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Southern CA Fires- Extreme Santa Ana Winds


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You know good and well that is the bat signal for the usual suspects and this thread will go from badass to a shit flinging circus of I’m right and you’re wrong. If that’s the direction we’re going here that’s fine, but I won’t be a part of it. I get paid to deal with idiots . I won’t do it for free.

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19 minutes ago, Herbie Hancock said:

Goddammit this is why we can’t have nice things. Take it elsewhere fuckwad

Respectfully, the difference between misinformation and information is part of this story. You yourself bring valuable information to this thread that puts into context what is going on.

Also, where the thread was going was a guy soliciting opinions about the Governor so Im not sure how that's not CR

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Respectfully, the difference between misinformation and information is part of this story. You yourself bring valuable information to this thread that puts into context what is going on.
Also, where the thread was going was a guy soliciting opinions about the Governor so Im not sure how that's not CR

I can’t edit my post so I’ll say it here: I retract the part about you being a fuckwad. You may indeed be one, but current participation in this thread is not indicative of that.

I find the information you posted to be detestable and disgusting, and given what I do for a living there are a lot of social media pages I follow that are echoing the information you posted. It’s disgusting and I hate it. In the same breath, if we start these discussions here it’s gonna devolve rather quickly. We’ve all been here long enough to have seen it time and again.



TldR; I don’t want to see a badass thread go to shit and I am incapable of articulating that appropriately.
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Article about the FAIR plan. Not to CR this but I would expect a government bailout from the current admin but have no clue what the new guy will do given his volatility. This is the first I’ve heard of assessments being on the table.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_3f92d976-ce0a-11ef-9efc-bb80f6754a0d.amp.html

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California’s fire insurer of last resort has long been on the brink of insolvency. Not only could FAIR customers – in the absence of a government bailout – face major assessments, it’s likely the FAIR’s relatively low property insurance maximums could leave many Palisades property owners with uncovered losses.

Now, with the FAIR plan holding just $200 million in cash and facing nearly six billion dollars of exposure in the Pacific Palisades alone, every FAIR customer in the state could face an assessment in the thousands of dollars to cover losses from the three major blazes raging across the Los Angeles area.

Because state regulations prevent the plan from passing on the cost of reinsurance, which covers losses in excess of available funds, to its customers, every customer in the state may face a major assessment. 

FAIR, created as a “temporary safety net,” covered just $50 billion of property in 2018, and now covers $458 billion. Even a single large blaze would wipe out FAIR’s relatively paltry $2.5 billion of reinsurance.

Making matters worse, FAIR only covers up to three million dollars of home value, while the median home listing in the Palisades is $4.6 million.

Because the state has to approve fire insurance rate hikes, insurance rates have not kept up with fire losses, leading insurers to exit the state in droves, leaving FAIR as the only option for over one million property owners.

FAIR covered just 445,000 properties in September 2021, rising to 1.4 million by September 2024. 

In the Pacific Palisades, where State Farm recently canceled over 1,600 policies a few months ago, FAIR plan residential plans in the 90272 zip code grew 85% from 2023 to 2024. 

While the state insurance regulator just approved a plan to let fire insurers use “catastrophe” modeling that would let them rapidly raise rates, consumer activist group Consumer Watchdog warned that the balance of power could soon be going too far the other way.

“Companies can use secret algorithms to correspond to black box climate models to raise insurance rates,” said Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court in a statement. “Even the insurance commissioner doesn’t know how much rates will go up because no one can see in the black box.” 

While rates have risen less than what is required by the market for insurers to remain in business, they still have risen fast enough to drive California residents to other states. Global credit ratings agency S&P warned that property-insurance driven outmigration could even risk government revenues and credit ratings. 

One alternative to the state’s fire and insurance crisis could lie with addressing the 15 million acres in California the United States Forest Service says requires forest thinning to become healthy and resilient. With a USFS estimated “treatment” cost of $1,000 per acre, such a program would cost the government $15 billion.

 

Edited by C-Man
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34 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

 

This is a great description. I remember the first time I was golfing in Los Alamitos and we teed off at 53° in the morning and about an hour or so later when the wind started, it was like somebody had turned a hairdryer on it was just this warm, dry, crazy fast air, and temperature shot up to about 70 in an instant. It really made golfing fun for the rest of the day. 

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Question from a guy who doesn't work in insurance. From what I'm seeing the insurance payouts are capped at 3 million and the average home price is 4.6. 

Isn't most of that value the land though? 3 million to clear the lot and build a new house. How close to 4.6 million is the resulting new build?

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14 minutes ago, Sgt Hulk said:

This is a great description. I remember the first time I was golfing in Los Alamitos and we teed off at 53° in the morning and about an hour or so later when the wind started, it was like somebody had turned a hairdryer on it was just this warm, dry, crazy fast air, and temperature shot up to about 70 in an instant. It really made golfing fun for the rest of the day. 

Thoughts and prayers.

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10 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

Question from a guy who doesn't work in insurance. From what I'm seeing the insurance payouts are capped at 3 million and the average home price is 4.6. 

Isn't most of that value the land though? 3 million to clear the lot and build a new house. How close to 4.6 million is the resulting new build?

Most of the value is in the land out there so most normal people would be completely fine with a $3M max.

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That is one thing I was curious about, when you see figures like, $X billion of dollars in losses.   Is that just taking the current market value of every house burned down or is it how much it would cost to rebuild the houses?   Seems like there would be a pretty considerable difference in those 2 numbers.

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Sucks for everyone. That stretch of Malibu coastal homes was really awesome but not surprising they all burned. They are basically on zero lot lines.  This has become so hyper partisan that I'm not sure anyone will be able to objectively parse out what could have been done. Maybe nothing. We show a lot of hubris when we think we can mitigate natural disasters of this magnitude. Lots of beautiful places to live with lots of risks.

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23 minutes ago, cmontexas said:

Question from a guy who doesn't work in insurance. From what I'm seeing the insurance payouts are capped at 3 million and the average home price is 4.6. 

Isn't most of that value the land though? 3 million to clear the lot and build a new house. How close to 4.6 million is the resulting new build?

Correct. The insured value on EVERY insurance policy covers the improvements only. The dirt is not insured. In California, the dirt is worth a substantial portion of the overall value of real estate. If you've been following the last few days, my second example of the a prospect we worked on in Montecito -- the actual value to rebuild his home is probably $5.5M or so give or take. However, if he were to sell that house/property he could probably get more than $10M. The insured value is only the value to rebuild the home. We fight with mortgage companies all the time because they don't understand this. They want coverage to at least match the amount of the loan -- well, that loan also includes the dirt and you don't insure the dirt because it isn't going anywhere. So, the article I posted is a little misleading -- not intentionally mind you. I'm not overly familiar with the Palisades area but I know there were a number of well-known celebs living in the area. The $4.6M number cited in that article includes the value of the land.

For an example a little closer to home, lots in the Park Cities (Highland Park/University Park) generally start at $1M and increase substantially from there. You can definitely get in situations where the true cost to build a home is $500K-$750K (there aren't that many of these left) but the owner could probably get up to (or more) than $2M if they decided to sell.

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12 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

That is one thing I was curious about, when you see figures like, $X billion of dollars in losses.   Is that just taking the current market value of every house burned down or is it how much it would cost to rebuild the houses?   Seems like there would be a pretty considerable difference in those 2 numbers.

Not a bad question. Generally speaking, you probably need to consider the source. If it comes from an insurance outlet, it's going to be talking about insured losses so it would not consider market value. That number means nothing to us. If it's CNN or another news outlet playing loose with their reporting, they might multiply the number of homes burned in an area and multiply it by the average value of a real estate transaction in the area and run with that number. It will be months before the insurance industry has a firm idea of what the total insured loss will be.

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41 minutes ago, mdmost said:

John Mayer had a good post about what people lost in the fires. It wasn't just a house. It was things like photos of their families. Sure, houses can be rebuilt but you aren't getting those photos back. Existences were erased. 

 

A good reminder to digitize my backlog of old photos and home recordings.

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2 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

I went to HS with this dim bulb.  Let's see if we can spot the flaw in his hypothesis.

image.png.5d57a917413dc1783b2f31e8d39991e0.png

Just in general, there is typically a reason to no longer be friends/acquaintances with certain folks from high school and college.  Facebook fucked that up.  

 

And to be on topic, my best friend's brother lost his home in the palisades.  3 kids under 4 and they had to evacuate.

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21 hours ago, Herbie Hancock said:

 

 


When I was younger, this kind of declaratory statement used to really aggravate me. It still does, but not as much as it used to as I came to realize that the majority of people making these kinds of statements are either intellectually deficient or misinformed. Or both. So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are simply misinformed.

Every department/agency has what is called a PIO (Public Information Officer). He or she has been designated as the mouthpiece for the agency when high visibility incidents occur in that agency’s jurisdiction. 

 

 

Not intellectually deficient, nor misinformed. This was not a PIO, it was the actual fire chief of the city of Los Angeles. The same fire chief who wrote a letter to the mayor a couple of months ago expressing how  the budget cuts to the fire department would impact the ability of the fire department to respond to wildfires. Said fire chief was on the local news yesterday, and when the anchor asked if the cuts affected their response, the chief hesitantly applied in the affirmative.

 

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2 minutes ago, otisdog said:

Not intellectually deficient, nor misinformed. This was not a PIO, it was the actual fire chief of the city of Los Angeles. The same fire chief who wrote a letter to the mayor a couple of months ago expressing how  the budget cuts to the fire department would impact the ability of the fire department to respond to wildfires. Said fire chief was on the local news yesterday, and when the anchor asked if the cuts affected their response, the chief hesitantly applied in the affirmative.

 

DT gonna CR.

”Factcheck: Was the LAFD budget cut? No, it actually increased. Here’s how.”

https://www.dailynews.com/2025/01/09/factcheck-was-the-lafd-budget-cut-no-it-actually-increased-heres-how/

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17 minutes ago, babysdaddy said:

Just in general, there is typically a reason to no longer be friends/acquaintances with certain folks from high school and college.  Facebook fucked that up.  

 

And to be on topic, my best friend's brother lost his home in the palisades.  3 kids under 4 and they had to evacuate.

Also get off fucking Facebook.

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21 minutes ago, otisdog said:

Not intellectually deficient, nor misinformed. This was not a PIO, it was the actual fire chief of the city of Los Angeles. The same fire chief who wrote a letter to the mayor a couple of months ago expressing how  the budget cuts to the fire department would impact the ability of the fire department to respond to wildfires. Said fire chief was on the local news yesterday, and when the anchor asked if the cuts affected their response, the chief hesitantly applied in the affirmative.

 


 

If you’ll notice, my post that you quoted was in response to this portion of your post and I only quoted this portion for a reason. 

Quote

Seems like the 'first responders' are more interested in holding press conferences  and spewing excuses than anything else. Fire Chief said " hydrants aren't designed for wild fires, just single building fires"


I interpreted the above as you intended it to be, and that is saying the firefighters are looking for their five minutes of fame instead of doing their job. I educated you on the nuances of news conferences in the fire service, and that the person in front of the camera was not shirking their duties because their sole duty is handling news media and information release. It appears the Chief either wears that hat in their dept or chose to wear that hat for this incident. 

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I watched the old beta tape of my parents inventorying my childhood home. Was an interesting time capsule. Avoided the one titled “fuq flix”

If my house ever burns down, I hope I can get the “estimated collection value” discog’s has for my records.

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9 minutes ago, MAUFRAIS said:

I watched the old beta tape of my parents inventorying my childhood home. Was an interesting time capsule. Avoided the one titled “fuq flix”

If my house ever burns down, I hope I can get the “estimated collection value” discog’s has for my records.

I don't have any clients who do this but it might be worth seeing if you can schedule the most valuable items (if not the entire collection) on a personal articles floater with your carrier.

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1 hour ago, babysdaddy said:

Just in general, there is typically a reason to no longer be friends/acquaintances with certain folks from high school and college.  Facebook fucked that up.  

 

And to be on topic, my best friend's brother lost his home in the palisades.  3 kids under 4 and they had 

So after 3 kids he finally figured out how to pull out in time?

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7 hours ago, Brisketexan said:


Can vouch. GOLL and I got stuck in O’Hare for 5 hours back in 2020. So we did one of our favorite things: camped out at the bar and drank beer to watch the world go by, and check out the scenery.
There was no scenery. None. Just large midwestern women. A very depressing flight delay.

But on the upside, O'Hare food court choices are very tense with people yelling like they're in the chow hall at Zero Week in Basic Training. I yell the fuck back at them, to their satisfaction and my inner disgust.

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1 hour ago, Willfully Horn said:

DT gonna CR.

”Factcheck: Was the LAFD budget cut? No, it actually increased. Here’s how.”

https://www.dailynews.com/2025/01/09/factcheck-was-the-lafd-budget-cut-no-it-actually-increased-heres-how/

Take it up with the LA Fire Chief 

A month before fires, L.A. fire chief warned budget cuts were hampering emergency response - CBS News

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1 hour ago, babysdaddy said:

Just in general, there is typically a reason to no longer be friends/acquaintances with certain folks from high school and college.  Facebook fucked that up.  

If there was just some way, something that could be done to prevent mark zuckerberg from making you be friends with everyone you knew in hs/college. Maybe someday that technology will exist. maybe. 

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1 hour ago, C-Man said:

Oh, and another insurance tip. One day when you're bored, get your phone and run a video of you opening the front door and walking into your home. Go into every room and film succinctly everything in the room. Just a quick scan of everything in the room. Open the closets and keep the video rolling. Narrate while you're doing it. Scan the hallways, the walls and go into the next room. Wash, rinse and repeat for every room in your house, including any back houses, garages, etc. Then upload this video into the cloud -- or put it on a thumb/zip drive and put it a safety deposit box or leave it at work. Anywhere off property. Update it occasionally.

These videos are INVALUABLE tools if/when you have a situation where your house is a total loss and insurance gets involved. Nobody will be able to remember all the things they own, especially in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic situation where you've lost your home due to fire or tornado. (This is a reminder that I need to do the same thing and practice what I preach.)

I take it I should leave the flamethrower and crates of dynamite out of this video?

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