Late to the party here but throwing in some local thoughts. It's just sad. I have four fraternity brothers I know of that have lost their homes.
Because people inevitably want to discuss the causes I'll offer several. For starters it was just a really unfortunate mix of drought conditions and Santa Ana winds. Really hard to prevent that. But there are things we could have done differently.
The first is Prop 103 which was passed by voters in 1988 to regulate insurance rates. It basically said the gov't has to approve any increase in insurance premiums. It was sold as being pro consumer. What it did however was keep rates artificially low and didn't allow insurance companies to effectively price in risk. One of the big results being homes were built in high risk areas that if market pricing mechanisms were in place would have made it extremely costly to build. It's the reason so many insurance firms have started to stop writing policies in California or pull out all together. But you don't you don't get elected in California saying we need insurance costs to rise so we just turned a blind eye essentially until it was too late.
And preparedness is a whole other long discussion. Our approach to climate change has been going after oil companies and trying to subsidize EV purchases etc. But that's not going to deindustrialize the planet and change anything locally. Instead we could have recognized that the climate is changing and put in more safety measures to deal with it. (again, can get far more into the weeds on that). But we didn't.
It's always easy to Monday morning quarterback on certain things but the insurance issue and preparedness have been discussed for quite awhile in the state. This didn't sneak up on us.
Correct.