As Florida Storms Worsen, Some in Tampa Bay Wonder: Is Living There Worth It?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We build for extreme weather. Our building codes (and common sense) protect us. My house has 10" of concrete on all our exterior walls and 1" concrete shingles on the roof, with no electrical system below waist height. We have 1/4" galvanized sheets of metal in the shed that we can bolt over all our windows when a cat-4 blows through. Don't get me wrong - a cat 2+ is still a giant pain in the ass to live through, but it's not a long-term problem.
Also, most people don't bother with home insurance (unless they have a mortgage) covering storm damage. You build your house in anticipation of repairing it and thus build better.
A lot of our current situation is only possible because we had an island-wide reset in 2004 (https://youtu.be/NzzeDGICjbA), that may be what it takes for Florida.
Huh, apparently “wind is responsible for greater property loss than water” [1].
As the study concludes, wind will absolutely tear apart a cheap house, or a structure not built to be resilient to wind. And most aren’t.
_But_ once you’re ready for wind , as we are, you live in fear of the storm surge accompanying a major hurricane. Especially since it lasts 4-6 hours and can overlap with high tide, that’s a 15-20’ sea level rise of churning water. No house can be practically hardened against that, and when wind is gusting at 100+mph it’s not safe to run or move.
When we anticipate a major storm surge + storm, we plan for an island-wide evacuation of 50,000+ people to seven small shelters.
As I said in a different response though, when you have a hardened home you fear storm surges, and we do. Our house would probably be obliterated by a 12’ storm surge at high tide.
We’re built on a 3’ high cement slab foundation though, so if we had only 1’ of water around the house we’d be fine. (This is a building code here, it’s nearly impossible to build a basement and your house must be floored 18” above your prevailing level.)
For a variety of meteorological reasons that’s exceptionally unlikely for my specific location, but it’s something we’re acutely aware of and plan ahead for.
We have no electrical wiring below waist height, I think 3'? Our floors are tiles and our load-bearing walls are cement, so if we just had flooding we'd be able to get to ~13' above sea level before being in real trouble. Our furniture would be written off.
Our house is actually a bit more durable than the country. If we had a 15' storm surge, the house might survive, but the island would be toast. That would submerge nearly the entire island, and it would be happening during a hurricane. It would take months to recover even basic infrastructure. Our plan for that is to give up everything we own and return in a year or two to rebuild.
_But_, for a variety of reasons, a 15' storm surge is meteorologically improbable here. It's a once-in-a-millennium event, even accounting for the worst of global warming. Nothing is impossible, but there's no point in planning for it; it's like living within a thousand miles of yosemite national park. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How is this any different from selling people exploitive loans to desperate people?
Instead of providing assistance to rebuild, if the property is in a fucked place, provide money to move.
Climate related disasters are intensifying everywhere. What's now "inevitable" may have been unthinkable when some of these folks moved there.
West coast best coast.
eventually seismic activity will pick up too.
I almost lost my fire insurance last year because my neighbor doesn’t keep his property up, for decades. The agent initially rejected my renewal due to pictures taken from an inspection they did that showed a ton of downed trees but they were across my property line.
But there are plenty of things that can be done to reduce the number of wildfires. Remember the fires caused by old and poorly maintained PG&E lines?
The Airport Fire that just burned in Orange and Riverside counties was started by some county public works employees pushing boulders around with a bulldozer (to build a barricade preventing motorcyclists from going into the canyons and starting a wildfire) on a red flag day, literally at the peak of the heat hottest day of the entire year.
This sort of shit should see whoever sent them out there fired for gross misconduct and potentially charged. I certainly wouldn't keep my job if I fucked up that badly.
So, it's an interesting idea to change the choice from: either "don't spend the money" or "spend the money on prevention and fixing our shit"
To: from "the money is spent either way, might as well fix our shit."
If there's also one state that has demonstrated a willingness to use economics to encourage "correct" choices/behavior in consumers, it's California, so they should be real sympathetic to this idea :-)
I don't know if I'd support such a proposal or not. That would require some serious analysis and consideration of the details, but I don't think we should just dismiss the whole idea.
Also, federal assistance programs largely transfers wealth from "blue" states to "red" states. Proposing less federal assistance or some kind of "fairer" tax program isn't going to persuade in the direction you think. It's just going to mean more money for blue states to handle their own internal matters.
They are under strict orders not to say the blunt truth as they put it "you have one exit and in the middle of an unstoppable fuel load. in case of fire,you are all fucked and will die".
Instead they have to say something along the lines of that they should do everything within their economic power to reduce their fire risk.
On the part of pollution from wildfires, I'm much more ambivalent. A smoke filled West Coast was the norm in fall prior to California fire suppression.
Genuinely curious for the evidence on this, if you have it.
It has been estimated that 5 to 12 million acres burned in California per year prior to 1850 [1], [2]. As a comparison, California’s 2000–2020 average burned acreage is 0.79 million acres per year [2]. 2020 was the largest wildfire year in California's recorded history, with nearly 4.5 million acres burned, which is on the low end for the historical average.
Last time I went down this rabbit hole I found several archival records and letters from settlers and surveyors describing California smoke and haze from the 1800's, but unfortunately I cant produce them for you. They described how the Sierra Nevada would be blanketed with smoke in the fall, and that it would linger in the central valley as a dim haze. If by chance you come across these, please let me know.
There is also ample biological evidence in the fire adapted ecology of California, where many plants require fire to reproduce and spread. This comports with the burn studies that estimates the burn interval for most California biomes to be between 3 and 20 years, with 3 years being typical for grasslands and steppes, 10 being typical for redwood forests, and 20 being more common for the pines forests.
Of course there is more to wildfire and smoke than simple acreage, and the quantity of fuel and hardwoods currently being burnt is greater as a result of our 150 year hiatus from wildfire. That said, the pre-1850 average was literally an order of magnitude greater than post 2000, which goes a long way in bridging this difference.
Here is a paper on Wildfire acreage:
[1] https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...
[2] https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/classic/cc/SB901_...
here is some information historic fire intervals:
https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.4996/fireec...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228116866_Historic_...
What you are suggesting is subsidizing people to live in economically impractical regions, specifically regions we know will get worse and more costly. I don't see the logic there at all.
We get this mess. Local governments selling building permits in flood and wildfire zones because they get cash in the short term while others pay in the long.
We’re seeing in Florida, for example, a recapitulation of the financial crisis, down to bogus ratings of undercapitalised insurers allowing risky mortgages to be passed along to banks, Fannie and Freddie [1].
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-051_f1329bc3-...
Personal insurance must cover 100% of personal property loss, not governments (at any level) which are obliged to serve the population fairly and uniformly. Local government alone is responsible for rebuilding lost local infrastructure -- roads, power, sewer, and schools. Presumably state government would marshal emergency response from outlying communities, and perhaps coordinate financial resources to rebuild.
Federalizing recovery will pass along the cost of disaster recovery to everyone, not just those who build homes in the paths of hurricanes or in low lying areas which flood frequently. That is the role of personal property insurance. The companies who insure against flood, fire, and wind damage are a far better source of indemnifying the risk incurred by each home and neighborhood than is any government. Then the homeowner can choose to insure or not. But no government should pass along the costs of higher risk by some to others who chose a lower risk. That would clearly be unjust.
You get what you vote for, and Florida has been consistently voting for denial and corruption and mismanagement.
Instead of doing it's job, and doing anything to mitigate these disasters, or making hard decisions about where people should not be building, the government's too busy attacking homosexuals and the 'woke'. Its what the voters want, it's what the voters get.
The 'price of living in paradise'.
We need some kind of insurance reform. Insurance works best when there is one extremely large pool of consumers to offset the risk of a catastrophic event in one small area of that pool. The risk pools keep getting smaller as private insurance companies stop offering high risk insurance in markets that suffer from floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wild fires. Several state governments have been forced to pick up the slack by offering a small pool of high risk (and therefore high cost) insurance to those residents.
I get it, private insurance companies want to make as much profit as possible and those markets are killing their profits. They should have the right to pull out of those markets if they want, but I would propose that if a private insurance companies should not be able to selectively offer different insurance in different risk markets.
So, for example, if State Farm wants the privilege of selling auto insurance to California's 39 million residents, they also have to offer home/fire insurance (nearly all private insurance companies are not writing new home insurance policies in California due to high risk of wild fires, but they do offer other types of insurance). In other words, it should be all or nothing if they want to participant in any geographic market.
If they still don't want to offer it after such a law, that's ok because then the government's insurance pool can pickup the lower risk insurance (car, home, life, umbrella) to help offset the cost of the higher risk fire insurance (in the California example). The same would be true in other states that have single vertical government pools for different natural disasters (Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama).
I'm sure there are better ideas, but this is just one option that comes to mind.
Right to run scheme for say 10 year period is auctioned off to lowest bidder.
When living in EU, there was a church about 5 minutes waking distance that was ~900 years old lol
As it goes - 100 miles is a long distance in Europe, while 100 years is a long time ago in America.
From my lens, a building that is 200 years old is not really all that old.
I've extensively modified and upgraded my house since I've bought it. Even so, I'm sure there are aspects (e.g. one small bathroom) that would give many buyers pause.
I have drywall in my apartment, but I would hurt myself trying to punch any of my walls.
Wooden homes do not survive as well in high wind situations, and hurricanes are high wind situations.
And much of the US doesn't routinely have really high wind situations. Had a windstorm in my area last fall. A big mature spruce tree came down and managed to avoid hitting my house or neighbor's utility wires but house was fine. Wood construction is not uniquely susceptible to wind events relative to other things that tend to happen in severe storms. And, if you have a direct tornado hit, I'm not sure it really matters what your residential property is made of.
Water is the primary enemy of wood, keep the water out and wood frames houses will last generations. Modern pressure treated lumber lasts even longer.
Not in the parts of the US which are prone to tornados and hurricanes. And as we know, the areas prone to wind-related extreme weather are growing.
Oh, I forgot to mention fire. Many parts of the US are becoming more susceptible to fires.
Concrete is not a great eco choice, but it is a far better choice for homes that need to withstand increasingly harsh environments.
An increasingly large part of the US is subject to storms that include very high winds. When a tornado or hurricane hits a wooden house directly, the results are not usually good for the structure or the occupants. Concrete homes tend to survive much better.
Does also explain why housing is relatively cheap - just not very durable.
The concept isn't dissimilar to timberframing which uses all the same mechanisms but leverages wood joinery instead of metal brackets and would still use stick framing and sheething. Timber frames have stood for hundreds of years.
Frankly, just because your house is built from solid structure masonry doesn't mean that it will withstand hurricane level forces or dense flying objects at tens or hundreds of mph.
https://www.expedia.com/Atomic-Bomb-Dome-Hiroshima-City-Cent...
https://www.archidust.com/blog/2023/11/20/stone-or-timber-de...
Generally when you see major home destruction post hurricane those homes were built prior to the ‘90s or washed out by surge.
Those of us in Florida know…it’s not so much the wind we worry about, it’s the water from the surge. Helene’s damage in the Tampa Bay Area was mainly storm surge…the wind, which did occasionally gust beyond 65mph, wasn’t as much of an issue.