Hurricane$, Earthquake$, and Flood$
Reeves, Richard
Hurricane$ Earthquake$, and Flood$ If people want to build their houses in dangerous places, why should the rest of us pay when disaster strikes? BY RICHARD REEVES "We should not provide federal...
...Therefore most homeowners cannot get any kind of coverage for normal damage that costs less than the deductible: cracked walls, broken pipes or windows, crumbled chimneys in the living room...
...For days that October, television news was dominated by movie producers and other Malibu folk telling sob stories and demanding that the government build a wall to stop the slides on the other side of Pacific Coast Highway...
...wrote Fred Morley of Free Union, Virginia, to his senator, John Warner, as Congress voted to send more than $8.6 billion in emergency aid to California after the Los Angeles earthquake of January 17...
...Boland, whose home was hit hard enough to leave her sleeping in a car in case her house collapsed overnight, was asked by the Los Angeles Times whether she would favor a temporary state sales tax increase to finance relief and rebuilding after the after-shocks...
...The total value of those subsidized policies is a staggering $248 billion...
...These people live in California voluntarily...
...The rest of us pay indirectly in the form of higher insurance premiums on safer ground or directly in the kind of emergency aid that prompted Mr...
...It was bailed out with $1.2 billion of federal funds in the early 1980s and may be headed for another taxpayer-financed rescue because of the $30 billion of damage caused last year by the horrific Midwestern floods and by Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992...
...In the earthquake of last January 17, a few houses not far from me ended up below the smog line—on the Pacific Coast Highway, to be exact...
...I then realized something: Nature never meant for 10 million people to live in the Los Angeles basin, and nature wanted the basin back...
...They live or vacation in the most dangerous of places—in Malibu, Fire Island, and West-hampton Beach, along the coast in Florida and South Carolina, on the Great Lakes, and along the great rivers that divide the Midwest...
...The feds," she said, "are going to have to come through for us...
...On the other coast, 3,000 miles away, ocean storms in December of 1992 and March of last year swept away 81 homes on Fire Island, New York, which, like Westhampton Beach, is basically a long sandbar off the south shore of Long Island...
...Without the root systems of gnarled little trees and other brush to hold the land in place, a little rain moves more earth than a fleet of John Deere tractors...
...You got it, Virginians, there is a Santa Claus...
...Not good enough, said Wilson...
...So Californians, great Western individualists all, beginning with our Republican governor, Pete Wilson, want government on our backs this time...
...New cycles of growth and new roots hold the hills in place above expensive coastal strips like Malibu, where for years not one home has sold for less than $1 million...
...The Palisades, by the way, are above the smog line...
...Why should this Virginian provide the insurance with my tax monies that the Californians voluntarily elected not to buy for themselves...
...Instead, Clinton said, California would have to put up only 10 percent...
...Subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous, you see, is part of living in the home of the free and the land of the brave...
...Just pay up, so we can get back to complaining about Washington and big government...
...The normal deductible is 10 percent of property value...
...I watched eight houses explode into puffs of bright gas just before the flames passed by us...
...Our first official demands were that the rest of the nation pay for the risks we took to live in the sun by the sea...
...I know because I make it a point to try to live as close as possible to my financial betters—usually just renting, but the view doesn't know that...
...Most of the Fire Island homes, which are summer houses, will be rebuilt with storm and flood insurance money by policies that cost as little as $900 a year...
...They're going to have to start giving something back to California...
...My first earthquake was 69 days later—a 4.6 on the Richter scale, on January 1, 1979...
...Those, of course, are also among the most beautiful (and most expensive) places to live in the country...
...Even ignoring the fact that the federal government gets its money from taxation, too, it was the feds (or taxpayers in the rest of the country) who built the dams on the Colorado River that made the world-class development of Southern California possible and who created defense and aerospace industries that made the Southland, as we call it, so rich for so long so effortlessly...
...But surely, said the Times reporter, George Skelton, tax money was needed to rebuild broken freeways and such...
...Most of the earthquake damage is not covered by insurance of any kind...
...Morley's letter...
...And perhaps part of what makes the rich different from you and me is that they are braver...
...The idea was the federal government would use flood insurance as a lever by only offering it where state and local governments adopted and enforced building codes that prevented new building in dangerous coastal and flood areas, and required upgrading or moving buildings in obvious danger—my house at 714 Dune Road in Westhampton Beach was a perfect example before it floated to New Jersey...
...The fires of 1978 were, as fires always are, followed by mudslides...
...That was also the year I moved to Pacific Palisades for the first time—on October 23, 1978...
...I'd add another: aid...
...There are a couple of quite natural reasons—natural in the sense of human nature—that this is so...
...He was holding out for zero percent...
...The law failed from the start...
...The reason for the failure was the unwillingness of local and state officials to displease developers lusting after beach and riverfront property...
...In the Midwest, the annual rates on homes along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers are as low as $300 for a $185,000 home...
...now I live in Pacific Palisades, California, across the road from Arnold Schwarzenegger's place (with a moat separating it from the rest of the country), and down the hill from where Ronald Reagan lived before he became president...
...The height of the Palisades can, however, cause some problems...
...Warner put the letter in the Congressional Record, noting: "We have to recognize that there are geographical areas in this country that are highly vulnerable to disaster and somehow recognize that we cannot go back to the American taxpayer time after time to rebuild the freeways, to restore the military bases, to rebuild the levees...
...The total damage may reach $20 billion and by the middle of February, the number of applications for Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance had reached 360,000, more than the previous high of 304,000 applications after Hurricane Hugo hit the South four years ago...
...Insurance was available, but many reported that they didn't buy it because of the cost...
...BY RICHARD REEVES "We should not provide federal funds to rebuild private property...
...Rick Lazio—D'Amato has been able to block reform of the Disaster Relief Act, screwing the rest of America to protect coastal homeowners and developers on Long Island...
...In simple terms, everyone else in the country pays higher taxes and insurance premiums to protect property that is uninsurable under any rational system...
...It's you—and millions of other taxpayers who, one way or another, subsidize Californians and other folks rich enough, lucky enough, or foolish enough to live at water's edge or in the picturesque path of fire, mudslide, or tremors...
...We need to rethink the whole concept of emergency aid from Washington...
...We've got to start finding ways to conserve money...
...President Clinton said that because of the size of the quake, and the fact that California has had fire this year, too, and is in stubborn economic recession, he was recommending that the federal government waive its requirement that states put up 25 percent of disaster aid to match the federal share of 75 percent...
...They've taken our military bases and all those jobs...
...You see, out here we all feel as if we live in Malibu—or should...
...Right Richard Reeves is a syndicated columnist and the author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993...
...Like many other government programs, the 1974 act is a good idea become bad law...
...The career of Senator Al-fonse D'Amato of New York is a textbook example, and so far—with help in the House of Representatives from another New York Republican, Rep...
...No," she said...
...Earthquake is the most incomprehensible of threats and the most expensive to insure against—as high as $10 a year per $1,000 of coverage...
...People are taxed to death...
...State and local politics, in general, is driven by real estate money, including contributions from developers and builders...
...Just like those people living on the rivers in the Midwest, they knew the risk...
...Actually, we want a ride on government's back...
...The president owes us...
...I'm sure you saw the pictures...
...In fact, Californians have started joking that there are seasons here: fire, flood, earthquake, and riot...
...That is the true voice of California, a state that feels owed to, a state that sees misfortune as somebody else's problem, always somebody else's fault...
...But under the Disaster Relief Act of 1974, the federal government mandates that insurers cover those homes and at least 2.6 million others on an assigned-risk basis...
...And the state did just that, with the help of federal emergency aid—all for a dozen rich people living on the beach...
...I imagined the next landfall was France, though actually it was New Jersey—which is where the house ended up, in pieces, after a hurricane in 1978...
...All Shook Up The January earthquake in Los Angeles is dol-lar-for-dollar apparently going to be the worst natural disaster in American history—if you believe that it is natural to build great cities above great faults in the earth's crust...
...That's wrong...
...Obviously, no insurance company willingly would offer those kinds of rates for homes on stilts in shifting sands where neither God nor law meant for man to settle...
...In summers past, I rented on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, New York, writing a book as I looked across the Atlantic...
...Within an hour after we settled in, we were preparing to evacuate as brushfires moved across the far ridge of our canyon, driven by winds of 50 miles an hour...
...People who live in potential disaster areas tend to avoid thinking about disasters...
...As I write this, I am looking across the greens of the Riveria Country Club to Catali-na Island, 26 miles across the sea on my right, and, to the left, the snowcap of Mount Baldy more than 50 miles away...
...Meanwhile in California, the last resort for homeowners seeking lire insurance in brush areas is the state's California Fair Plan Association, an assigned-risk program with 26,500 policyholders in areas where lightning has ignited brush fires in the hills since before there was a man or a woman on the planet—that is the way nature has always generated fertilizer (basically nitrates in the ash...
...Paula Boland, the State Assemblywoman from Northridge, the community at the epicenter of the earthquake, agreed totally with the governor...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 4
