Many of the homes at risk in California are modestly priced, as Californians seek housing in far-flung suburbs because of the high real estate costs in or near cities. Here in Arizona, a spate of wildfires will quickly reveal the number of people who have retirement homes, vacation homes, or longtime family homes in forests and brushy areas. Some indeed are very fancy structures, but some are just normal houses and mobile homes.

LOL! Water runs uphill toward money!

Then you have the fires in the west burning multi-million dollar homes, the man hours fighting/containing/preventing those fires. Anyway, I’m sure the associated costs are way more than those for annual hurricanes.

It’s all relative.

Oh, I’ve heard it said ‘the next war will be fought over water.’ Just something to think about for you folks in the desert southwest.

Most of California, certainly in L.A. area, actually is desert: water is piped long distances to fill the large population’s needs, and the river that once flowed to the ocean there is now an empty concrete ditch (or was, the last time I saw it). The desert cities of Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas in fact are modeled after the planning strategy that resulted in the sprawl that is L.A. (sometimes I think our City Parents studied everything L.A. did wrong and then went forth and did likewise!).

Tucson actually has some fairly sensible water-use regulation, since much of their supply comes from surface water, but the Phoenix area seems to be blessed with more golf courses than children, and we went through a particularly demented period in which builders took to laying out tracts around ridiculous artificial “lakes.” Now, however, developers are required to prove that a 100-year supply of water exists before breaking ground. By whose standards this 100-year estimate is made remains to be seen…but at least it’s an effort in the right direction.

It’s highly dubious whether enough water will be available over the next century to supply the number of people who are already here, even in the major cities that have managed to glom onto sources supposedly guaranteed to keep them going into the foreseeable future. But really attractive smaller cities such as Prescott and Flagstaff are already having water problems, even as more and more people move there.

Is running out of water exactly a natural disaster? It seems to me to be more a case of human short-sightedness. If you’ve ever read Cadillac Desert, you’ll know that these issues were recognized many years ago. Reisner wrote the first edition in the early 1990s, and even then what he reported was not exactly breaking news. But despite the widespread knowledge that the plans laid for the Central Arizona Project and distribution of water among the Four Corners states were based on a period that was freakishly wet, a heedless leadership (many of whom were developers themselves) and a greedy construction industry pushed ahead with luring hordes of people to settle here, at one point blading irreplaceable desert lands at the rate of an acre an hour. In fact, the “drought” conditions we’ve seen for the past decade or so are closer to the historically normal precipitation in the Sonoran Desert and Colorado Plateau, and so it’s reasonable to expect that over a century we will not have enough water to support a larger population. Or possibly even the population already settled here.

Who will pay for this bad policy? I don’t know. Probably the taxpayers. Homeowner’s insurance won’t cover your loss on a house rendered worthless because there’s no longer enough water to take a shower or flush the toilet, to say nothing of running a dishwasher, clothes washer, and swimming pool. Many who live here believe the vast outlying suburbs will be abandoned, left to crumble into the ruined desert: Styrofoam-and-plaster ghost tracts. Others think they will become huge slums as property values, already vastly deflated, fall deep into the low-income range and stay there. Whatever happens, you can be sure someone will end up paying for it, and that someone probably will not be the developers.

In the case of Katrina, the losses can’t quite be laid at the feet of individual homeowners living in harm’s way, because some of the hardest-hit districts were low-income areas. It’s reasonable to conclude that most folks living in inexpensive housing couldn’t afford to move to higher ground. But…where was the leadership? Why, given what was already known about the risks (experts quoted in the Scientific American article feared that as many as 100,000 people could die in a major flood), why was low-income housing not built in safer areas? Why were the levees not shored up before a huge hurricane bore down on the populace? IMHO, it’s as much the responsibility of the governments that knew about these issues as it is that of citizens living in the area.

Think of it. Credible experts warn that a hundred thousand people could be killed in flooding associated with a major storm; a million people trapped inside the bowl that New Orleans occupies; another million in neighboring suburbs. For god’s sake. That’s TWO POINT ONE MILLION HUMAN LIVES! And little or nothing is done?

IMHO, insurance companies (and their customers who pay premiums, who comprise a far smaller group than the entire citizenry represented by the US and Louisiana governments) should not be expected to bear the cost of this kind of bureaucratic and elected-leadership stupidity. Maybe it takes a tax increase to cover the results of such incompetence to make voters understand what “kill the beast” really means.

Are we any more foolish than the millions of people, like yourself, who live in a desert? After all, man is pumping water into desert communities and that isn’t natural or cost-effective in the long run. The problem also lies in the fact that natural disasters happen almost everywhere. If no one lived in quake-prone California or flood-prone New Orleans, then do we all move to the few areas where natural disasters never happen? Where is that, by the way?

As for others subsidizing my foolishness, I am a tax-paying citizen and have been for many many years. I know a couple who could not afford one child yet decide to have two. They take advantage of family and government assistence, tax breaks for children etc.. just to scrape by. They don’t live in a disaster-prone area but their foolishness cost me as a taxpayer.

Like I said I respect your opinion but I hope you know that there are two sides to every story and not all canyon dwellers are rich.

I do agree with part of what you say, however.