Your favorite conifer of the Western US?
Comments
-
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.
-
F.O. Row Peter Puffer, you left off...
western larch
-
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.
-
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".
-
Redwood
We managed forests and fought fires and managed not to burn out towns
-
Ponderosa Pine
None of these tuff, loggers have tried to punch me in the face either, when I'm out Mt Biking.
-
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
