"Both spent their lives measuring the stress in stone. Both used scientific methods to answer questions that had seemed to everyone else beyond the reach of science."
Nothing, I repeat NOTHING is beyond the reach of science!
Go and investigate something that no-one investigated before, and you will find something that no-one found before.
Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Now whether [what you find] is worth the trouble of investigating (or: where one's efforts are best spent), that is another matter.
Especially the part where improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety: regulatory dysfunction at its finest. Interestingly, in other regulated areas (such as toxic emissions into the environmental), there are clear echelons regarding what is required such as BPT vs BAT (best practicable vs achievable technology). For the coal mining case, if BAT had been the requirement (and the regulating body had enough teeth to enforce it), Chris's work might have been easier to fund.
> improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety
"And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury."
To me, this is the hardest-hitting sentence of the entire article.
Be sure to remember this whenever a new achievement in efficiency (power or otherwise) is announced, be it in computing, industry, or transportation. Such advances are rarely aimed at lessening the load on the environment; not at first, anyway. Instead, they are used for extracting more profits, while burdening the environment just the same -- I think "more profits" is the incentive for such research and advances in the first place. I think the EU does it right, by demanding progress via regulations. Whether those directives are issued after the technological advances are reported, or the directives are the motivation for the research, I cannot say; either way, advances can be steered toward public benefits only via regulations.
Wow, what an amazing story. Fascinating from an engineering perspective. Quoting a few of my favorite bits:
>Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic. He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral. There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course, but also the winds. (To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.) He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light. Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.
>“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering. Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation, where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength. Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums, and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar. Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability, which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”
>Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them. “I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said. That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought. His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living. Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high. “Coal was booming,” said Chris. “We were going to save the world. Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil. People felt good about themselves.”
>“A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.”
>Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses. Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road: whacking it with a ball-peen hammer. Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it. There were just a handful of ways the rock might react, and its specific reaction revealed its strength. Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers. “It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”
That article touched on so many facets of a person's career: the pursuit of meaning, grit, familial context... It should be required reading for all young engineers.
I was surprised that insurance companies wouldn't cover damage from mine subsidence. I guess the lesson is to never buy property if you can't get insurance to cover something (wildfire, flood, hurricane, etc) at a reasonable rate since you're all but certain to encounter it eventually and be left on the hook for high costs.
In Japan, except for certain areas in the top major metros, only land has value. Buildings lose value over the life of a 30 year mortgage due to the changing nature of earthquake regulations for buildings. It will almost always be cheaper to tear down and build new than retrofit. Its also why Japan has very creative residential architecture- owners can build what they want without caring about resale.
Many non Japanese who are buying in Japan without understanding this fundamentally different aspect of real estate in Japan do so at their own risk.
This may depend on jurisdiction. UK buildings insurance usually covers subsidence (although it may then be difficult to sell the property, as any buyer will have difficulty getting their own insurance even after a repair)
I don't know specifically about mines or sinkholes, but I don't think they are generally excluded. However one difficulty would be that buildings are generally insured up to the value of the rebuilding cost, IE what it would take to put the building back after it was completely destroyed. But in the case of a mine or sinkhole, the land itself may also be unusable. In an expensive city the rebuild cost may be only a fraction of the cost of buying an equivalent home, including the land it sits on.
In general, no. Most of the coal companies went bust and the rights are owned by gas and/or fracking companies or consolidated by one of the surviving companies.
> Are the current owners of the mineral rights the same people that dug the mines?
Almost certainly not.
> Owning mineral rights doesn't create liability for existing mines.
I was under the impression that it generally does. However, the documents are generally old paper records (often missing) and fragmented between multiple polities in Pennsylvania. The owners of the mineral rights obviously know who they are but reconstructing the trail from public records is quite time consuming and provides a lot of "plausible deniability".
But, boy, once fracking made those mineral rights worth something, the owners sure showed up and found those "missing" records in a real hurry.
In the US, mineral rights are land use rights. It allows you to extract minerals, which has priority over some other land use rights. You are responsible for restoring lower priority use rights only to the extent you have deprived them. You are not responsible for any deprivation of use rights you did not create, which existing mines would be.
I have owned water, mineral, grazing, and other rights in the western US in environments where these were all considered valuable. YMMV.
The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.
Those two things together mean that this year you could have good insurance that covers freak accidents, but what about next year, or next decade? An area that may have only seen flooding once a century might be predicted to see it once a decade or even once a year.
People still live there. Some people lived there with the insurance coverage for those natural disasters only to see it slowly go away or to be outright cancelled. We can't expect that they all migrate.
I feel strongly that we should save every human life it's possible to save during disasters. Fema is pretty great at that.
However, that doesn't neccesarily imply that there should be flows of money available to rebuild in vulnerable locations. Insurance becoming unavailable or unaffordable is probably the best signal available that someplace is a bad place to live. If you can't afford the price or the risk ... There are lots of other places in the world.
This assumes you are moving into an area fresh. But what about someone that's been there, potentially for generations?
It's one thing to say "don't buy beach front property in the Florida everglades" but what do you do with the millions who already own such property?
This came up with hurricane Katrina and Louisiana. Multigenerational communities were completely obliterated. I really don't find "the market said you should move" to be a compelling response.
Well; some solution has to be found. There are probably options other than relocation - look at Venice. But the market is signalling how much money should be diverted into finding solutions and whether it is cost-effective to do so rather than just moving.
And I have no sympathy towards the "been there for generations" argument. The circumstances of your grandma just can't be a reason for what people do in the present - it s too unfair.
Venice is an interesting example because most of the population moved off the island for obvious logistical issues. However, tourists love interesting places so the islands have not been fully abandoned. What’s telling is it’s not the kind of model that really scale as the more common it gets the less interesting it becomes.
For another Chicago example, there's the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, a/k/a TARP (not to be confused with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis project with the same initialism).
The Chicago TARP was commissioned in the 1970s and won't be completed until 2029. It's cost > $3 billion to date.
A huge part of the problem is government putting its thumb on the scale and preventing the sort of cheap low quality development that makes sense in areas where it's a given that nature will flatten everything every 50yr or whatever.
Florida existed this way for 100 yr. You have lots that had a house built in 1850, wiped out in 1900, rebuilt, wiped out in 1950, replaced with a double wide, wiped out in 2000, and then the owner gets told "sorry, build a multi million dollar house on stilts with windows rated to stop a flying patio chair and a roof you could dangle the house from or F-off"
I understand that there's a desire to stop sketchy interests from billing off "disposable" construction as "this will resist a hurricane and is prob good for 100yr" and pocketing the difference before vanishing (especially among the HN crowd because they're demographics who usually get left holding the bag) but it's not economically tenable to force communities to construct above their means either by law or by proxy with provisions written into insurance and lending requirements.
Those parts of New Orleans that never bounced back are just the denser more vertical versions of those poor Florida communities. There just isn't the money there. And while you can potentially cover this with state and federal programs (e.g. FEMA), it seems like in practice they don't quite bridge the gap.
> preventing the sort of cheap low quality development that makes sense in areas where it's a given that nature will flatten everything every 50yr or whatever.
What kind of low quality development makes sense when you know it's only going to be washed away into the ocean at some random point within the next 50 years? Who is going to live in a place like that? What happens to them when they lose everything?
I have some sympathy. Those communities are valuable and should be saved where possible. However, it also doesn't make sense to keep rebuiling the same high risk locations, especially when all indications are rhat the risk is increasing.
The millions that own beach front property should accept the value of their land will decrease as it becomes harder to insure. If they don't want to lose equity, sell it sooner than later.
Well, "compelling" isn't a good organizational principle. I'm not saying we should evict grandma at the first hint of insurance prices rising. There could absolutely be compensation for property, negotiated buyouts and moving costs, or other good policies.
For better or worse, markets are the clearest signals we have in a hugely messy world. That shouldn't prevent us from doing the best thing available, but the world is not inherently fair and safe, and it's not possible for it to be perfectly fair and safe with our current technology and psychology.
After Harvey was the first time I remember hearing about FEMA doing buyouts of property in susceptible locations just so they don't have to continue to pay each time weather moves in. A lot of times, families in these situations cannot sell because no buyer will want to purchase such disaster prone property. This government buyout at least gives the families a fighting chance to move.
Helene would make your point more forcefully since the bulk of the damage it caused happened in the Appalachian mountains more than 200 miles inland from the ocean.
What is the average person supposed to do if their insurance stops covering their home after decades of ownership? Just saying "there are lots of other places in the world" ignores the reality where their only major asset has become close to worthless through no fault of their own, which makes it impossible to relocate without going bankrupt.
Should the government assist or are you of the opinion that it's just bad luck that they need to deal with on their own?
Personally I think the most rational option would be for the government to build non-profit apartment complexes across the country, but localized in areas that are projected to be safe for 100+ years where affected families could be relocated. I don't think they should be pumping money into rebuilding homes in the exact same vulnerable location though - I don't know if that's happening or not.
I think this is a classic case for government intervention; buyouts back to state or federal land seems practical and just to me. And the government typically does intervene to help people, just not in the most optimal way IMO; there are stories of people whose homes have been rebuilt multiple times in vulnerable spots. I don't have a clear notion of how common of an issue that is, but I think the natural human tendency to pick a spot and defend it at all costs is shortsighted and leads to tragedy and high costs all around. And then a surprising fraction of people defend ignoring a reliable signal that something has to give... either building practices, or locations, or something else.
Even if you ignore the asset value the "just move" opinion is still almost pure ignorance.
Normal people who've "put down roots" incur a HUGE cost when they move away from all that. Lives become optimized, you establish relationships with businesses. You make friends and engage in mutually beneficial favor trading. Ripping all that away is probably on the order of a 15-30% reduction in real income depending on the individuals in question.
Yeah, it's going to suck for a huge number of people who are displaced due to climate change, but "just move" is the increasingly going to be the only option that they have.
People who are able to move out of areas that are projected to be hit hardest by climate change should consider moving away sooner rather than later to manage that transition more on their own terms.
Globally, we're looking at billions of climate refugees needing to move somewhere and some of them will be displaced Americans. It's not going to be optimized for anybody and even people who don't have to move will be impacted by the influx of people coming into their cities.
> Personally I think the most rational option would be for the government to build non-profit apartment complexes across the country, but localized in areas that are projected to be safe for 100+ years
I agree, we should be building up infrastructure and housing in those areas to provide places for climate refugees both for those in the US who are forced to move and to house the millions we'll need to bring in from outside of the US. As far as I can tell we're just ignoring that the massive wave of migration due to climate change has already started and we're not doing anything to prepare.
> The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.
I strongly believe in mandatory house insurance. We live in an area where full house insurance was mandatory and organized by the government until the 90ies. It was cheap, because it was subsidized and everybody paid in. Then they privatized the insurance, and they weren't mandatory anymore. A relative of mine realized that insurance that would cover flooding would now be nearly twice as expensive in his area as the previous mandatory insurance, so he got one which did not cover flooding. 8 years later, his house was flooded.
A few years ago, a family of 5 here became homeless because their house burned down. They did not have any insurance and lost 600,000 EUR and their place to live.
Should government’s role be to prevent all dumb decisions that affect only the people/families making dumb decisions?
I think auto liability insurance (or an equivalent bond posting) should be mandatory, because it protects others. I don’t think theft or collision insurance should be mandatory (and in fact don’t carry it on some of our cars).
Insure against losses that you couldn’t withstand. Don’t (or self-) insure against those that you can easily withstand. No government intervention needed there IMO.
> Should government’s role be to prevent all dumb decisions that affect only the people/families making dumb decisions?
You don't think other people are impacted when families lose their homes and everything they have? Who do you think is going to end up having to pay to house and feed them? Taxpayers. The economic effects on people who still have their house aren't immediate and obvious so it's easy to pretend that nobody else is impacted, but it's almost never the case, especially when it's not about one guy whose house burned down after he tried to save a little extra money by not insuring against fire, but entire communities who lose everything.
When government manages insurance and everyone is covered the costs are dramatically lower and everyone is safer. The role of government should be to provide important safety nets to people providing stability and confidence to communities and the economy. Government can do it without needing to continuously stuff their pockets with higher and higher profits like shareholders demand, and without doing everything possible to avoid paying out valid claims the way private insurance companies do in order to protect those profits.
While there does come a point where it doesn't make sense for people to continue to live in certain areas, for more typical cases it'd be a major improvement that would save more money than letting people who just want to gamble on the odds get away with not paying for insurance at all. Eventually many of those people lose that game and instead of just upsetting their lives it destroys them while everyone around them pays the higher costs.
Do we make government the sole provider of investment advice? Of legal advice? Should we also mandate life insurance? Exercise and diet? Budget and provide spending money allowances to adults? Ration alcohol? Limit screen time?
All of those things could help people be more successful, make them less likely to lose their job or have a better relationship, etc.
At some point, there’s a line where government should protect third parties and a different line where government protects first parties from themselves. Different people will prefer those lines be located in different places; I tend towards giving individuals power over governments.
I agree that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere and I sympathize with the desire to keep control in the hands of individuals when it makes sense. I'd say that wherever government requires people to have insurance, the government should also provide it since that will keep the costs lowest and ensure the highest value.
I'd also say that in many cases the best thing you can do to empower individuals is to give preference to government over corporations. Government is (or at least can be made to be) accountable to the people. You don't have the power to elect the CEO of a company or vote for their corporate policy. Voting with wallets is largely a myth. If that actually worked there wouldn't be massive numbers of companies constantly screwing people over. Some companies are even basically universally hated yet remain highly successful. Government is where individuals hold the most power, especially at local levels. Care has to be taken to not let fear of government power back you into a position where you're being taken advantage of by others looking to force you into paying for their negative externalities.
I mean, we don't have to expect they will want to migrate. But life is all about how we handle change, both at the personal level and as a society.
When people throw money at an IPO only for it to tank we don't go around refunding them. Investments generally are NOT guaranteed, this includes assets like a house.
Should society at large be paying for someone's luxury beachfront home to be rebuilt over and over in the face of lack of insurance? Should people ignoring the climate observations and making dumb decisions NOT be penalised by losing their assets?
Honestly, there are good answers to this last question - no one wants to see an instant slums and the ongoing effects burdening society. No one wants to see grandma thrown to the curb. To be considered a society one has to act like it, which includes helping those who are down.
But not by trying to reset it back the way it was. Not by guaranteeing that people can make decisions - silly or not - with any level of guarantee.
Maybe a government buyback for property in an area that is rezoned because of climate reasons. Maybe a change in building standards to make rebuilds more reliable in the face of the new normal. Maybe public housing elsewhere to absorb the impact of such events until people can remake their lives and move on. Feel free to insert better ideas.
But the change in circumstances - in this case climate activity - has to be handled or it borders on stupidity.
FEMA has nothing to do with insurance. They do grants, cover temporary gaps in coverage time for insurance, and coordinate repsonses across regions (multi-state).
You are thinking of programs like the NFIP (national Flood Insurance Program)...
Unfortunately, programs like this create perverse incentives. People keep building homes where none would be if disasters were priced in.
We recently bought a house, and we learned that it is surprisingly difficult to get insurance that covers damage from asteroids / meteors / satellite parts. It is AFAIK impossible to get insurance that covers war damage.
Even if an insurance policy covered war, the chance of collecting the full amount would be almost zero. War levels extremely large areas, most buildings aren't bomb-resistant bunkers, and fighting drags on. There's no insurer who could handle paying all the claims they'd receive at the same time. Only governments could handle that level of funding.
As a general rule don't expect insurance to cover anything where there isn't an easily sue-able responsible party unless you're specifically paying for that type of event to be covered.
Predicting things like that is exactly the job of insurers and reinsurers. They're very good at it and it actually becomes easier at scale.
How many houses will be made uninhabitable by subsidence in the US in the next 5 years? I predict more than 100 and fewer than one million. There, that's a prediction. A team of actuaries armed with historic data could massively improve it.
This is much easier than the same kind of prediction for earthquakes or hurricanes, which have tail risk of unlikely but devastating events. If insurers don't want to cover this kind of risk, it's either because it's too small to be worth spending time on, or so predictable that it's not worth spreading the risk (better to just condemn the handful of houses built on top of known mines and move on).
I can only recommend a visit to the "Ruhrpott" area of Germany. Probably thousands of mines were dug over the centuries, hundreds alone after WW2 when people dug for coal on their own under horrendous conditions, and none of them documented. Accidents and incidents aboveground happen frequently when old shafts collapse. A lot of former mining sites have been converted to museums, although none of them actually allow access at the old depth. You can spend a month in NRW and not be able to visit all the museum sites!
The entire Ruhrpott settled and sank so much that if the water pumps in the largest mines would cease operating for too long, the entire area would flood. It's literally called "Ewigkeitslasten" (forever burdens) for that reason.
The Lake Peigneur diaster in 1980, drilling for oil in a lake bed in Louisiana they accidentally drilled down into a salt mine and drained the freshwater lake into it. That disolved the salt pillars supporting the mine's roof and created a 65 acre sink hole and backfilled the whole area from the saltwater bay.
I remember visiting LKAB in Kiruna, Sweden. Enormous iron ore mining operation and not abandoned at all. I believe it accounts for 10% of all concrete consumption in Sweden. The town in all its Scandinavian mid-century glory at the time was slowly collapsing with facilities and people being moved away a few km. Really hope they saved that erect rocket from the town square.
Centralia, PA has a mine that has been on fire since 1962 and will be on fire for at least another 250 years [0] - the town had to be evacuated in the 80s because it caused people to fall into sinkholes that randomly and suddenly opened up. Scary.
Just drove through there a couple weeks ago. There are basically crevices in the ground exhausting hot humid drafts. Almost uncomfortably hot for a hand, and will fog up glasses.
I do appreciate creators who give us a real website alternative, not just drop videos on <centralized platform>. Everyday Astronaut is another great one.
It takes a lot of effort—on the order of 1-2 hours per video, from my experience—to translate a video into a blog post in a better-than-just-a-transcript form.
For me, I do it because I like writing more than I like making videos, and I know many people appreciate it.
But my blog maybe makes a few pennies a month, whereas my video content provides my full-time income.
So I'm not surprised most content creators who can, move to video-only. It's only out of passion for the written form/blogging that I still do my text posts :(
A great companion piece on a government bureaucrat who solved the problem on how to optimally support the roofs in longwall mines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/mic...
That was a great read! This bit struck me:
"Both spent their lives measuring the stress in stone. Both used scientific methods to answer questions that had seemed to everyone else beyond the reach of science."
Nothing, I repeat NOTHING is beyond the reach of science!
Go and investigate something that no-one investigated before, and you will find something that no-one found before.
Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Now whether [what you find] is worth the trouble of investigating (or: where one's efforts are best spent), that is another matter.
> NOTHING is beyond the reach of science!
Events outside of our light cone? (I was going to say "past events" but I suspect that's superfluous)
Alexander Humbolt, perhaps the greatest scientist ever, was a government bureaucrat. Started his career working as a mining examiner.
One evidence of greatness: Humbolt has more geological features named after him than anyone else. Like the Humbolt Current etc.
That was fascinating. And contained some interesting stories relating to the function profit = f(lives_lost)
Especially the part where improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety: regulatory dysfunction at its finest. Interestingly, in other regulated areas (such as toxic emissions into the environmental), there are clear echelons regarding what is required such as BPT vs BAT (best practicable vs achievable technology). For the coal mining case, if BAT had been the requirement (and the regulating body had enough teeth to enforce it), Chris's work might have been easier to fund.
> improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety
"And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury."
To me, this is the hardest-hitting sentence of the entire article.
Be sure to remember this whenever a new achievement in efficiency (power or otherwise) is announced, be it in computing, industry, or transportation. Such advances are rarely aimed at lessening the load on the environment; not at first, anyway. Instead, they are used for extracting more profits, while burdening the environment just the same -- I think "more profits" is the incentive for such research and advances in the first place. I think the EU does it right, by demanding progress via regulations. Whether those directives are issued after the technological advances are reported, or the directives are the motivation for the research, I cannot say; either way, advances can be steered toward public benefits only via regulations.
Wow, what an amazing story. Fascinating from an engineering perspective. Quoting a few of my favorite bits:
>Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic. He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral. There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course, but also the winds. (To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.) He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light. Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.
>“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering. Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation, where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength. Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums, and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar. Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability, which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”
>Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them. “I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said. That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought. His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living. Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high. “Coal was booming,” said Chris. “We were going to save the world. Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil. People felt good about themselves.”
>“A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.”
>Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses. Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road: whacking it with a ball-peen hammer. Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it. There were just a handful of ways the rock might react, and its specific reaction revealed its strength. Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers. “It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”
One thread from last year:
The Canary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41478771 - Sept 2024 (54 comments)
Thanks so much for sharing. Enthralling.
That article touched on so many facets of a person's career: the pursuit of meaning, grit, familial context... It should be required reading for all young engineers.
Thank you for posting this. Simultaneously uplifting and tragic.
What a great read! Thank you for sharing
what a great read and inspiring story.
I was surprised that insurance companies wouldn't cover damage from mine subsidence. I guess the lesson is to never buy property if you can't get insurance to cover something (wildfire, flood, hurricane, etc) at a reasonable rate since you're all but certain to encounter it eventually and be left on the hook for high costs.
You should read your insurance contract carefully so you aren’t hit by any nasty surprises.
Earth movement in general - from landslides to sinkholes to shifting foundations - is excluded from most home insurance policies.
In Japan, except for certain areas in the top major metros, only land has value. Buildings lose value over the life of a 30 year mortgage due to the changing nature of earthquake regulations for buildings. It will almost always be cheaper to tear down and build new than retrofit. Its also why Japan has very creative residential architecture- owners can build what they want without caring about resale.
Many non Japanese who are buying in Japan without understanding this fundamentally different aspect of real estate in Japan do so at their own risk.
This may depend on jurisdiction. UK buildings insurance usually covers subsidence (although it may then be difficult to sell the property, as any buyer will have difficulty getting their own insurance even after a repair)
I don't know specifically about mines or sinkholes, but I don't think they are generally excluded. However one difficulty would be that buildings are generally insured up to the value of the rebuilding cost, IE what it would take to put the building back after it was completely destroyed. But in the case of a mine or sinkhole, the land itself may also be unusable. In an expensive city the rebuild cost may be only a fraction of the cost of buying an equivalent home, including the land it sits on.
In Pennsylvania, it's a sop to industry because they magically could find the owners of the mineral rights when fracking became profitable.
Those mines still have owners, and they can be found by the state if they really, really want to find them.
Are the current owners of the mineral rights the same people that dug the mines? Owning mineral rights doesn't create liability for existing mines.
In general, no. Most of the coal companies went bust and the rights are owned by gas and/or fracking companies or consolidated by one of the surviving companies.
> Are the current owners of the mineral rights the same people that dug the mines?
Almost certainly not.
> Owning mineral rights doesn't create liability for existing mines.
I was under the impression that it generally does. However, the documents are generally old paper records (often missing) and fragmented between multiple polities in Pennsylvania. The owners of the mineral rights obviously know who they are but reconstructing the trail from public records is quite time consuming and provides a lot of "plausible deniability".
But, boy, once fracking made those mineral rights worth something, the owners sure showed up and found those "missing" records in a real hurry.
In the US, mineral rights are land use rights. It allows you to extract minerals, which has priority over some other land use rights. You are responsible for restoring lower priority use rights only to the extent you have deprived them. You are not responsible for any deprivation of use rights you did not create, which existing mines would be.
I have owned water, mineral, grazing, and other rights in the western US in environments where these were all considered valuable. YMMV.
It's why programs like FEMA are so important.
The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.
Those two things together mean that this year you could have good insurance that covers freak accidents, but what about next year, or next decade? An area that may have only seen flooding once a century might be predicted to see it once a decade or even once a year.
People still live there. Some people lived there with the insurance coverage for those natural disasters only to see it slowly go away or to be outright cancelled. We can't expect that they all migrate.
I feel strongly that we should save every human life it's possible to save during disasters. Fema is pretty great at that.
However, that doesn't neccesarily imply that there should be flows of money available to rebuild in vulnerable locations. Insurance becoming unavailable or unaffordable is probably the best signal available that someplace is a bad place to live. If you can't afford the price or the risk ... There are lots of other places in the world.
This assumes you are moving into an area fresh. But what about someone that's been there, potentially for generations?
It's one thing to say "don't buy beach front property in the Florida everglades" but what do you do with the millions who already own such property?
This came up with hurricane Katrina and Louisiana. Multigenerational communities were completely obliterated. I really don't find "the market said you should move" to be a compelling response.
It’s not the market saying that, it’s the climate. The market is just communicating it to you.
These places are no longer safely inhabitable due to rising ocean levels. People are going to have to be relocated one way or another.
Well; some solution has to be found. There are probably options other than relocation - look at Venice. But the market is signalling how much money should be diverted into finding solutions and whether it is cost-effective to do so rather than just moving.
And I have no sympathy towards the "been there for generations" argument. The circumstances of your grandma just can't be a reason for what people do in the present - it s too unfair.
Venice is an interesting example because most of the population moved off the island for obvious logistical issues. However, tourists love interesting places so the islands have not been fully abandoned. What’s telling is it’s not the kind of model that really scale as the more common it gets the less interesting it becomes.
Chicago is a more scalable model, as both raising the city and moving existing housing worked quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
For another Chicago example, there's the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, a/k/a TARP (not to be confused with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis project with the same initialism).
The Chicago TARP was commissioned in the 1970s and won't be completed until 2029. It's cost > $3 billion to date.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_and_Reservoir_Plan>
A huge part of the problem is government putting its thumb on the scale and preventing the sort of cheap low quality development that makes sense in areas where it's a given that nature will flatten everything every 50yr or whatever.
Florida existed this way for 100 yr. You have lots that had a house built in 1850, wiped out in 1900, rebuilt, wiped out in 1950, replaced with a double wide, wiped out in 2000, and then the owner gets told "sorry, build a multi million dollar house on stilts with windows rated to stop a flying patio chair and a roof you could dangle the house from or F-off"
I understand that there's a desire to stop sketchy interests from billing off "disposable" construction as "this will resist a hurricane and is prob good for 100yr" and pocketing the difference before vanishing (especially among the HN crowd because they're demographics who usually get left holding the bag) but it's not economically tenable to force communities to construct above their means either by law or by proxy with provisions written into insurance and lending requirements.
Those parts of New Orleans that never bounced back are just the denser more vertical versions of those poor Florida communities. There just isn't the money there. And while you can potentially cover this with state and federal programs (e.g. FEMA), it seems like in practice they don't quite bridge the gap.
> preventing the sort of cheap low quality development that makes sense in areas where it's a given that nature will flatten everything every 50yr or whatever.
What kind of low quality development makes sense when you know it's only going to be washed away into the ocean at some random point within the next 50 years? Who is going to live in a place like that? What happens to them when they lose everything?
I have some sympathy. Those communities are valuable and should be saved where possible. However, it also doesn't make sense to keep rebuiling the same high risk locations, especially when all indications are rhat the risk is increasing.
The millions that own beach front property should accept the value of their land will decrease as it becomes harder to insure. If they don't want to lose equity, sell it sooner than later.
Well, "compelling" isn't a good organizational principle. I'm not saying we should evict grandma at the first hint of insurance prices rising. There could absolutely be compensation for property, negotiated buyouts and moving costs, or other good policies.
For better or worse, markets are the clearest signals we have in a hugely messy world. That shouldn't prevent us from doing the best thing available, but the world is not inherently fair and safe, and it's not possible for it to be perfectly fair and safe with our current technology and psychology.
After Harvey was the first time I remember hearing about FEMA doing buyouts of property in susceptible locations just so they don't have to continue to pay each time weather moves in. A lot of times, families in these situations cannot sell because no buyer will want to purchase such disaster prone property. This government buyout at least gives the families a fighting chance to move.
Helene would make your point more forcefully since the bulk of the damage it caused happened in the Appalachian mountains more than 200 miles inland from the ocean.
It's becoming a hard bargain from a governmental point of view as well.
Does Florida have multigenerational communities?
Not white people, no. But people have been living there for at least 20,000 years so more than likely multiple generations.
Oldest city in America is in Florida
The Hopi might argue a different spot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oraibi,_Arizona
St. Augustine
Built by the Spanish in 1565 and continuously occupied since then.
What is the average person supposed to do if their insurance stops covering their home after decades of ownership? Just saying "there are lots of other places in the world" ignores the reality where their only major asset has become close to worthless through no fault of their own, which makes it impossible to relocate without going bankrupt.
Should the government assist or are you of the opinion that it's just bad luck that they need to deal with on their own?
Personally I think the most rational option would be for the government to build non-profit apartment complexes across the country, but localized in areas that are projected to be safe for 100+ years where affected families could be relocated. I don't think they should be pumping money into rebuilding homes in the exact same vulnerable location though - I don't know if that's happening or not.
I think this is a classic case for government intervention; buyouts back to state or federal land seems practical and just to me. And the government typically does intervene to help people, just not in the most optimal way IMO; there are stories of people whose homes have been rebuilt multiple times in vulnerable spots. I don't have a clear notion of how common of an issue that is, but I think the natural human tendency to pick a spot and defend it at all costs is shortsighted and leads to tragedy and high costs all around. And then a surprising fraction of people defend ignoring a reliable signal that something has to give... either building practices, or locations, or something else.
Even if you ignore the asset value the "just move" opinion is still almost pure ignorance.
Normal people who've "put down roots" incur a HUGE cost when they move away from all that. Lives become optimized, you establish relationships with businesses. You make friends and engage in mutually beneficial favor trading. Ripping all that away is probably on the order of a 15-30% reduction in real income depending on the individuals in question.
Yeah, it's going to suck for a huge number of people who are displaced due to climate change, but "just move" is the increasingly going to be the only option that they have.
People who are able to move out of areas that are projected to be hit hardest by climate change should consider moving away sooner rather than later to manage that transition more on their own terms.
Globally, we're looking at billions of climate refugees needing to move somewhere and some of them will be displaced Americans. It's not going to be optimized for anybody and even people who don't have to move will be impacted by the influx of people coming into their cities.
> Personally I think the most rational option would be for the government to build non-profit apartment complexes across the country, but localized in areas that are projected to be safe for 100+ years
I agree, we should be building up infrastructure and housing in those areas to provide places for climate refugees both for those in the US who are forced to move and to house the millions we'll need to bring in from outside of the US. As far as I can tell we're just ignoring that the massive wave of migration due to climate change has already started and we're not doing anything to prepare.
> We can't expect that they all migrate.
They can’t expect us to cover their losses, especially predictable and repeated losses.
> The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.
I strongly believe in mandatory house insurance. We live in an area where full house insurance was mandatory and organized by the government until the 90ies. It was cheap, because it was subsidized and everybody paid in. Then they privatized the insurance, and they weren't mandatory anymore. A relative of mine realized that insurance that would cover flooding would now be nearly twice as expensive in his area as the previous mandatory insurance, so he got one which did not cover flooding. 8 years later, his house was flooded.
A few years ago, a family of 5 here became homeless because their house burned down. They did not have any insurance and lost 600,000 EUR and their place to live.
Should government’s role be to prevent all dumb decisions that affect only the people/families making dumb decisions?
I think auto liability insurance (or an equivalent bond posting) should be mandatory, because it protects others. I don’t think theft or collision insurance should be mandatory (and in fact don’t carry it on some of our cars).
Insure against losses that you couldn’t withstand. Don’t (or self-) insure against those that you can easily withstand. No government intervention needed there IMO.
> Should government’s role be to prevent all dumb decisions that affect only the people/families making dumb decisions?
You don't think other people are impacted when families lose their homes and everything they have? Who do you think is going to end up having to pay to house and feed them? Taxpayers. The economic effects on people who still have their house aren't immediate and obvious so it's easy to pretend that nobody else is impacted, but it's almost never the case, especially when it's not about one guy whose house burned down after he tried to save a little extra money by not insuring against fire, but entire communities who lose everything.
When government manages insurance and everyone is covered the costs are dramatically lower and everyone is safer. The role of government should be to provide important safety nets to people providing stability and confidence to communities and the economy. Government can do it without needing to continuously stuff their pockets with higher and higher profits like shareholders demand, and without doing everything possible to avoid paying out valid claims the way private insurance companies do in order to protect those profits.
While there does come a point where it doesn't make sense for people to continue to live in certain areas, for more typical cases it'd be a major improvement that would save more money than letting people who just want to gamble on the odds get away with not paying for insurance at all. Eventually many of those people lose that game and instead of just upsetting their lives it destroys them while everyone around them pays the higher costs.
Do we make government the sole provider of investment advice? Of legal advice? Should we also mandate life insurance? Exercise and diet? Budget and provide spending money allowances to adults? Ration alcohol? Limit screen time?
All of those things could help people be more successful, make them less likely to lose their job or have a better relationship, etc.
At some point, there’s a line where government should protect third parties and a different line where government protects first parties from themselves. Different people will prefer those lines be located in different places; I tend towards giving individuals power over governments.
I agree that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere and I sympathize with the desire to keep control in the hands of individuals when it makes sense. I'd say that wherever government requires people to have insurance, the government should also provide it since that will keep the costs lowest and ensure the highest value.
I'd also say that in many cases the best thing you can do to empower individuals is to give preference to government over corporations. Government is (or at least can be made to be) accountable to the people. You don't have the power to elect the CEO of a company or vote for their corporate policy. Voting with wallets is largely a myth. If that actually worked there wouldn't be massive numbers of companies constantly screwing people over. Some companies are even basically universally hated yet remain highly successful. Government is where individuals hold the most power, especially at local levels. Care has to be taken to not let fear of government power back you into a position where you're being taken advantage of by others looking to force you into paying for their negative externalities.
I mean, we don't have to expect they will want to migrate. But life is all about how we handle change, both at the personal level and as a society.
When people throw money at an IPO only for it to tank we don't go around refunding them. Investments generally are NOT guaranteed, this includes assets like a house.
Should society at large be paying for someone's luxury beachfront home to be rebuilt over and over in the face of lack of insurance? Should people ignoring the climate observations and making dumb decisions NOT be penalised by losing their assets?
Honestly, there are good answers to this last question - no one wants to see an instant slums and the ongoing effects burdening society. No one wants to see grandma thrown to the curb. To be considered a society one has to act like it, which includes helping those who are down.
But not by trying to reset it back the way it was. Not by guaranteeing that people can make decisions - silly or not - with any level of guarantee.
Maybe a government buyback for property in an area that is rezoned because of climate reasons. Maybe a change in building standards to make rebuilds more reliable in the face of the new normal. Maybe public housing elsewhere to absorb the impact of such events until people can remake their lives and move on. Feel free to insert better ideas.
But the change in circumstances - in this case climate activity - has to be handled or it borders on stupidity.
FEMA has nothing to do with insurance. They do grants, cover temporary gaps in coverage time for insurance, and coordinate repsonses across regions (multi-state).
You are thinking of programs like the NFIP (national Flood Insurance Program)...
Unfortunately, programs like this create perverse incentives. People keep building homes where none would be if disasters were priced in.
We recently bought a house, and we learned that it is surprisingly difficult to get insurance that covers damage from asteroids / meteors / satellite parts. It is AFAIK impossible to get insurance that covers war damage.
Even if an insurance policy covered war, the chance of collecting the full amount would be almost zero. War levels extremely large areas, most buildings aren't bomb-resistant bunkers, and fighting drags on. There's no insurer who could handle paying all the claims they'd receive at the same time. Only governments could handle that level of funding.
As a general rule don't expect insurance to cover anything where there isn't an easily sue-able responsible party unless you're specifically paying for that type of event to be covered.
You can't insure against something you can't reliably quantify. Mine subsidence is extremely difficult to predict.
Predicting things like that is exactly the job of insurers and reinsurers. They're very good at it and it actually becomes easier at scale.
How many houses will be made uninhabitable by subsidence in the US in the next 5 years? I predict more than 100 and fewer than one million. There, that's a prediction. A team of actuaries armed with historic data could massively improve it.
This is much easier than the same kind of prediction for earthquakes or hurricanes, which have tail risk of unlikely but devastating events. If insurers don't want to cover this kind of risk, it's either because it's too small to be worth spending time on, or so predictable that it's not worth spreading the risk (better to just condemn the handful of houses built on top of known mines and move on).
I can only recommend a visit to the "Ruhrpott" area of Germany. Probably thousands of mines were dug over the centuries, hundreds alone after WW2 when people dug for coal on their own under horrendous conditions, and none of them documented. Accidents and incidents aboveground happen frequently when old shafts collapse. A lot of former mining sites have been converted to museums, although none of them actually allow access at the old depth. You can spend a month in NRW and not be able to visit all the museum sites!
The entire Ruhrpott settled and sank so much that if the water pumps in the largest mines would cease operating for too long, the entire area would flood. It's literally called "Ewigkeitslasten" (forever burdens) for that reason.
Sounds like an opportunity to get an inland lake!
They also have those, once they flood the open-pit coal mines they've been relentlessly digging...
The Lake Peigneur diaster in 1980, drilling for oil in a lake bed in Louisiana they accidentally drilled down into a salt mine and drained the freshwater lake into it. That disolved the salt pillars supporting the mine's roof and created a 65 acre sink hole and backfilled the whole area from the saltwater bay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur
I remember visiting LKAB in Kiruna, Sweden. Enormous iron ore mining operation and not abandoned at all. I believe it accounts for 10% of all concrete consumption in Sweden. The town in all its Scandinavian mid-century glory at the time was slowly collapsing with facilities and people being moved away a few km. Really hope they saved that erect rocket from the town square.
I think that rocket still stands [0] :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_(rocket) [1]: http://www.astronautix.com/m/maxus.html
I have been down the mine with my family. It was fascinating. I wish they would allow tourists into more big industrial facilities like this.
There's also a couple of old mines that are permanently on fire.
Sort of an IRL Hell.
Centralia, PA has a mine that has been on fire since 1962 and will be on fire for at least another 250 years [0] - the town had to be evacuated in the 80s because it caused people to fall into sinkholes that randomly and suddenly opened up. Scary.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
Just drove through there a couple weeks ago. There are basically crevices in the ground exhausting hot humid drafts. Almost uncomfortably hot for a hand, and will fog up glasses.
Coal seam fires are a nasty thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
I grew up near one. On fire and under the sea, no less.
The number one cause of mine collapses, in my personal experience, is creepers.
Actually, it is people who come in close contact with creepers.
[Video]
Direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZg1zOKm5wk
I do appreciate creators who give us a real website alternative, not just drop videos on <centralized platform>. Everyday Astronaut is another great one.
There's a transcript below?
True, but it references visuals only present in the video. It would be nice if there were stills from the video included for those who prefer to read.
It takes a lot of effort—on the order of 1-2 hours per video, from my experience—to translate a video into a blog post in a better-than-just-a-transcript form.
For me, I do it because I like writing more than I like making videos, and I know many people appreciate it.
But my blog maybe makes a few pennies a month, whereas my video content provides my full-time income.
So I'm not surprised most content creators who can, move to video-only. It's only out of passion for the written form/blogging that I still do my text posts :(