150 BILLION to rebuild LA ~ where's the money going to come from

[LaurieFairyCake]

That's HUGE amounts right?

I can't even conceive how much money that is is it more than our gdp?

Because insurance companies are multi-national.

The bill was pretty high when New Orleans had hurricane Katrina (160billion), and not nearly the wealth.

Because insurance is a global business and risk, and costs, are therefore borne globally.

The point -rather obviously - being that fire investigators don't say to the firefighters "Don't bother fighting this fire until we know what caused it."

A non fire-based analogy, if people are distracted, would be a surgeon saying "until we know why this patient has a knife sticking out of them, there's nothing I can do". Which appears to be some peoples approach to climate change.

Global temperatures are rising. We (well some of us) as a species are fortunate enough to be able to access and analyse and understand the data from the long history of our planet (which could be titled - "Earth: a history of climate in flux") to know the implications and mitigations.

British idea that.

Actually you're both right, and it can be a matter of perception

We're hardly talking tenements of course, but go down to Newport Beach / Corona del Mar - a filthy rich area where folk expect the mansions to have space - and they're crammed in so badly that you can hardly get a fag paper between them and residents' outside sitting areas abut the streets

I know it's not something to break our hearts over when there are so many other problems, but it's still a bit of a surprise when you first see it

You can’t have been to London or many cities in the U.K. if you think that! Or even the average suburb. And as shown by the numbers another poster has provided that’s just not true anyway. Have you been to Lahaina? The houses there were no more closer together than the average town in England. But we don’t have power lines swinging around where people are walking along the pavements.

That Reddit thread is an American guy who says he doesn’t know how they get round those issues he described in Europe, but they do.

It’s not about being densely populated - that would be a better reason for it! It will be money. And time, hassle etc but these events are now demonstrating this is not good long term. Same as the climate crisis!

Yes, but people per square kilometre is a different metric than structures per square kilometre, which is the real issue. Because in places like London you have people living in attached structures and flats. Places like LA have more structures as people live in detached houses.

Well I live in London and have for 20 years, so I've been to a few cities and average suburbs in the UK.

My point was that it's not just about population density. I'm sure cost is a factor, but it's not anywhere near the only one. The reddit posts go into some detail about the kinds of issues you can encounter.

We have a house in the US, not in CA, in a small rural town, and found out, when doing some landscaping (that actually included burying power lines) that about two feet under the soil, the entire ledge was granite. It took nearly two weeks of specialist diggers to put the tunnels through one property. It also required getting the town to give permission to close the road and take part of it out. We paid to have it re-paved and for the teams to inspect to make sure there was no damage to the other systems that run nearby (sewer, water, gas). Just coordinating the various different services was ridiculous. There is absolutely no way you could do that for entire densely packed urban areas, not to mention the potential damage to existing infrastructure for the kind of digging and tunnelling necessary.

I will also say that I've lived in 3 neighbourhoods in central London over the years and in every single one, our road and nearby roads seem to have required digging up fairly regularly, at great inconvenience. Our generally quiet road is clogged with standing traffic as we speak because National Grid and Thames Water have diverted traffic off the main road with a dig (once again).

I'm not arguing that it's not ultimately a better system. I am saying it's easy to sit behind a keyboard and announce confidently what should be done when you don't have to deal with the realities of doing it.

Have you been to Lahaina? The houses there were no more closer together than the average town in England. But we don’t have power lines swinging around where people are walking along the pavements.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're saying here? The infrastructure of Lahaina is nothing like the infrastructure of LA.