Wildfire Coverage Part 2 | Hour 3

about this? In regards to fire? As well? About an hour after we go off the air of our live broadcast, that episode is Boom, part of the House Whisper podcast and it lives in perpetuity wherever your favorite podcasts are found, of course on the iHeartRadio app, but also Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Wherever you listen to your podcast, you can find us. You just search for Home with Dean Sharp, or you can search for The House Whisper. You're gonna find us.

You're gonna find me. There you will find it, and you will find eight seasons, eight years, hundreds of episodes, all all listed by topic, all waiting for you when you want to hear them. And if you're thinking, well, that's all great, but what we really need is Dean and Tina in our house. And you're joking about that, well, you can do that too. You can book an in home design consult with me and Tea. You just go

to house whisper dot Design. There are contact forms there to fill out very easily, very quick, and more information for you house whisperer dot Design. All right, I want to take one, maybe two more calls from our callers today and then move on to how do you rebuild and what the expectation is after a whole neighborhoods have been wiped away? So for now let's talk to Richard. Hey, Richard, welcome home.

or a curtain of water. I mean, if it was you know, Niagara Falls, that would be one thing, clearly, But a wall or curtain of water it's not the most efficient use of water because water is really If you ask any firefighter, you know they constant trade those streams of water, not on the tops of upper flames usually, but at the base of the fire where it's actually uh you know, where where the actual consumption of materials is taking place, the actual ignition is taking place, and so,

you know, a curtain of water again, it's sort of like our previous caller talking about an automatic system too, to spray the gel fire gel on the house. A water hose in the hands of a of an experienced human being, focusing the water where it counts the most on a fire is going to be far more efficient

than a curtain of water. Now, could you get lucky and turn that on before you evacuate and and not run out of water by the time the fire reaches Sure, that's all possible, but generally speak, we're talking about areas where there's a lot of cost involved. It affects the function of your home, undoubtedly on some level, and will it be there to help when the moment arrives. So I'm not going to say no, I'm just going to say,

you know, be informed. I think far wiser is to listen to the advice of people like John White, experienced firefighters who are telling us that, hey, do those at events, clear the defensible space around your home, get the junk away from your house, all of those kinds of things, because this is the stuff they deal with all the time. They see how it is that fires go down and affect structures. So that's my encouragement to you, Richard. Thanks

for the question, Thanks for hanging in there. And yeah, so that's where we're at. Everybody, all right, So here is where we turn next. It's an interesting situation. Interesting. I don't mean that to downplay the situation at all. It's interesting and a very different kind of scenario when you've had a wildfire that has done something like the Palisades Fire and the Eaten fire have done like the Paradise fire did just a few years back in Paradise, California.

Any fire that gets into an actual residential and urbanized area and clears it out what happens next, How does that change the rebuilding timeline? What can you expect? So I want to speak to that, and I also want to speak to the basics of what do you do after you've evacuated and then you have found out that you've lost your home to a wildfire? What is next?

on this fork. One is what are the normal things that will happen by way of fire damage anytime anybody's house burns to the ground. And number two, what happens when it's not just your house, but an entire neighborhood or a region that has burnt to the ground. How does that affect the rebuilding process and all the decisions that come next. Okay, so let's start with that first of all, always first steps. I mentioned this yesterday. I'm going to repeat myself here for those listening right now.

First steps, get out, get safe, and get rested, and take a breath. That's what you need. And who do you have. You've got friends, You've got relatives, You've got loved ones who are reaching out and offering help. You have FEMA. Make sure if you have lost your home in these fires, that you have registered with and made contact with FEMA. There are potential money. Now, FEMA is not there to rebuild your house, but they're there to help with emergency costs and expenditures along the way. It

will help. Nothing cures, but it will help. The Red Cross, of course, is available. There are shelters, there's food, there's water, there's rest areas, there's medical attention. All of that has to happen in order to get you, you and your loved ones safe and away from the danger. Okay, now now comes insurance. Insurance is a sticky wicket. It just is. I've spoken on this before and we're going to be speaking about it again in the next few weeks. Insurance

is a strange thing. Because you enlist the help of an insurance company to protect your home and your property, you pay them premiums. Those premiums sometimes are very, very costly, and then when the event happens, you know, it's kind of like a legalized gambling situation when the event actually occurs and the loss is suffered. And this is everything from you know, broken pipe in your kitchen to your

whole house burning down. When that happens, the insurance company who bet that nothing would happen to your house in order to make the profits that they wanted to make from your premiums not going you know, unpaid. That company now has approached you from the perspective. Now I'm not saying that they are that they're being nasty with you. I'm just saying that their perspective is their priority is

minimizing loss, financial loss on their part. Okay, So does that put you in an adversarial position with your insurance company. The reality is yes, yes it does, and at a time when you need it, that situation laid on your doorstep the least. But it's just the way this business works. Okay. So here's the first thing that you need to know.

You need to make a claim. And it's not about like, oh, there's plenty of time, nothing's happening over No, you make a claim, okay, especially in a massive disaster, because some insurance companies may not survive this disaster. They will pay out until they can payout, and so you make your claim. Make your claim. That also gets certain balls rolling in the state of California. It is my understanding, okay, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, but it's my

understanding in the state of California. If your house is completely destroyed in an event that resulted in a state of emergency being declared, and which these fires were a state of emergency officially declared by the Governor's office in the state of California, in those events, your insurance company is required to immediately pay you a minimum of one third of the estimated value of your personal belongings that's known as contents in your policy, and a minimum of

four months worth of rent for the local area in which you live. That's cash that's available to you right now, and those payments are required of them, whether an adjuster has inspected your home or not. Do you understand that those are just automatic payments. So this is why you make your claim. Okay. You can also in some situations ask your insurance provider for cash advances for living expenses

such as renting out furniture. And there are companies out there if you did not know, that can come to your temporary residence, your temporary home that you just rented and furnish it, furnish it. I mean, if you've lost everything in the fire, you don't have much other than maybe what you got in your car and the clothes on your back. There are companies that will furnish that rental home, that temporary residence, down to the towels and

kitchen utensils, Okay, all the way through. Okay, so understand that that is at your disposal. Secondly, okay, the next thing that and I know this is a difficult thing as well, especially in a time of stress, but secondly, it's time to start what's called a recovery diary. Okay. All I'm saying is it's not dear diary, I had

a bad day today. No. A recovery diary is just a book or a set of records in which you begin to take detailed notes on people that you've talked to when you talk to them, the phone numbers that you called, who has called you, what was said. Keep your paperwork organized. Take photos of receipts, hotel bills, you know, pet receipts, boarding receipts, so you can have them all accessible. Okay, now the other thing is this is no I know I've been talking about after you've left and your home

is burnt down. But one more item of advice for those of you who are in a you may evacuate situation soon. You haven't been ordered to evacuate yet, but you've been told that it may be coming. You've got time right now to do one of the most important things for your financial future, and it's in your hands, probably in your pocket, your cell phone, your camera. If you have not evacuated yet but are on the edge of potentially evacuating, you need to take video and photos

of everything everything. Everything in your home, your valuables, your electronics, stuff in your drawers, everything in the kitchen, all the appliances, everything inside the cupboards. I mean literally, somebody somebody video and the other person walk in front like a host tour guide and just walk through the house and point out here are our two sofas. Here's our leather recliner,

here's our seventy two inch flat screen TV. Here's this, here's that, And document your possessions, everything that may not survive that fire, because when it's ash, it's hard for anybody to walk up and say, oh, and I also had a you know, five thousand dollars gold necklace in this drawer. Uh, how do we know? Document it? Document it all? Does that make sense? I hope?

shoveling and removing stuff. Okay, there's going to be a time for that, but go in and simply, without disturbing as much as possible, go in and document everything you can, everything that you can on site. Without just starting cleanup and throwing stuff away. Okay, document, document, document everything possible, visibly, photographs, video,

You get the idea. Okay. All of this leads up to the beginning of negotiations with your insurance company, and when we come back from break, I'm going to talk to you about what that expectation is going to be and what other resources are at your disposal in order to make that as beneficial for you as possible, because honestly, insurance companies make billions of dollars. I want to now focus on you getting what you need out of that disastrous situation. And you may need some help. You probably

will need some help. Where will you find it? Talk about that right after.

attorney who specializes in damage law. How public insurance adjuster is It sounds like they would not work for you personally, but that's exactly what that title means. A public insurance adjuster is an experienced insurance adjuster, very likely somebody who has worked as an insurance adjuster for an insurance company but now works directly with you for you, solely on your behalf. And it puts them in a position, because of their experience, to negotiate with your insurance company on

your behalf. Now, what kind of value does your insurance company have to listen to them? Yes, if you sign a contract with a public insurance adjuster, who, by the way, gets paid a percentage of your recovery of loss, your loss recovery, and by and large, in my experience, they are more than worth it because the money that you will pay out to them will be from a return of lost value far greater than if you were to simply deal with your insurance company directly yourself right to

well worth the money spent. It's kind of like, should I have an agent if I'm in the movie business or the entertainment business. Well, they cost money to have an agent, but they can get you a deal far

better than you can negotiate on your own. That's the idea. Okay, So a public insurance adjuster has that experience, and yes, your insurance company is legally obligated to deal with them because they become upon you signing that contract, they become your agent in regards to loss mitigation for your property. The same is true of an attorney that specializes in

damage law. They're not that common, to be quite honest with you, and you want to be careful, and you want to make sure you're dealing with an attorney who really does specialize in I'm going to make a recommendation for you right now. If you live in the Greater Los Angeles area, which you know, if you've been affected by these fires you do, I want you to go to my friends at Damage Law. This is a pair of attorneys who decided that their entire practice is going

to be focused solely in this area. They are great guys. They're actually going to be on the show in early February. Okay, in just a couple three weeks. I'll have them on our Sunday program to talk at length about this, but just for the moment and let them know that I

sent you Damage law dot Com. What will an attorney do essentially kind of fulfill that role of the public insurance adjuster, with the addition that there's one thing they can do that a public insurance adjuster can't do, and that is they can threaten a lawsuit if they feel like the insurance company is not treating you right. Okay, and sometimes quite honestly, it's necessary. And so these are the two main forms of professional assistance that you can

have that you're not left to your own devices. You don't need to just deal with the insurance companies recommended contractors. And we've talked at length about that before. And I don't want to get into the weeds on that because there's more that I want to cover with you, But that's essentially where what you're looking at. These are the responses. Now,

what's the expected timeline for all this? Well, if you just lost your house from a house fire and your neighborhood is intact, then the amount of claim and the beginning to rebuild can happen almost immediately, almost immediately that's what's different about this situation, because we're not talking about just an isolated house lost in the middle of a functioning neighborhood. How is the timeline affected when the entire

neighborhood goes down. It is affected in the extreme. And so that's why you do these things that I'm suggesting you get them moving as quickly as possible. But also I want you to realize, and this is why you get the adjuster and or an attorney really advocating for you, that there are some law you're going to need some long term payouts just in the area of you know, temporary housing when it comes to this, because this is not a four month process. This is not a seven

month process. This is going to be easily easily a year plus process of just getting to the point where rebuilding is feasible and you making the decision if you're going to rebuild. Yet, are you hearing me? The reason is this The very first thing that the city is going to have to deal with is they are very likely, in a devastating event like this, going to take point

on general cleanup. Now I don't mean that they're going to be going in and cleaning every area of your property, but general cleanup from a devastation like this is something the city has an interest, a vested interest in handling. Number One, there's a lot of toxicity in those neighborhoods right now in the debris, because we're not just talking about pine trees and chaparral brush burning in a brush fire.

We're talking about chemicals and glues and furniture and clothing and synthetics and petroleum by all sorts of things have been altered chemically as a result of the fire and exposed to the environment. And so there's going to be a cleanup effort not left to individual homeowners, and it could be limited or more extensive. We'll have to wait and see exactly what the situation calls for. But the very first thing is that the city will likely take

point on general cleanup. And then before you are allowed to even get started with anything, then there are infrastructure concerns. Infrastructure meaning not just your house being burnt to the ground, but the neighborhood being affected. The heat of the flames, the amount of water poured upon them and gotten into certain systems, has likely affected roadwork, asphalt, It has affected

all the visible structures clearly. But the heat from the fire has damaged power lines, water lines, gas sewer lines running in. All of these things are going to have to be pulled, tested, examined, repaired, replaced Before a single home gets reburnt. It gets reburned, sorry, rebuilt in a devastated neighborhood. In other words, imagine you've all driven by home developments before, right, just regular home developments where a developer is building a new neighborhood full of homes. You've

seen that for months. First there was grading and heavy equipment out there moving soil around. Then there were streets that got laid in, and underneath those streets were power lines and gas service and electrical service to those new homes that are about to be built. All of that infrastructure has to be done before a single house individually starts to be built in a new development. Well, here, we've got all of that stuff in place, and yet

it's damaged. And if you can imagine the likelihood of the city and all of the local power utilities jumping in and getting it all reworked in the first few weeks, you know that that's not the case. We have a long wait ahead. While just the basic cleanup and infrastructure gets rebuilt so that an individual home could potentially start that process, and then there are questions that people have about those individual homes. My home burnt to the ground, Okay,

my slab seems to be intact. Can I rebuild my home on my old existing slab. I'm going to tell you that chances are eighty percent no, and eighty percent no, not because the concrete necessarily although concrete can be damaged from high heat exposure, but it's not necessarily that. But again, it's like I said out in the street, it's not just the fact that the slab and the footings are

still intact. It's that there are plastic drain lines that run underneath your slab that the heat has melted and affected. There are electrical conduits potentially running underneath your slab that have been affected. Now, if you look in any building code post fire in La County, building code is no

exception to this. They'll say things like they may allow a conduit that underneath a slab that has been through a fire to remain in place and be reused, but the conductors, the wires themselves, they have to be pulled. They may have melted in place. There's all sorts of trouble that fires cause below ground where we can't see it,

as well as above ground. So the likelihood of your slab being kept no, And this is another one of those areas where we make sure that that cost is being reimbursed in terms of insurance because most of these home slabs, most of these properties will have to be

scraped bare and started fresh and anew. And then if you think that for a thousand homes that the local building and Safety department is going to be able to expedite and get those permits done quickly, you need to have another thought about that because a lot of people are under the the misunderstanding that well building safety will just they'll push fast permits forward. If there's been a little bit of damage to a house and it's a minor non structural issue that needs to be paired, building

safety is happy to push those forward. But we're talking about building a new home. The local department of Building and Safety in charge of that is not going to rush that process. It's going to be treated just like a regular plan check and process for these new homes. So understand the most the city could do is prioritize your permit application over you know, somebody on the other side of town who just wants to, you know, remodel

their house. Those may get put on hold to prioritize permit applications when the time comes if it's a fire devastated related rebuild. But they aren't going to speed up the process of actually going through and making sure your home is planned properly and is being built properly. That's the facts, and so we have a long road ahead. I wish I had better news for you, but that's the truth of it. There's a long road ahead, and

we'll have to take it step by step. All right, let's hear some news and then we'll come back and wrap this all up for today.

It is not directly related to fire hardening your home, but a lot more people on the outskirts of these fires have experienced power outages, lots and lots of power out and as a result have been left with you know, susceptible too, Like when maybe you've got medical equipment and things that need power to run. You know, power went out, hasn't gone on for three days, and now all the food in your fridge needs to be tossed out and that kind of stuff, and a lot of questions. Every

time this happens, whether there's wildfire happening or not. Every time an extended heavy Santa Ana windstorm starts knocking out power, there's a run on generators. You know, home depots got no generators today. You know that they ran out on Thursday, and everybody in town who normally carries them. So a quick note on emergency power. There are basically three approaches to this that are running on the top of my mind right now, and I'm just kind of riffing from

my experience on it. There are three approaches to it. Number one, if you've got a solar system, then you should consider or you may have solar backup batteries. It's never a bad idea for that to be the case because those are emergency power supplies when power goes down. Now, different batteries, the amount of the energy they can provide to the house, that's all something that has to be discussed.

The cool thing about solar backup batteries is that they are being without fuel cost, being restored and recharged on a daily basi as long as the sun is out and on windy firestorm windstorm days, guess the sun is out because if it was cloudy outside, there would be that way because there's no wind all right, and chances

are your power hasn't gone down. So it's a good thing to have or to consider a backup battery that's tied into your solar system if you have solar plus these days, the way that energy is measured and handled in the state of California with your solar energy, a smart backup battery is a great way to continue to save the most amount of money and have your solar system be as efficient as possible. So there you go, solar and or solar powered or solar rechargeable generators or

backup batteries. The second way to go is to have a whole house generator installed that runs off of natural gas. Some are dual fueled, but most runoff of natural gas, and they kick in immediately as soon as the power goes down and are capable of powering most, if not all, of most sized homes. That's the second way to go. Now, it's an expense, it's less expense, about half the price of getting a solar battery, but they don't recharge. They

are dependent on natural gas. But typically in everything except maybe an earthquake scenario in southern California, at least the natural gas supply to homes is strong and consistent, even if the power company is shutting down power to be safe, or that transformers are being blown over, and so on and so forth. The final way to go, if you don't have thousands and thousands of dollars to invest on these systems, is simply a good quality, portable inverter style generator.

It's quiet. It can run either plugged into your house through a transfer switch that you can have an electrician rig for you, or you can simply run extension cords into your home. I'll just tell you this. It is a worthy investment to have a backup generator. A generator. I prefer the ones that run off of propane because

it's safer to store, and they they run longer. Like one canister of propane for one of my inverter generators will run it at twenty five percent draw for like thirty six hours, so they go a long ways and they're easy to store. And the kind of generator I'm talking, I've got like a twenty five hundred watt Champion generator that's whisper quiet because it was actually designed for RVs

for camping. It's whisper quiet, twenty five hundred watts. It can be linked together with another one to give five thousand watts of emergency power, and it's like a six hundred dollars generator, right, And it's not cheap, but it's also not expensive in the long run. So these are your areas of consideration. Just think it through.

So give it thought. All right, That's all I got for today for y'all. Remember we're on social media. We're there for you on Facebook, TikTok x, Instagram, Home with Dean. The house Whisper podcast is everywhere your favorite podcasts are found, and if your home is in need of some personal house Whisper attention, you can book an in home design consult with us at house Whisper dot Design. I'm hoping that next weekend we can return to uplifting moving forward topics.

That's the plan we'll see because our first priority and always priority, is to give you what you need at the time that you need it. That being said, I'm going to leave you with this thought today. These fires remind us that it's hard to let go of things that feel permanent. They also remind us that the things that feel permanent and actuality aren't. So let me tell you a little story. The small valley that I call home was first settled by humans some twelve thousand years ago.

That was a time when mammoths and saber toothed cats and giant cave bears and one hundred and fifty pound four foot tall dire wolves very likely roamed through what is now my backyard. It's hard to believe, but it's true. The humans who settled this area came to be known as the chew Mash or the bead Makers. They spread their villages along the California coast from what is now northern Los Angeles to more Obey. I live a short walk from the site of a chew Mash village known

as Sapwee, which means house of deer. By the way, if you live in this area, and even if you don't, there are still some Chumash place names that you might recognize. I bet you will, names like Napomo, Ohai, Pismo, Piru, Lompoc, Sadakoi, Somus, see me, and yes, Malibu. For twelve thousand years, tens of thousands of people were born and lived and died where I drink my coffee. Twelve thousand years. That's four

hundred generations of joy and fear, pleasure and pain. Four hundred generations of loving families and intimate friendships, the memories of four hundred consecutive lifetimes, tens of thousands of lives. And here's the thing. I'll never know a single one of them, and they will never know me. They were all gone long before I was born, and long before I arrived here. Their settlements, their huts, are all gone

now and now my house is here. And this feels quite permanent to me, this place, but I'm sure it did to four hundred generations of Chumash and the mammoths and the bears and the dire wolves. True. Also, the truth is it won't be long before I am gone. It won't be long before my house is gone. It won't be long before all that remains of my life, my friends and family, my entire generation, is nothing more than a curiosity of history. There's a line from a

movie that I love, and it's true. It goes like this. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. It's not a happy thought. It's hard to let things go that seem permanent. It's even harder to acknowledge that I am not permanent. So as someone tearfully asked me earlier this week, Dean, what is the point. The only answer I have for that question is, however

impermanent life may be, life is a miracle. Even if there are billions of civilizations spread throughout the universe, life is still incredibly rare, and you and I we have it right now. It doesn't matter how long it lasts, or if anyone will ever remember it. Life is miraculously rare, and you and I, against all odds, are part of that. Trouble sometimes comes, sometimes the things we count on, the things that seem so permanent to us, Sometimes those things

burn to the ground. The trick is to hold it all loosely, hold yourself loosely, and live the miracle that's in your hands for as long as you are. We are all my friends, sand castles, here one moment and gone the next. That doesn't make this moment meaningless. It makes this moment miraculous. It has meaning because it means something to you, and it means something to me. And that's enough. So don't miss the miracle, don't let the moment pass, live it and use it to build yourself

a beautiful life. I hope that comforts you in some way. Today. Take that thought with you this week, and we will be right back here for you next weekend. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app