Your favorite conifer of the Western US?
Comments
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Ponderosa Pine
All my neighbors have beautiful ponderosas and my lot has zero. I get to enjoy all the beauty with only minimal stray needles and cones.
What’s your homeowners like up there ? Getting fucked hard I assume. -
Western Red Cedar
Yes indeed. My rate is likely surpisingly low compared to the rest of the country, but my renewal came last week and I had the privilege of receiving a 44% rate increase from Safeco. $1100/year now. THat's after I took a 20% rate increase last year.
My auto insurance went from $750/year to $1200/year. -
Ponderosa Pine
Shit mang, that's nothing. We're more than double your premium. Our neighborhood is "moderate" wildfire risk, but a lot of homes in our zip fall into "high" risk zones so they us all together it would seem. Deschutes National Forest is only a mile from my house and that's a lot of dry, overgrown Ponderosa pine. They are thinning like crazy and doing a ton of prescribed burns, but I still feel like Bend is due for some wildfire property loss at some point. The last one to evacuate our side of town was in 2014 and was about 5 miles away.
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F.O. Row Peter Puffer, you left off...
western larch
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Western Red Cedar
Indeed, another item on the list of great things about Idaho is affordable insurance. Nevertheless, a 44% increase is a bit tough to swallow when you're operating the budget. You know?
It's good that Bend is doing the prescribed burns! The wildfires in the west are costing the insurance companies billions right now. Many companies are refusing to write new policies in CA due to the high risk. -
Ponderosa Pine
It's almost like the insurance companies forget that the biggest god damned wildfire in US history was in Idaho!!
Our home should be nothing special in terms of replacement cost- i.e., 4 beds / 2400 sq ft. But labor costs are stupid in Central Oregon.
I think it's really the insurers waking up to wildfire risk in Oregon being pretty high in a lot of spots. I think they had like $3billion in claims in Oregon in the 2020 fires.
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Ponderosa Pine
And I'm very much in the log and burn it camp out here. Historically, the high desert ponderosa forest should have about 50 to 60 bid, tuff tress per acre but in the tracts that we clear cut and then fire suppressed, it's more like 150 to 170 tress. We call this "garbage forest".
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Redwood
We managed forests and fought fires and managed not to burn out towns
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Ponderosa Pine
None of these tuff, loggers have tried to punch me in the face either, when I'm out Mt Biking.
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Western Red Cedar
OH yeah, insurance companies are losing their asses in wildfire claims right now. I was an independent agent not too long ago and sat through numerous annual reports from Safeco, ENumclaw, Travelers, Progressive showing how much money they were paying out. It was terrible. Frankly, it shocked me that it took so long for them to raise rates. It is just a LITTLE frustrating that
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Redwood
Now we know the real reason that DeBoer left for 'Bama. No worries about big forest fire payouts down there.
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Ponderosa Pine
Considering the fire risk when we moved here in 2020 we were probably getting a steal on rates. I have a good buddy who is a broker in WA and he told me to shut the fuck up and be thankful I haven't been dropped. Lol.
At least, were not in Florida. They're fucked.
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Douglas Fir
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Western Red Cedar
Florida and California. The carriers are speed racing to get out of that state. CA will be on a state funded, state mandated, state run insurance program in no time because the cost of doing business there is just to high. Mostly the states fault for failing to manage their forests properly.
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Ponderosa Pine
CA (and many other states) @houseofpain247have had terrible forestry management and that's part of the problem no doubt. This issue (garbage forest) is certainly the biggest fire risk posed to my house.
But I'll bet there are many more billions of dollars of CA real estate at high risk for fire in the chaparral scrublands of Central and Southern CA than in poorly managed conifer forests. And that's not a forestry management issue per se. It's a building homes in dry scrubland fuels prone to Santa Anna winds. That shit has always burned. It burned when the @Swaye s started eating acorns and it burned when @creepycoug tried to get a foot hold in Alta California but couldn't find enough settlers to hold off my peoples.
Both of my childhood homes in Ramona and Poway, CA came within a few hundred yards of burning down in the 2003 Cedar and 2007 Witch Fires. Grandma's house in Laguna Beach came within two lots of burning down in 1993.
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F.O. Row Peter Puffer, you left off...
the correct answer was blue spruce
