We have had some pretty bad disasters in the US of late. I don't want to get into a discussion of how they were handled, or how they could been prevented or even if people put themselves in a position where they became victims of the disaster.

What I want to discuss is where people go after a disaster. We see them on the news in temporary shelters for a few days after the disaster but then coverage stops. The recent fires in California displaced 250K+ people. Where do all of these people go for the long term? That is a lot of hotel rooms or new houses to find. I imagine some go to live with family or friends but not everyone has someone and a lot of the friends and family are in the same boat. So where do they go?

 

https://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/videos/144445

 

So do we have 250K people living in trailers in California?

 

Many victims of the fires in Paradise, California are now living in their cars or tents in parking lots. Just like the urban homeless who have lost their homes because of skyrocketing rents because the economy has been flooded with billions in corporate welfare.

People need to be considerate of people living on the street because they are only a disaster away from it happening to them.

 

So do we have 250K people living in trailers in California?

You would hope most people losing private homes have insurance that should provide a temporary housing benefit or at least money to find lodging.

 

You would hope most people losing private homes have insurance that should provide a temporary housing benefit or at least money to find lodging.

Insurance policies have a fairly large deductible so having insurance won't get them off the hook financially.

My HOA has earthquake insurance on our condo building, but there's a 15% deductible. In fact, there's no way the insurance industry could ever handle a major earthquake near a large city. State Farm lost a cool billion on the Northridge Earthquake in 1994.

 

You would hope most people losing private homes have insurance that should provide a temporary housing benefit or at least money to find lodging.

It is not a question of paying for it. It is a question of finding it.

And an additional follow up question is what people to for a livelihood. You would figure that if someone lives in a district, there is a decent chance they work there too. So not only do they lose their home, they lose their job.

 

Some may not get on their feet at all. No insurance, job loss, PTSD etc. We still have people here who are struggling with insurance companies two years after cyclones destroyed their homes.Although I could never understand homeless persons wanting to stay in cities with all the dangers that entails. I would rather take my backpack(swag) etc and take a hike into the countryside or be on the road.

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/27/6496...ires-should-be-left-to-burn-so-why-arent-they

Malcolm North, a fire ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California, Davis, gets it. He once worked as a wildland firefighter himself.

The problem, he says, is that approach to wildfire is not just short-sighted, it's dangerous.

Overgrown forests, the result of a century of aggressive firefighting, are one of the biggest contributors to the types of massive, catastrophic fires that are becoming more common in much of the west.

A lesson we learn over, and over, and over.

"Every time you get one of these big fires, it is the result of 100 years of management decisions where they went and put out lightning strikes, they limited or shut down prescribed fire. And those decisions eventually accumulate and bite you in the butt," he says, between quick breaths, hiking up a rock-strewn trail in the Sierra Nevada.

 

I don't understand his reasoning about the fires being the result of "mismanagement of the forests". There have been catastrophic forest fires every year for the past 20 years, so all the overgrowth (and entire forests) have already been burned to ashes. It takes at least 35 years for a new forest to grow, so how can the same forests keep burning over and over year after year?

Has he ever given any thought about that "Elephant In The Living Room" known as endless population growth and development?
These are actually structure fires and not vegetation fires. In fact, if you see photos of the fire zone, the trees are not burned - it was all the homes and buildings that fueled the fires.

Just keep building 1000s of homes out of flammable materials (and adding 1000s of tons to the fuel load) and any fire will turn into an inferno. So, here's what's really causing the problem:

[1] Build a huge subdivision in every hot, dry place there is in California.
[2] Every summer, the whole damn place goes up in an inferno.
[3] Rebuild again
[4] The place burns again.
[5] Rinse and repeat.

 

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/27/6496...ires-should-be-left-to-burn-so-why-arent-they

You are breaking the rules of the thread.

 

You are breaking the rules of the thread.

Yes I know, logistics instead.

 

More rule-breaking:

 

The "Camp Fire" was the 18th major wild fire in California since the year 2000.
However, the well-established history of wild fires in California shows these monstrous blazes have occurred in an Area Of Repeated Ignition (ARI). These areas are prone to the hot, dry Diablo or Santa Ana Winds and the slightest source of an ignition can trigger a small fire that quickly evolves into blast furnace.

Furthermore, rapid development of open space in ARIs is adding more fuel to a potential blaze. The average home contains at least 5 tons of wood which can quickly ignite and burn at over 2000 degrees. In fact, most of the fuel load in the Santa Rose fire was the 7000 homes and buildings in a vast, but closely spaced neighborhood. When one home caught fire, the flames quickly jumped from one home to another creating a fire storm that eventually engulfed the entire region.

The Santa Rosa Fire and the Camp Fire are another example of how California's economy based on endless population growth and development is literally fueling more and more disasters. Never the less, the trend is for even more “high density” development. Clearly, building high density neighborhoods in an ARI is a recipe for a mega disaster. However, when residents of burned out neighborhoods are interviewed by the media, they glibly say “We’ll rebuild”.

Yeah right, rebuild another tinderbox home in an ARI and it's a guaranteed certainty that another inferno will occur This “Rebuild & Reb
urn” syndrome is now costing about billions per year in government firefighting service and billions more in insurance payouts. Someone said "Insanity is doing te same failed thing over and over and expecting to get different results".

 

Any of you guys up in the NW feel anything? A quake in AK?

 

Any of you guys up in the NW feel anything? A quake in AK?

Nothing here, no tsunami warning. Looks like a monster in AK.
https://twitter.com/HeatherHintze/status/1068577253905203200

 

Yes sireee....thanks for that twitter link. That was quite a shaker......and it didn't want to quit.

 

Where do people go, to the bar.

 

If the bar's a total loss, people will have to stay home to drink til they're drunk.

 

...people will have to stay home to drink til they're drunk.

And then they leave home after they're drunk?