Wildfire Rebuilds Are an Opportunity to Build More Resilient and Sustainable Homes
Hundreds of residents in Louisville protested in front of city hall after Colorado’s most costly wildfire over building codes meant to make new homes more green and sustainable. The residents argued they would make the rebuilding process longer and more expensive.
Under the standards, in order to rebuild, new homes would have to be built to updated energy standards that had been passed by the city months before the fire. A local home builders association estimated the new codes would increase the cost of rebuilding $100,000 per home. The average homeowner received $250,000 less than what it would cost to rebuild, as many of the residents who lost their homes were underinsured or uninsured. This made the cost to build back more sustainably difficult to bear.
“You might think, ‘People who’ve just gone through a disaster, they must be really open to doing things differently so that they don’t suffer that same thing again in the future,’” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has spent his career studying the aftermath of natural disasters. “But the reality is that actually post-disasters are one of the most difficult times to do resiliency and to make those hard decisions because people have just gone through a traumatic loss. They’ve already had a lot taken from them, and oftentimes decisions about rebuilding that are perceived—whether or not it’s true or not—to add cost, add time, add difficulty, add uncertainty, can feel to them like the government or others trying to stop them from coming home.”
According to Inside Climate News, Still, three years later, about 70 percent of those who have rebuilt have met the higher standard, as local government staff across municipalities worked to educate homeowners on what the standards actually cost (closer to $13,000), explained the long-term benefits of the improvements and worked to bring in rebates and funding to offset the extra costs.
It’s been barely a week since a series of deadly and destructive wildfires devastated Los Angeles, with multiple fires still burning and swaths of the region still facing extreme red flag warnings, but already the beginning steps of rebuilding have begun. Los Angeles’ recovery will be long and expensive, but recoveries from other wildfires and natural disasters, like the one after the Marshall Fire, provide insight into how to navigate rebuilding equitably and sustainably.
In the aftermath of a disaster, when people just want to return home and misinformation is swirling, efforts to rebuild more resilient and sustainable homes are often mired in controversy. Experts and local leaders involved in disaster recovery efforts said the key to building back better and more equitably is community outreach and engagement, frequent communication with the public about the process and the flexibility to eliminate hurdles and change processes to make recovering easier. Though challenging, there’s real opportunity to create communities better prepared for the types of extreme natural disasters climate change is making more frequent.
