it. I can imagine that in this whole quagmire, and considering what people would pay for insurance, it's easier to just pass.
- __turbobrew__ 3y ago
  That is what reinsurance is for
  - ahahahahah 3y ago
    Oh gee. Thanks for repeating what the parent said...
lozenge 3y ago
Who's going to pay that much for insurance though?

cameldrv 3y ago

Politically though if those houses are uninsurable, if there is a big fire, the government will bail the homeowners out, so it’s effectively zero cost fire insurance.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bandrami 3y ago

Unfortunately if people ever realize that, even in CA the answer will be "bulldoze all the trees"

creato 3y ago
I think that’s unrealistic. If you want to get rid of the fuel for fires, the best way is prescribed fires. If things get that bad, we’ll just see the regulations around prescribed burns loosened, the way they should be anyways.
joe_the_user 3y ago
Nah, if you bulldoze the trees, you get fire-based shrubs in however many years and those aren't necessarily better. Also, California cities don't even have the money to bulldoze the trees in an N-mile radius around them. California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago, yes but those trees were valuable and there actually weren't as many of them (due to the fire ecology). A hundred years of fire suppression forestry and logging have turned the Sierras into a giant thicket - filled with small trees and shrubs with no market value, not easy to remove and ready to explode.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  > California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago insufficient detail, plus people lied in writing to get paid in Sacramento because "who could know" basically a BS statement, right?
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Are you saying they didn't log all those trees? I don't know the specifics, but I know that where I am up in Oregon there is very little of the old growth left. Almost everything got logged at one time or another. We still have plenty of forests, but they are all second growth.

EdwardDiego 3y ago

Yep, in New Zealand, we're already looking at managed retreat in seaside / riverside communities that are proving untenable in the face of increasing erosion/flooding events due to climate change. We have a national disaster insurance entity[0], but coverage from them is tied to insurance from an insurance company. So as insurers start to refuse to insure houses at proven high risk of natural disaster, then the EQC coverage isn't applicable either. It will suck for some communities, but it's the reality of climate change that some of those changes are gong to suck. And I just can't believe that California, like Australia, has allowed so much residential development in ecosystems where fire is a natural part. Not sure if it's the triumph of hope over facts, or just plain ostriching. [0]: https://www.eqc.govt.nz/about-eqc/ https://www.eqc.govt.nz/about-eqc/

LorenPechtel 3y ago

Except the state normally (I have no idea of the current situation with California) won't let the insurance companies accurately price the high risk areas because the voters will scream at the insurance bill. Eventually it reaches a point where the state puts so much burden on the insurance company that they decide it's uneconomic to operate there and leave. Any insurance company refusing to write should be interpreted as a whack with a clue-by-4.