We lost our house to the Eaton fire this morning. It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the destruction in our community. Everything within a couple square miles of us burned.
I’d wait until the smoke settles (because the CCF focuses on less well-off communities than Altadena or the Palisades) but donating to their wildfire relief efforts does a lot of good regardless. They frequently give grants to the local organizations running the evacuation shelters.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...
The fact that otherwise intelligent people are eating it up has made me give up for a generation.
It is a truly depressing state of affairs.
And yes, in the end the mayor is responsible for the wellbeing of the city. And people see the mayor is nowhere to be found when their homes burned down. Who do you want them to be mad at?
Anyway on topic an aunt of mine is a mayor of a small city (55k). Her opinion is that firefighters fight fires and having a politician walk around a disaster area with a hundred journalists isn't helping.
Wasn't that Ted Cruz, the senator? During the blizzard?
Of course that outrage assumes you believe that a mayor should be on the scene even if they're not, in this case, holding onto a hose and actively suppressing fire. I personally think that's a fair ask of her constituents. It would be an entirely different story if this was an unpredictable situation, but, again, every expert commenting pointed out how unique the upcoming weather was and that there was the very real potential for massive fires.
I think it's one of those issues where both sides of the aisle could agree except for the right-wing side turned it into this weird DEI stuff.
Edit: I continue to see her name pop up in the news and I have been trying to understand how LA works in that she is in the complete spotlight. There are fires in surrounding LA but does the city of LA mayor have any control in those?
I grew up in north-central Pasadena and had many friends who lived in Altadena, and it’s been heartbreaking to watch the news from a distance and realize that many of their homes might have burned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D29RXlm4yE&t=584s
From the street signs, I was able to identify a location where a high school friend of mine lived—the house now burned to the ground. (It’s been nearly fifty years since I graduated from high school, and I don’t know if her family still lives there or not.)
California has had a state fire insurer (FAIR) of last resort for over fifty years and fire insurance is practically mandatory for mortgages so there aren’t many places that are excluded.
It’s entirely funded by premiums and has never been bailed out by state or federal funds. It’s not like the National Insurance Flood Program that’s burned billions of dollars in federal funding to subsidize people living in flood plains and Florida.
Here's a link if anyone's interested https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/California...
I suspect long term fire insurance due to wildfire will not be covered by home insurance policies. As it’s not a “random” event, and instead a risk of certain areas.
Insurance companies cover known risks all the time. The greater the risk, the higher the premiums.
As long as insurance companies are permitted to accurately and fully price the risk into premiums, anything is insurable — at least in concept.
While some exclusions may apply to fires caused by excluded perils (e.g., floods or earthquakes) or to contributory factors like neglect, wildfires are generally not excluded in standard homeowner’s insurance policies.
This is mostly on the California government, since the high insurance premiums are a side effect of disastrous wildfire mitigation policy in California. More proactive and competent wildfire mitigation would reduce the risk and therefore make insurance premiums more reasonable.
Or... not building mansions next to forestry? In Germany we have pretty strict requirements on distances, so it's rare for damages to occur. Also, most of our power grid infrastructure is buried below ground, so videos like the ones circulating on Twitter from arcing lines setting bushes and trees alight can't really happen here either.
Prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run.
The risk level is not just affected by proximity to forests. For offshore (Santa Ana) wind events, the riskiest areas are the SW bottom of hills and near canyons. That's where the current LA fires are.
IMO, a better prevention measure would be to not build houses out of sticks. That's already the case for much of the housing in Europe. Alas, here in the US the colonial and cabin aesthetics still win out, even when fire-resistant options aren't more expensive.
Coffey Park in Santa Rosa was destroyed in 2017, and most properties were rebuilt to lower fire-resistance standards.[1] The second little pig just doesn't wanna hear it.
https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/11/19/after-the-tubbs-fire-ho...
It is not an aesthetic preference, the US used to construct housing like in Europe through the 19th century.
That style of construction was repeatedly catastrophically destroyed by severe earthquakes, killing many people needlessly, and is now illegal in many regions.
The US became strict about seismic safety after the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake[0]. A few decades earlier, the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake[1] literally flattened entire towns of European-style construction; some of these are now ghost towns that were simply abandoned and never rebuilt. When you see surviving old masonry buildings, they usually have been retroactively refitted with steel frames to make the masonry mostly decorative.
The regions of the US prone to wildfire are also prone to severe earthquakes, so your options are wood or steel frame construction, neither of which is particularly wildfire resistant but at least it won't collapse during a severe earthquake. Many parts of the US also have to engineer for much higher wind loadings than in Europe.
You can build masonry buildings that meet the seismic standard but that requires a lot of steel and is expensive. Where I live, all modern construction is required to survive a M8.5 earthquake; I've never seen a house in Europe engineered to that standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_Owens_Valley_earthquake
As for the higher cost, this has become mostly an urban myth. In regions with low construction costs such as the South or the Midwest ($130-180/sqft,) the cost difference is minimal. In areas with high construction costs such as CA ($200-700/sqft,) the difference is either immaterial or negative (thanks to the insurance savings.)
Most typical reinforced masonry will fail during a severe earthquake, for which there is ample empirical evidence. The cost to reinforce masonry to e.g. a M8.5 standard is not small. The quantity of rebar, ties, etc required is expensive in both time and material. It isn’t cheap nor does the labor exist at the scale required.
I actually live in exotic construction, designed for extreme seismic and wind loads. Lots of steel, not much concrete, and extremely fire resistant (even though that isn’t a requirement here) but much cheaper to build and more seismic resistant (in theory) than reinforced concrete, which is what it replaces (its raison d’être). No structural wood either, but it wouldn’t be economical to construct a typical house this way.
This is an active area of research. If it was an “urban myth” there wouldn’t be so many engineering firms investing in developing new construction techniques that provide seismic resistance without the cost. If reinforced masonry actually worked in a reasonable way, we’d just use that.
As I explained in sibling threads, "speed bumps" are the most important thing here in CA. It's not about whether your structure can withstand a 1000-degree fire all around it. It's about whether your structure will set fire to three others within minutes of when it goes up in flames.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...
These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material. The bigger issue is most of these homes have probably not properly gone through fire mitigation steps.
https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...
> These homes would have been destroyed regardless of building material.
That's just not the case. Fire-resistant construction might not always help the first house at the subdivision's edge, but it will help the rest. One analogy is control rods in a reactor.
As I said in another post, the problem with firestorms here in CA is the rate of initial spread. We always get massive numbers of destroyed structures all at once, and <25% containment until the winds subside. The ignition source for most of the structures are burning wood-frame structures. Early on, firefighters can only help evacuate people.
As I said before the homes are of course an issue but the larger issue is basic fire prevention, not the fact that homes are as you say “built out of twigs”. It is certainly a factor but the more important piece are all the other steps that go before as I linked earlier.
Only well funded commercial and government campuses like JPL or the Getty can afford the kind of fire suppression measures required to defend against a conflagration of this magnitude.
The only thing that helps against is hurricanes and other storm events. Once the fire has blown up the windows and embers (or outright flames) enter the interior, it's game over generally. You might be able to re-use a concrete or brick structure after a large fire, but if the fire ran unchecked until it burned out everything, no chance - concrete will have lost rebar integrity and bricks will have soaked up toxic combustion products.
https://grist.org/extreme-weather/california-overhauled-its-...
Sorry for your loss.
In Southern California, it is typical to have tile roofs and stucco exteriors, which helps protect against the embers that will rain on your house during a major wildfire.
Source: used to live in a Los Angeles hilly suburb. If the fires get to where I used to live, that house will definitely burn despite having a cement tile roof.
All homeowners I know here have already had them installed over the last five years because of fire insurance inspections but I don’t know how representative my sample is.