California is trying to quickly rebuild homes destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires. Should it?

In response to what could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, California leaders have taken swift action to help residents rebuild thousands of homes and businesses destroyed in a spate of deadly wildfires.

“Once the fires are extinguished, victims who lost their homes and businesses must be able to rebuild quickly and without roadblocks. The executive order I signed today will help reduce permitting delays, an important first step to help our communities recover faster and stronger,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement Sunday.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued her own executive order on Monday.

“This order is the first step in eliminating red tape and red tape to organize based on urgency, common sense and compassion,” Bass wrote. “We will do everything we can to bring Angelenos back home.”

But not everyone believes the impulse to rebuild fire-prone areas makes sense in the long term, especially as climate change continues to increase the risk of wildfires.

“There were completely understandable, natural reactions. You can see it in elected officials saying they’re going to rebuild,” Alice Hill, an energy and environmental expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former judge in Los Angeles, told Yahoo News. “The challenge is that the nature of the land beneath our feet is changing. The nature of extreme weather events is changing and these changes are making some areas far less safe than in the past.”

Lessons learned?

Some climate scientists, who have long warned about the consequences of rising global temperatures, also question the wisdom of simply replacing the destroyed homes as they were before the latest round of wildfires devastated Southern California.

“In Pacific Palisades and the Eaton Fire, once the fire reached the urban area, it wasn’t really a vegetation or forest problem,” said Peter Gleick, a hydrologist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute. “They were buildings burning one after the other, setting their neighbors on fire. So that raises the whole question of what kind of urban development we should have. What building materials should we allow?”

A growing body of scientific research has shown that the conditions that made these wildfires so severe will only get worse thanks to climate change as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels.

“There will be more of these whiplash drought events in California in the future,” said UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, pointing out that climate change is giving an area with a naturally dry climate and Santa Ana is just another one Adding a layer of risk Wind events already made it vulnerable to wildfires.

Difficult decisions

Just like residents who have lost their homes in coastal states like Florida due to hurricanes intensified by climate change, the decision to rebuild in California is much more than a simple risk calculation.

“We are already no longer thinking about the next steps; We jumped into action pretty quickly,” Dustin Bramell, whose family of four lost their home in the Palisades fire, told The Washington Post. “The only thing we have now is our friends, family and community.”

For many people like Bramell, who believe climate change is increasing the risks to life in Los Angeles, the question is shifting from rebuilding to a safer course of action. California home builder Mike Roddy has been criticizing the “use of wood frames” for homes for years. “Embers and strong winds can easily ignite wood,” he said in an email. His company, Butte Build Better, has built more than 600 steel-framed homes and units.

“We face enormous problems if we continue to burn fossil fuels and cut down native forests,” he said in a 2022 interview, adding: “There are substitutes.”

But Hill questions whether it will be possible to stay ahead of climate change in disaster-prone places.

“You can either build a structure that simply survives. “It may look like a concrete dome, not very aesthetically pleasing, but it could survive the severe wildfires we have, or they won’t rebuild there,” she added. “The insurance industry is signaling to us that the way we build in these areas is simply not safe.”

“Money will talk”

Another expert on the ongoing insurance crisis, former Obama administration science adviser Susan Crawford, agrees that while it is “a situation full of fear and desperation,” it is also “disturbing that we are unable to do so “To take a more long-term perspective”.

“Given what we know about the accelerating, violent impacts of climate change, it seems short-sighted to rebuild exactly as you did before the disaster, but I understand the human impulse to get everything back on track as quickly as possible “Return to the status quo,” she said. “But insurance companies are increasingly demanding that a home – and a community – be built so that the risk of fire is minimal. In this situation, money will talk.”

In part, Newsom and Bass’s push to loosen building codes is a response to the at-times byzantine restrictions that can lead to long delays in rebuilding after wildfires.

Consider how quickly reconstruction efforts were carried out after the Woolsey fire in 2018. The fire destroyed 1,643 buildings in Malibu and claimed three lives. Since then, the city of Malibu says it has issued 296 permits for home reconstruction and only 363 reconstruction applications have been approved by the Planning Commission.

Crawford, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has compassion for both those traumatized by the loss of their homes and local governments that will soon face a shortfall in property tax revenue. But she has also examined the domino effect that climate disasters bring to the larger US economy.

“Los Angeles County is made up of 88 separate municipalities, separate local governments. In some cases, the individual cities will perform differently,” she said. “But the bigger picture is that the entire region will be a place of declining property values ​​and loss of revenue, and that will have a major impact on the ability to finance services and public infrastructure.”

“The American West is in big trouble.”

For California residents who decide that living in the state isn’t worth the risks posed by a fire, the question becomes: “Where should they move?”

“It is obvious that the American West is in deep trouble. “We have experienced extreme heat, extreme drought and now wildfires that suggest we need to incentivize development in slightly safer areas or at least consider removing government support for infrastructure in areas that are no longer insurable Crawford said.

But both Crawford and Hill emphasize that there are ways to improve the situation in Southern California.

“It will take courage, but we have seen communities do this after a disaster. After the Great Fire in London in 1666, all wooden buildings were banned. I’m sure it wasn’t popular,” said Hill, who recently wrote an article about rebuilding Los Angeles. “Nero said when Rome was burning that we would have wider streets, it was too dangerous to have these narrow streets. Following the Great Chicago Fire, similar restrictions on building materials were imposed. This is an opportunity to really push big ideas forward.”