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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#451

Post by giorgioz »

Animats wrote: post #107

Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher. It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly. The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement. I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his…

> brick isn't earthquake resistant

This is an extreme that is not true. Bricks are harder to make earthquake resistant but it's perfectly possible to build houses that have SOME bricks in it that are also earthquake resistant. There are permutations of materials that are both more fire resistant and more earthquake resistant to the required level at a certain height of the building.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#452

Post by altairprime »

chmod775 wrote: post #146
altairprime wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked wildfires; think ‘explosive fiery-hot shrapnel’ rather than just catching on fire like wood. (This is not a contradiction of your point, just a useful related factoid for the modern era.)

You're going to die if you're around to witness either (if you didn't already pass out from smoke/heat/lack of oxygen). It literally doesn't matter. The advantage of suburbs in which houses are mostly built from non-flammable materials is that while maybe one or two rows of houses closest to forested areas will likely burn out, there won't be enough calorific potential for the fire to propagate further into the subur…

Brick does tend to survive. Brick as an insulating layer can save lives. Brick also explodes violently under conditions where wood merely burns. Neither of these save homes in our wildfires, though; it turns out what saves homes is things no one realized at first:

Don’t plant trees within fifty feet of a structure. More, if you didn’t inflate your home like a balloon to fill a property to the brim with home. Cut them down and make a firebreak. Clearings exist for a real and serious reason. Aesthetics have been given precedence far too long in this regard.

Make your home airtight (or positively pressurize it, if you have the power and tech to do that safely) so that embers don’t get pushed in by the winds and pulled in by the temperature differential currents and catch your house on fire from inside its walls. Not much fun in having a brick building burned out from embers that were forced in through a poorly-sealed door.

Saturate your roof with water, so that it doesn’t trap embers and act as a fire repeater to the next house on the block. Not only will your roof not burn, but every ember that lands on it will likely go out. Even if your roof is metal, consider installing sprinklers anyways. Maybe you’ll help save your neighborhood someday.

It’s not the building material that’s the one problem here; it’s the carelessness of building code, safety enforcement and absence of federal and state aid to fireproof homes in known fire zones. It’s the catastrophically incorrect hundred year old policy that would rather burn down a chunk of homes every ten years rather than admit that policy is wrong and that the indigenous people were right all along. Brick or wood or concrete or steel, none of these will stop the hottest fires with any certainty. We know what does, and we’ve allowed it to become unsafe to have wood homes. We know how to stop these wildfires. Build with brick if you like, but:

Only fire can prevent forest fires.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#453

Post by avianlyric »

leguminous wrote: post #432
HacklesRaised wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature. What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's…

> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C). The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C). I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air condition…

You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.

So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.

Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.

So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.

All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#454

Post by HPsquared »

daedrdev wrote: post #211
teractiveodular wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the 173 million strong population of Bangladesh can attest, they can and do live in such places. "Each year, on average, 31,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi) (around 21% of the country) is flooded. During severe floods the affected area may exceed two-thirds of the country, as was seen in 1998." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh Most of the world does not want to aspire to be Bangladesh, but hu…

The cost of labor is extremely high in the US compared to Bangladesh, and that along with building standards, minimum lot size, minimum floor space requirements and required low density zoning (lmao) make these two case very different

What does it mean when a whole country has expensive labour? The highly-paid people of said country can afford each others' services. It basically means "low cost of materials" from a human perspective.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#455

Post by galangalalgol »

niemandhier wrote: post #415
simianparrot wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this. > Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case. Relevant: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...

Sure Japan did it, so did Mexico. The latter is probably much more important as an example for the US. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disast...

Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#456

Post by spicyusername »

epolanski wrote: post #437
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #283

American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?" The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

I'm always baffled at the fact that Americans don't build houses out of bricks. I read those arguments of the advantages this method has, especially financial ones, but to me it's nonsense considering that it would prevent an endless number of problems that cause the total loss. I still remember when New Orleans was hit with by Katrina, large parts of the suburbs where houses where made by wood and plastic where dest…

Building out of wood is cheap and perfectly strong for most areas.

Engineering is always a set of trade-offs.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#457

Post by spicyusername »

_tariky wrote: post #230
Animats wrote: post #107

Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher. It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly. The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement. I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his…

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…

The problem always becomes, who is going to pay for that action.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#458

Post by mvc »

fishstock25 wrote: post #359
miohtama wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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*…

Please do let me know where I can live that is guaranteed to be safe from unexpected natural disaster.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#459

Post by epolanski »

spicyusername wrote: post #456
epolanski wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always baffled at the fact that Americans don't build houses out of bricks. I read those arguments of the advantages this method has, especially financial ones, but to me it's nonsense considering that it would prevent an endless number of problems that cause the total loss. I still remember when New Orleans was hit with by Katrina, large parts of the suburbs where houses where made by wood and plastic where dest…

Building out of wood is cheap and perfectly strong for most areas. Engineering is always a set of trade-offs.

I don't get how can one put his own future in a cheaply built building you're one fire or thougher-than-usual natural event away from losing.

It's normal nobody wants to insure such risky assets, especially as nominal value of this wooden crap is stellar due to the skewed demand/offer ratio plaguing good parts of US.

In my life I've seen my and my family's real estate being hit by a tree, fire, floodings and I've never had to face anything close to a total loss.

Huge expenses? Sure. But never anything close to a loss.

The only thing that could put my real estate on a serious risk are earthquakes, I guess that's a scenario where lighter built houses would have instead an advantage.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#460

Post by mbesto »

avianlyric wrote: post #453
leguminous wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C). The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C). I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air condition…

You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive. So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat th…

I also point out that Phoenix's "summer" last longer than Berlin's winter:

https://weatherspark.com/y/75981/Average-Weather-in-Berlin-G...

https://weatherspark.com/y/2460/Average-Weather-in-Phoenix-A...

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