Is it Worth Living in Areas Prone to Natural Disaster?
By LYDIA KUHNERT ‘28
Cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room, phone in hand, I watched as my neighborhood burnt to the ground. The high school went first — a ginormous building, once housing four thousand students, quickly engulfed by the flames. I texted my mother in shock and utter disbelief. I genuinely could not believe it. I sat for another hour, watching the fire spread next to the supermarket, then to the church, then to the ballet studio. I watched in horror as my preschool burnt down. The community, the town I had lived in my whole life, no longer existed. It’s difficult to completely convey how devastating this fire was. Imagine you woke up one day, checked your phone, and Exeter was gone — Oba destroyed, Lexie’s in ashes, and the Academy Building decimated. That’s what happened to the Palisades. There is nothing left.
Most of my friends from the Palisades are now homeless. The ones whose houses did survive can’t move back for months, if they do move back at all. The town is gone, the people are gone, and lives are in ruins. I was always told that our town was too urban to catch fire, and to ignore the risk. However, after seeing the destruction this fire brought upon my community, I can’t help but wonder: Is it worth living in areas prone to natural disaster at all?
In order to answer this, we have to weigh the financial strain and possibility of hardship against general quality of life. Hardship will refer to the emotional and physical toll that arises from being affected by a natural disaster, and quality-of-life the general wellbeing of the person during the average day-to-day.
In a wildfire, the most immediate financial risk is usually to that of your property, or in some fast-moving fires, to your life. Without insurance, you risk losing the worth of your house, and everything in it, a loss devastating to the lives of most people. In areas of high risk, insurance prices are exorbitantly high, ranging from a few thousand dollars for extremely basic insurance, to tens of thousands for good coverage. Many people can only afford the most basic plans, leaving them extremely vulnerable to disaster. Furthermore, some people do opt to pay for the expensive options, only for the companies to drop them when the risk becomes too high for them to pay out. In California, the government has implemented a price cap to limit the rate in which insurance companies can increase their prices. In theory, this sounds like a well planned initiative to combat price gouging, but in practice, when companies determine the risk has increased by more than what the increase can cover, they pull out of the area, and drop existing families from their plans. These families are then forced to find new insurance, usually worse insurance, before the new companies run actuarial models, and come to the same conclusions as the first company that pulled out. Eventually, families in high risk areas are left unable to find any sort of substantial coverage, and are forced to turn to the state run model, the California FAIR Plan. In just two years, 500,000 people in Los Angeles were dropped from their insurance plans, and demand for the FAIR Plan has skyrocketed. FAIR is meant as a last-resort offering, and offers the most basic coverage. For families across the Palisades, FAIR was the only plan willing to take them. After their houses burnt down, FAIR coverage couldn’t provide the complete total of money necessary for them to rebuild, and these families lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Without good insurance, living in disaster-prone areas is an extremely high risk from a financial standpoint.
We must also consider the emotional toll a wildfire takes on a person. If the fire hasn’t yet spread to your street, you spend every moment in fearful wake, praying that your house isn’t next to burn. If the fire has spread to your area, you must cope with the loss of your community and home quickly. The world doesn’t stop moving when your life does, and you must be able to adjust and hold yourself together. Living in a disaster prone area, the thought always lingers in the back of your mind that tomorrow this could all be gone. Sometimes it is.
So far, we have considered only the negatives, but negatives shouldn’t govern a decision alone. There are so many benefits that come from living in a place like Los Angeles which should be recognized as well. The nature of disaster prone cities is different, however I am most familiar with the character of LA, so that is what I will discuss. LA is a land of opportunity. From Hollywood to Pasadena, from Santa Monica to Long Beach, LA is pure opportunity — exciting jobs, big breaks, interesting places. There is so much to be gained from living here, and so much to offer. For people who have been here for their whole lives, the connection is even stronger. We build our memories in the salt water, in the downtown district, and hiking to Inspiration Point. When you live in LA, you are a part of LA — you learn Spanish, you surf on the weekends, and of course you groan when you have to drive all the way out to Encino. It is a big ask to just move away from it all. Near the coast or in the mountains, often areas where wildfires are the most dangerous, LA offers gorgeous natural scenery — a perfectly blue ocean, rolling hills, and warm sun year round. The people are nice (for the most part) and we all have dreams. People come to LA for a reason, but we stay in LA for many reasons.
When you live in a disaster-prone area like LA, you have to accept the risk of destruction. You have to accept that though the place you’ve lived your whole life seems permanent, it could be gone the next day. Without good insurance, your life could be over with it. However, if you are able to find good insurance, and if you are able to accept the possibility of disaster, is it not preferable to risk the chance of loving and losing, rather than not loving at all?