6 ms·

In Yugoslavia, in 1969, one of the biggest earthquakes occurred, destroying several cities. After that, the country’s leaders decided to change building codes.

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 their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.

Panzer04 2y ago
Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy insurance and rebuild later? This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced right to provide that incentive.
- miohtama 2y ago
  Maybe be there is no longer "cheap" and that's the issue
  - fishstock25 2y ago
    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* hits the fan, they shouldn't come whine that everything gets sprayed with poo.
    - pestaa 2y ago
      But this cuts both ways. The insurers chose to provide their services in the area for the amount of money agreed upon. If anyone was more aware of the risks and probabilities, it's them. Why do they get to pull out now when it's time to hold their end of the contract?
      - fishstock25 2y ago
        That depends on what you mean with "pull out". Typically you pay a premium and that means you are insured for a certain period. A year or so. Everybody who is insured at the moment of course needs to be paid by the insurance under the terms they had agreed to. The insurances should not be allowed to "pull out" of this responsibility. But what about the next year? If no insurance wants to offer you another term, especially not for those same conditions, then it's their choice to "pull out" in that sense.
        andrewaylett 2y ago
        On the other hand, suddenly not offering cover at all is a problem for people who have established interests in a property. I can see an argument for not writing new policies in an area. But I can also make an argument for allowing existing policyholders to renew -- maybe not at the previous rate, but at an appropriate rate for the risk. As a matter of public policy, we ought to match the risk put on a homeowner with a mortgage by the bank with the risk assumed by the insurer when the homeowner pays their policies. Not let the insurance company lay the risk on the homeowner if they notice the risk has gone up before the loss is realised. Alternatively, we need to start treating buildings insurance more like (UK) life cover: I took out decreasing life insurance when I took out my mortgage, it'll pay off the mortgage if I die. The amount of cover goes down every year to roughly match me paying off my mortgage. No matter what happens to my health in the meantime, if I keep paying the premiums then I keep the cover -- even if I wouldn't qualify for new cover. Or maybe we need to say that if an insurance company declines to renew because they think the risk has risen too much, the customer should be allowed to claim on the expiring policy even if the house is still standing, because it's obviously worthless, and it's obviously due to a risk that was covered by the policy.
        Panzer04 2y ago
        If you want a longer reinsurance term, it needed to be agreed to upfront. I'd guess insurance companies are well aware of the risks of writing long-term policies and so don't usually offer them. That being said, your comparison to term life insurance is quite apt - I wonder if such insurance policies actually exist. I would guess they'd cost more than a yearly renewing policy, but who knows. Your other proposals as extensions to yearly terms certainly go too far. Annual renewal policies are commonplace, and it should be well understood that there's no obligation on any party to continue it.
    - mvc 2y ago
      Please do let me know where I can live that is guaranteed to be safe from unexpected natural disaster.
      - fishstock25 2y ago
        In your mind, probably. More seriously, nowhere of course, but if the risk is manageable (a fluffy term to mean predictable and not too high) then you'll find an insurance that covers you. Those natural conditions are dynamic though, so where such insurance is available can be (and is) subject to change. Predictably so. Nobody will provide you with the same car insurance when your car is new compared to 40 years later (same car). Things change. If you don't want your insurance to change, negotiate a 40-year term. Forcing them is nuts.
      - waterhouse 2y ago
        Not a guarantee, but it appears there's a nearly 200x difference between the most dangerous and the safest countries in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_disaster_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_d...
      - miohtama 2y ago
        Finland
- consp 2y ago
  Only you also take into account your cheap home will likely accelerate the problem. Which never happens.
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  How about the cost of your life? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    Building to protect occupants and building to make the structure salvageable afterwards may be two different goals. Think crumple zones in cars.
    - earnestinger 2y ago
      Nice point. Still, in wast majority of cases, house keeps standing -> habitant survival chance goes up. Cars being on the move, makes that distinction much much more relevant
      - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        For inhabitant survival a sifficient goal is something like “remains structurally intact for ~30 minutes after the end of the earthquake”. Which is significantly leas than is required for staying habitable
        earnestinger 2y ago
        Makes sense. I was fixating on the opposition of goals in the car (if car doesn’t bend/deform, then death risk increases).
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      Where is the crumple zone in the burned out buildings in California?
      - HPsquared 2y ago
        Evacuation. Hardly anyone died in these fires.
- poisonborz 2y ago
  Maybe people don't like to restart their lives like that if it's avoidable, even if it costs more.
- vasco 2y ago
  The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble someone else can rebuild your house and it might be cheaper.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    There’s not much rubble for a house made of wood!
  - michaelt 2y ago
    These wildfires produce surprisingly few deaths. Did you know the most destructive wildfire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire, destroyed 19,000 buildings but only caused 85 deaths? [1] [1] https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/climate-change/document/04wildfires.pdf https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/cli...
    - pixl97 2y ago
      Immediate deaths. How many suicides happened after the fact as an indirect cause?
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    Yes of course, but everything in life is a risk trade off. Presumably the person you’re replying to understands that.
- thisoneworks 2y ago
  Hah financialization strikes again. Try explaining this to a person from a third world country, they would say "what are you talking about". Also they would have better health care than your average American.
- bgnn 2y ago
  in case of earthquakes: to not to die.
Theodores 2y ago
In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet. If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the footprint of the building rather than let it 'slide off' to set fire to the property on the other side of the street. The parapet requirement did not extend to towns outside London, which makes me wonder why. The answer to that is to see what goes on in the USA. After a natural disaster they just pick themselves up and keep going. Florida was obliterated in 2024 but nobody cared after a fortnight. Same with the current wild fires, nobody will care next week, it will be forgotten, even though having one's home destroyed might be considered deeply traumatic. I think that the key to change is to not have too many natural disasters, ideally nobody has living memory of the last fire/flood/earthquake/pandemic/alien invasion/plague of locusts so that there is no point of reference or 'compassion fatigue'. Only then can there be a fair expectation of political will and the possibility of change.
- SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
  > ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...] Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat them. Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people today have never come across an iron lung, which is a testament to medical technology, but it means some silly opinions get way more traction than they should. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
  - Theodores 2y ago
    Yours is an interesting point as I am now questioning: > "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana I have expressed that idea with different attribution before now, but, on reflection, it is a 'trite quote' that can be trotted out far too easily!
- andsoitis 2y ago
johnisgood 2y ago
Yeah, I'm surprised that the damages of the LA fire occurred, because it was known beforehand that California had a fire problem (and also have an earthquake problem I think). I'm here in Eastern Europe and our buildings can withstand a lot of things. > we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones. As an European, it baffles me as well. If this doesn't happen to "cheap" homes here, why does it happen in California, to rich people's houses?
- nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
  The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance. When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.
  - areoform 2y ago
    > Gov. Gavin Newsom just released part of his solution to California’s home insurance crisis, and it boils down to a push to allow carriers to move faster to raise rates. > In most cases, the Department of Insurance would be required to act on an insurance carrier’s rate request within 60 days, unless extensions are necessary. > The proposed bill expedites the timelines laid out in Proposition 103, which requires insurance companies to have changes approved by the Department of Insurance and dictates how quickly the department must act on change requests. > Critics fear that shortening approval timelines will allow insurance companies to jack-up premiums without room for public appeals and sufficient review by the Department of Insurance. https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/30/california-insurance-crisis-new-newsom-trailer-bill/ https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/30/california-insurance-crisi...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fishstock25 2y ago
    > The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance. Obviously. Such a move by the government is just plain stupid. > When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die. No need to overgeneralize. Not every stupid move is immediately "socialism" and everything smart is "capitalism". It's obvious to every socialist that this move was stupid. In contrast, it's pretty clear that a purely market-based health system costs lives. Nobody is claiming though that "whenever societies dabble in capitalism it results in deaths". Pick your optimization target and then the right tool to reach that target. Sometimes that tool is to let prices regulate risk, sometimes it is laws to regulate risk, and sometimes it's something else entirely.
euroderf 2y ago
> Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones. It's all considered disposable, much like strip malls.
willvarfar 2y ago
(Recently there was a major public building collapse in Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on corruption and caused massive protests.)
- trinix912 2y ago
  What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.
  - grujicd 2y ago
    Not really. Old concrete cannopy collapsed. It was minimally modified as part of station reconstruction by adding some glass panels, but cannopy itself and its suspension beams were not rebuilt. It's not clear at this point whether this modification was responsible for collapse, but what is clear is that old cannopy and beams were not even inspected during this renovation. That's a major blunder which lead to loss of 15 lives, and main reason for that is systematic corruption where minimal work is performed while full price is billed by private companies close to rulling party.
spicyusername 2y ago
The problem always becomes, who is going to pay for that action.
arp242 2y ago
Reading up on this a bit, it seems it was the 1963 earthquake that precipitated the change in building regulations? The 1969 one seemed comparatively mild(?)
munificent 2y ago
> As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones. "Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones." Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc. Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.

Panzer04 2y ago

Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy insurance and rebuild later? This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced right to provide that incentive.

miohtama 2y ago
Maybe be there is no longer "cheap" and that's the issue
- fishstock25 2y ago
  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* hits the fan, they shouldn't come whine that everything gets sprayed with poo.
  - pestaa 2y ago
    But this cuts both ways. The insurers chose to provide their services in the area for the amount of money agreed upon. If anyone was more aware of the risks and probabilities, it's them. Why do they get to pull out now when it's time to hold their end of the contract?
    - fishstock25 2y ago
      That depends on what you mean with "pull out". Typically you pay a premium and that means you are insured for a certain period. A year or so. Everybody who is insured at the moment of course needs to be paid by the insurance under the terms they had agreed to. The insurances should not be allowed to "pull out" of this responsibility. But what about the next year? If no insurance wants to offer you another term, especially not for those same conditions, then it's their choice to "pull out" in that sense.
      - andrewaylett 2y ago
        On the other hand, suddenly not offering cover at all is a problem for people who have established interests in a property. I can see an argument for not writing new policies in an area. But I can also make an argument for allowing existing policyholders to renew -- maybe not at the previous rate, but at an appropriate rate for the risk. As a matter of public policy, we ought to match the risk put on a homeowner with a mortgage by the bank with the risk assumed by the insurer when the homeowner pays their policies. Not let the insurance company lay the risk on the homeowner if they notice the risk has gone up before the loss is realised. Alternatively, we need to start treating buildings insurance more like (UK) life cover: I took out decreasing life insurance when I took out my mortgage, it'll pay off the mortgage if I die. The amount of cover goes down every year to roughly match me paying off my mortgage. No matter what happens to my health in the meantime, if I keep paying the premiums then I keep the cover -- even if I wouldn't qualify for new cover. Or maybe we need to say that if an insurance company declines to renew because they think the risk has risen too much, the customer should be allowed to claim on the expiring policy even if the house is still standing, because it's obviously worthless, and it's obviously due to a risk that was covered by the policy.
        Panzer04 2y ago
        If you want a longer reinsurance term, it needed to be agreed to upfront. I'd guess insurance companies are well aware of the risks of writing long-term policies and so don't usually offer them. That being said, your comparison to term life insurance is quite apt - I wonder if such insurance policies actually exist. I would guess they'd cost more than a yearly renewing policy, but who knows. Your other proposals as extensions to yearly terms certainly go too far. Annual renewal policies are commonplace, and it should be well understood that there's no obligation on any party to continue it.
  - mvc 2y ago
    Please do let me know where I can live that is guaranteed to be safe from unexpected natural disaster.
    - fishstock25 2y ago
      In your mind, probably. More seriously, nowhere of course, but if the risk is manageable (a fluffy term to mean predictable and not too high) then you'll find an insurance that covers you. Those natural conditions are dynamic though, so where such insurance is available can be (and is) subject to change. Predictably so. Nobody will provide you with the same car insurance when your car is new compared to 40 years later (same car). Things change. If you don't want your insurance to change, negotiate a 40-year term. Forcing them is nuts.
    - waterhouse 2y ago
      Not a guarantee, but it appears there's a nearly 200x difference between the most dangerous and the safest countries in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_disaster_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_d...
    - miohtama 2y ago
      Finland
consp 2y ago
Only you also take into account your cheap home will likely accelerate the problem. Which never happens.
Almondsetat 2y ago
How about the cost of your life? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Building to protect occupants and building to make the structure salvageable afterwards may be two different goals. Think crumple zones in cars.
  - earnestinger 2y ago
    Nice point. Still, in wast majority of cases, house keeps standing -> habitant survival chance goes up. Cars being on the move, makes that distinction much much more relevant
    - hnaccount_rng 2y ago
      For inhabitant survival a sifficient goal is something like “remains structurally intact for ~30 minutes after the end of the earthquake”. Which is significantly leas than is required for staying habitable
      - earnestinger 2y ago
        Makes sense. I was fixating on the opposition of goals in the car (if car doesn’t bend/deform, then death risk increases).
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Where is the crumple zone in the burned out buildings in California?
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      Evacuation. Hardly anyone died in these fires.
poisonborz 2y ago
Maybe people don't like to restart their lives like that if it's avoidable, even if it costs more.
vasco 2y ago
The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble someone else can rebuild your house and it might be cheaper.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  There’s not much rubble for a house made of wood!
- michaelt 2y ago
  These wildfires produce surprisingly few deaths. Did you know the most destructive wildfire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire, destroyed 19,000 buildings but only caused 85 deaths? [1] [1] https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/climate-change/document/04wildfires.pdf https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/cli...
  - pixl97 2y ago
    Immediate deaths. How many suicides happened after the fact as an indirect cause?
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Yes of course, but everything in life is a risk trade off. Presumably the person you’re replying to understands that.
thisoneworks 2y ago
Hah financialization strikes again. Try explaining this to a person from a third world country, they would say "what are you talking about". Also they would have better health care than your average American.
bgnn 2y ago
in case of earthquakes: to not to die.

Theodores 2y ago

In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet. If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the footprint of the building rather than let it 'slide off' to set fire to the property on the other side of the street. The parapet requirement did not extend to towns outside London, which makes me wonder why. The answer to that is to see what goes on in the USA. After a natural disaster they just pick themselves up and keep going. Florida was obliterated in 2024 but nobody cared after a fortnight. Same with the current wild fires, nobody will care next week, it will be forgotten, even though having one's home destroyed might be considered deeply traumatic. I think that the key to change is to not have too many natural disasters, ideally nobody has living memory of the last fire/flood/earthquake/pandemic/alien invasion/plague of locusts so that there is no point of reference or 'compassion fatigue'. Only then can there be a fair expectation of political will and the possibility of change.

SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
> ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...] Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat them. Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people today have never come across an iron lung, which is a testament to medical technology, but it means some silly opinions get way more traction than they should. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
- Theodores 2y ago
  Yours is an interesting point as I am now questioning: > "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana I have expressed that idea with different attribution before now, but, on reflection, it is a 'trite quote' that can be trotted out far too easily!
andsoitis 2y ago

johnisgood 2y ago

Yeah, I'm surprised that the damages of the LA fire occurred, because it was known beforehand that California had a fire problem (and also have an earthquake problem I think). I'm here in Eastern Europe and our buildings can withstand a lot of things. > we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones. As an European, it baffles me as well. If this doesn't happen to "cheap" homes here, why does it happen in California, to rich people's houses?

nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance. When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.
- areoform 2y ago
  > Gov. Gavin Newsom just released part of his solution to California’s home insurance crisis, and it boils down to a push to allow carriers to move faster to raise rates. > In most cases, the Department of Insurance would be required to act on an insurance carrier’s rate request within 60 days, unless extensions are necessary. > The proposed bill expedites the timelines laid out in Proposition 103, which requires insurance companies to have changes approved by the Department of Insurance and dictates how quickly the department must act on change requests. > Critics fear that shortening approval timelines will allow insurance companies to jack-up premiums without room for public appeals and sufficient review by the Department of Insurance. https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/30/california-insurance-crisis-new-newsom-trailer-bill/ https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/30/california-insurance-crisi...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fishstock25 2y ago
  > The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance. Obviously. Such a move by the government is just plain stupid. > When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die. No need to overgeneralize. Not every stupid move is immediately "socialism" and everything smart is "capitalism". It's obvious to every socialist that this move was stupid. In contrast, it's pretty clear that a purely market-based health system costs lives. Nobody is claiming though that "whenever societies dabble in capitalism it results in deaths". Pick your optimization target and then the right tool to reach that target. Sometimes that tool is to let prices regulate risk, sometimes it is laws to regulate risk, and sometimes it's something else entirely.

euroderf 2y ago

> Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones. It's all considered disposable, much like strip malls.

willvarfar 2y ago

(Recently there was a major public building collapse in Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on corruption and caused massive protests.)

trinix912 2y ago
What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.
- grujicd 2y ago
  Not really. Old concrete cannopy collapsed. It was minimally modified as part of station reconstruction by adding some glass panels, but cannopy itself and its suspension beams were not rebuilt. It's not clear at this point whether this modification was responsible for collapse, but what is clear is that old cannopy and beams were not even inspected during this renovation. That's a major blunder which lead to loss of 15 lives, and main reason for that is systematic corruption where minimal work is performed while full price is billed by private companies close to rulling party.

spicyusername 2y ago

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

arp242 2y ago

Reading up on this a bit, it seems it was the 1963 earthquake that precipitated the change in building regulations? The 1969 one seemed comparatively mild(?)

munificent 2y ago

> As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones. "Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones." Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc. Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.