Once again, houses are sliding down hills in Southern California; this time in Laguna Beach. Anaheim Hills has also had its share of sliding houses, and Malibu offers scenes of destruction every year. Then there are those islands off of the Carolinas, where houses are destroyed every other year by hurricanes. I was called to jury duty when Aaron Spelling’s wife sued her HVAC contractor for $400,000 because the ocean damaged the HVAC system in her Malibu house – which was on the beach. :smack: (Being unsympathetic, I was not chosen for the jury.)
Now, I appreciate that the views are very nice from a house on a hill. But when you buy a house that was built on site known to suffer landslides, especially when being in an earthquake zone compounds the threat, does it really make sense to rebuild in the same location? Walking out of your back door and onto the sand at the beach is very convenient; but given the power of the ocean, shouldn’t one expect Bad Things to happen?
IMHO, people should pay more attention to where they put or buy their houses.
A) The HVAC contractor, knowing the location, should have accounted for the local environment and designed the system accordingly
or…
B) The HVAC contractor made claims that whatever they installed was the correct item in that instance and which later proved to be insufficient
Either of those two I could see fidning for the Spelling’s. However, if the HVAC contractor told the Spelling’s that they needed the $400,000 system for that area and they opted for the (say) $50,000 system then it is their own problem.
As to the OP I agree. If you decide to build a house (for instance) on the slopes of a volcano for the nice mountain view I cannot generate a lot of sympathy when Mother Nature buries it under a lava flow.
If I were to build a house on slopes where it is known houses slide down the hill I’d make damn sure the contractor drove the foundation half-way to the earth’s core to keep it from happening. Of course, that doesn’t help you from another house sliding onto you from above or a mud flow coming through your front door but I suppose rpecautions could be made for that too. If you do not have the money for said precautions (or are just too cheap) then tough luck for you when your house rolls down the hill.
True enough. IIRC, the claim was that the contractor did not install the system correctly, given the proximity of the ocean. But when your house is on the beach, there’s only so much you can do to protect it and its systems from the environment. How did she think the sand got on the beach in the first place?
I agree in general (It still kills me to see California houses built on stilts near a beach. This, in Earthquake Country), but in some cases there’s not much choice, and people should be aware of it. Sadly, they often aren’t. Read John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, especially the chapter on LA. The various disasters that overwhwelm people there – the earthquakes, the flooding, the fires, and the mudslides, are by no means unconnected. They affect each other, and the combination of all of them conspire to create worse conditions than any one alone will. Earthquakes shatter the rock, so that only the treees and brush hold the slope together, but these are “supposed to be” burned away naturall at regular intervals, only people prevent brush fires, so you get less frequent and much bigger blazes that are devastating themselves, but which also kill off the plant life that was maintaining the integrity of the slopes. It also adds a water-impervious layer atop the soil, guaranteeing that the next big rainstorm (possibly seeded by particulate matter in the air from the fire) will sweep down the slope rather than soak in, and will take all that loosened surface rock and soil with it, making a mud slide. That’s why LA has those concrete-lined catchbasins and riverbeds (like the one used in the chase scene in Terminator 2, or in Grease, or countless other flicks). The problem is, most people don’t know what they’re for, and don’t remember or know about the last fire/mudslide in their area 50 years previously. So they buy homes there, and get caught in the next cycle’s fire/slide.
But what are they going to do? Housing in LA is costly and rare, and it’s better to live on the mou8ntainside, above the smog.
Similarly, it’s a bitch to live on a floodplain near the floodable Mississippi-Missouri, but that’s where the land and the jobs are.
Island Beach, New Jersey (home of Seaside Heights and Seaside Park) is basically a sandbar that was completely reconfigured by a hurricane back in the 1950s. There’s no reason another hurricane couldn’t do the same in the near future, destroying plenty of ghouses in the process. But it’s prime real estrate because it hasn’t happened in half a century, and it’s a great beach.
Ditto for Hawaiians living near volcanos, and people in the Netherlands living below sea level (Do they get flooding from broken dikes the same way broken levees flood land around the Mississippi? You never hear about it.) Or Pompeiians living on the side of Vesuvius.
An awful lot of prime land is, unfortunately, on iffy plots . You pays your money and you takes your chances. Only some people don’t want to recognize that they are taking chances.
I agree and wonder why insurance companies keep stepping to the plate and covering these needless losses. No doubt they charge these homeowners high rates and some states may require coverage, but still… When I hear affluent people say they’ve suffered two catastrophic losses and intend to re-build, I wonder what the hell’s going on. If you locate your property on land that has a high incidence of loss–some reasonable standard can be developed, I think–then I think you should self-insure and not expect State Farm to cover your hubris.
If state farm is willing to take the bet–and they’ve got some really smart people to make sure the bet is in their favor–why shouldn’t we let them?
Now, there is a legitimate debate about government-funded aid to people that couldn’t/didn’t get insurance. But insurance companies know what they are doing.
You know what’s really stupid? How about ALL SIX LOCAL CHANNELS interrupting regular programming all morning long to bring us a live, uninterrupted coverage? Yeah, for a few minutes it’s interesting, but after six hours of NOTHING happening, you realize it’s just a freakin’ PILE OF DIRT. At least brush fires and thunderstorms are interesting!
However I did like the one woman who got scratched up to hell when she tried to rescue her cats. (She was the only reported injury in the event.)
State Farm may employ an army of brilliant statisticians and actuaries, but the top brass still managed to drive the company into a financial brick wall a couple years ago. State Farm thereafter had to pull out of many markets, reformulate, purge many brilliant statisticians and actuaries, and is now slowly recovering.
Bit of a hijack, but how do the concrete-lined riverbeds (or perhaps arroyos) necessarily mean that they are there because of mud slides and the like? Albuquerque has a lot of concrete-lined arroyos to help control and channel the water flow from the mountain to the river, as well as a couple of north-south diversion channels. That’s got nothing really to do with fires or mudslides, just heavy rains during thunderstorms. (By the way, does anyone know if that’s an arroyo down the middle of I-40? It’s always struck me as an odd divider.)
Besides, LA needs those channels and the subway to help channel the lava from the eventual volcano.
As much as I hated James Watt, I believe he advocated a policy that should have been implemented. IIRC he said if your home (located on a barrier island) was destroyed by natural forces (hurricaine, shifting sand – a barrier island!) your insurance company would be allowed to compensate you, but you could not rebuild on a barrier island again. You had to permanently move.
Perhaps a similar approach is needed here. Compensate the owners of the surfing homes but as part of the package, rebuilding on the unstable lands is permanently prohibited. Given enough natural disasters in California and over time, many of them will no longer cause as much damage.
Our local Fox news reported that the houses were not insured against acts of God… apparently California law prevents this coverage in that area for some reason. I, for one, would take that as a pretty big hint that building on that site would be a Bad Idea.
Let’s not forget that there are some wealthy people who seem to honestly believe that money can change the laws of physics.
Farmers who build in river floodplains or the slopes of volcanos benefit from the rich soil in such locations, so their gamble that they’ll have enough good years to pay for the occassional rebuilding required makes some sense, but suburbanites building on unstable hillside, and worse yet using wood construction and flammable landscaping in brush-fire zones, don’t even have that excuse.
I have to ask - doesn’t California have structural engineers? How were these buildings built in the first place?
My father-in-law is an engineer, and I know that before he signs his name on a set of plans he makes damn sure the building is strong enough to withstand anything short of a plane crash, because no matter what happens to a building, the moment it falls down it’s all legally (and morally, I might add) completely his fault. Why isn’t the system working here?
The Dutch bore the brunt of a horrendous flood back in 1953 and since then have been attacking the problem with a huge degree of enthusiasm and creativity and a truly staggering amount of money. Which doesn’t mean floods don’t happen any more, but that they’re less frequent and less severe than you’d expect. As I understand it, the real problem now is not the North Sea any more, so much as the water coming downstream through the rivers that empty into the North Sea through the Netherlands. The upstream flood plains of those rivers have basically been covered in concrete at this point.
Or the modern-day residents of Naples and the surrounding towns and villages that now occupy the slopes of that well-known volcano. But hey, it hasn’t actually killed anybody for, what, a few decades now…
Indeed. Unfortunately that seems to include some planners who are perfectly happy to put (say) high-rise buildings on barrier islands in hurricane country, and just not think about how they’re going to get everybody out of there when the next storm comes…
Ever look at the Yahoo! News message boards? Makes me glad I found you folks. There are folks there saying that nobody should ever build a home on the side of a hill or a mountain. Flatlanders can be sooooo cute sometimes!
Hmm, assuming I was crazy enough to build a home on the slopes overlooking Laguna Beach and the darn thing took on legs, moving two lots down the hill, could I be sued for trespassing?
