Summary
President Biden announced the federal government will cover 100% of costs for initial disaster response to the Los Angeles wildfires for 180 days.
The funding includes debris removal, temporary shelters, and first responder salaries.
Biden declared a major disaster, allowing immediate aid access, and directed the Pentagon to assist with firefighting resources.
With 28,000 acres burned, five deaths, and mass evacuations, Biden urged Congress to provide additional aid.
FEMA is coordinating recovery efforts on-site.
I don’t know about the US, but in the UK, rebuilding would be covered by the homeowner’s buildings insurance.
Although insurance companies would probably try to claim it as an Act Of God to get out of it. Don’t know how that would go legally…
I’m an Atheist. Act of God is nonsense. What does it even mean? It can mean whatever the fucking insurance wants it to mean and it’s horseshit
Read your contracts, the things that fall under this moniker will be listed.
I’m an atheist that understands that an act of god refers to any destructive natural event where the damage to property couldn’t have been reasonably prevented. And insurance companies detail exactly what is and isn’t covered per policy; it’s just that they can get away with denying coverage due to lack of oversight/policing of them.
I Germany we call it “Höhere Gewalt”. While that can refer to something supernatural, it just means “higher force” and I think it does a good job as a term.
It isn’t a good term though. There’s no such thing as the supernatural.
Yeah it’s not supernatural. It’s just that nature itself is a higher force than we are, or can you prevent an earthquake?
Don’t let reason and logic get in the way of his edginess.
Isn’t that what insurance is for?
Insurance is literally a market of risk assessments. The odds of any given event are x, y and z and the cost of each of those events are a, b, and c. Take the number of people who are applying for policies and spread the cost based on the risks and figure out how much each needs to pay to be able to cover x, y or z should/when any of them occur. There’s discussions to be had on how much a percentage of profit should be allowable on the top and how much to subsidize on known high risk coverage that is not mathematically reasonable but it all boils down to buying risk based on the chance and cost of any given event happening. Act of God/Force Majeure make complete sense when framing it this way. The insurance policy is based on known and predicted risks. You don’t have volcano insurance in NJ and you don’t have hurricane insurance in Kansas because they aren’t expected disasters so they aren’t included in the risk calculations. Act of God is a catch all term for things beyond the expected scope of the policy which is based on clearly established limits and scenarios.
That is one reason, yes.
You can’t prevent earthquakes but they sell earthquake insurance.
Many modern buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes of some magnitude; this is what reasonable prevention means.
You can’t prevent any natural force unless your uncle knows god (and is on good terms with them). What was stated was the ‘reasonable prevention of damage’. insurance companies that sell earthquake insurance won’t insure buildings that are not up to code, which in turn is based on locally expected disasters, their expected commonality, their expected severity, and what is considered to be reasonable measures for the prevention of damage (or an excess of e.g. mitigation).
For example, where I live you can’t get hail insurance unless you have impact resistant shingles. I had and have exactly that so I got hail insurance; after a particularly bad hail storm (and 8 previous years of wear) I filed a claim and had my entire roof redone at my insurer’s expense. I was kind of surprised how straight forward the process was and the stark absence of bullshittery, but I may have just gotten lucky. The area I’m in gets a lot of hail so it may also be in the insurer’s best interesting not to get a name for denying for hail damage.
You don’t have to use the non-specific pronoun. We all know god is a woman from the documentary by Kevin Smith.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses…
Yeah wtf with the religious taint. That’s what I call all these stupid terms that creep into secular government and businesses because it reminds me of the Zerg’s creep from StarCraft. Lol
No, fire insurance is a required part of home owners insurance in California, at least for now, but I’m sure the cost of this fire will have insurers squirming to get out of that.
Hopefully their insurers won’t go bankrupt
A lot of these places were dropped from their insurance because insurance companies made the risk calculation.
Edit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fires-california-palisades-fire-homeowners-insurance-state-farm-fair-losses/
I haven’t read the articles but there’s a bunch of headlines that insurance companies were dropping a lot of houses in the Palisades area.
Acts of God are covered by homeowners insurance unless explicitly stated otherwise. A homeowner in the Palisades without fire insurance is…playing with fire.
A homeowner in the Palisades without fire insurance probably doesn’t have it because their insurance company dropped them, after doing the calculations and realizing how likely a fire was
Very much depends on the insurance held