To the editor: So, David Steiner’s concrete house is the sole survivor in a destroyed Malibu neighborhood. I discover that predictable, however apparently insurance coverage firms don’t.
My house is a wholly concrete construction with a dirt-over-concrete roof. Just lately our insurance coverage was canceled as a result of we’re in a fireplace zone. True, however they didn’t cancel our neighbor’s late-Fifties wood-frame house in the identical zone.
We hear that insurers in California are mandated to contemplate a house’s fire-resistant components. It appears you get credit score for screening vents however punished for constructing an primarily fireproof construction.
Sure, California’s pure disasters make it very onerous for insurers. What would it not take to wake them up and get them to truly take a look at the fire-related components of a home fairly than, as they do now, put properties into classes and deny people who fail to slot in a kind of packing containers?
Ann Cottrell, San Diego
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To the editor: Listed here are two plain information: First, there’ll all the time be wildfires in California, and second, wooden burns.
When folks rebuild their properties this time, will they keep away from the usage of wooden and different combustibles? Unlikely until they’re pressured.
However it may occur very simply. Native and state ordinances may be the beginning — that may be the easiest way if politics didn’t hold the whole lot tied up in courtroom till it was too late and all of the tinder was in place for the following hearth.
The most definitely push to finish the usage of combustibles will come from the insurance coverage trade. By providing deep reductions or just refusing to insure, firms can save not solely our rebuilding communities, but in addition our forests. They’ll additionally save themselves from chapter.
Yet another factor: If you have already got a wooden home in a fire-prone space, stucco it. That’s what saved my Altadena house from the firestorm that leveled my neighborhood.
Steve Huffsteter, Altadena
