Posted on 11/15/2017 6:24:18 PM PST by rey
Has anyone had experience rebuilding after a disaster? What did you have to deal with? What government agencies became involved?
I am in Sonoma County and was in the Nuns Fire. As many of you know from the news many lost everything. We have been stymied at every turn by the county, FEMA, EPA, Army Corps and other agencies preventing clean up. They want home owners to sign over insurance to them so they may provide clean up (contract out). As I understand it, the county has yet to issue a single clean up permit to anyone. Out of county businesses attempting to do business in the county for clean up are being denied permits to do business. They claim toxicity issues. I was about to ship off some burned vehicles but was told by the yard receiving them, FEMA is preventing them from taking any more burned materials. Had I shipped a day earlier, it would have been no problem, but now, anything that is burned is deemed toxic. The rules seem to change daily.
Did folks in Florida and Texas face these issues after the hurricanes? What about other disaster rebuilds/clean ups?
BFLR
You need a “clean up permit” in a major disaster?
It’s California ... not the real world!
Disposal of debris was a problem after Andrew. I do not remember how it was resolved but I do know a huge rat problem developed because burning was prohibited. The same excuse of toxicity was used. Which no doubt was applicable to some waste but surely not all.
You need a permit to clean up? In California, you say?
I think I see your problem...
Pack up and go while you can, before they require you to get an exit visa/permit.
You need to find out if FEMA rules prevent any firm or person who does not have a contract with FEMA from providing clean up services. If not firms may have to meet certain criteria and meet approvals from various agencies but should be able to contract with insurance companies or home owners’ directly. Much like when somebody is doing asbestos abatement. I can’t direct you to the exact CFR but trust me there is one out there that addresses this issue.
My brother has a vineyard property in Redwood Valley upon which the house, guesthouse, and barn burned down. It’s his project, not mine, though I help out.
I was hesitant at first wrt the concept of turning over the cleanup to the county/FEMA and signing over the cleanup portion of your insurance proceeds to them. If you think about it, that is exactly what you want to do and it’s the best thing that could happen.
Because it means that you, property owner, are now essentially indemnified in case the cleanup costs exceed your coverage. And you can be absolutely certain that they will, because they have to be cleaned up to 2017 standards. These standards will be driven by Northern CA Eco-zealots afraid of your runoff running into the Russian River. If you do NOT do this (turnover the ins-—by the approaching deadline) you could or I should say WILL be on the hook for a multi-year total nightmare of environmental testing and sampling and issuing lab reports and if you don’t think that will cost well into six figures, my estimation is you’d be wrong. Your ins coverage is probably in the $25K-$50K range which I have no way of knowing but the critical point is, that (amount of) coverage is designed to pay for a burned down house in Des Moines where a loader comes in and hauls the debris to the dump and you’re done. There is no way that amount of coverage will produce compliance with what 2017 CA eco dudes and dudettes will make you do. Nuff said.
Although I can’t predict the future, I would imagine that as the co & FEMA gather more steam, they will impose more and more limitations and yet those limitations will change over time. As you noticed with the car disposal. The important thing, in my non-legal opinion but which matches my bro’s opinion, who IS an attorney though not an insurance atty, is that the more they do whatever they do, the more they take over the entirety of what they intend to take over, the more they assume legal and financial liability and you should want that, big time. That is my take on his take.
Just a PS. The county or municipality should be the ones issuing permits. They might need to make sure certain criteria set by other authorities having jurisdiction are met but the overall permits for rebuilding and clearing away debris should come from them.
PSs. Be sure to contact SBA about aid available from them.
That makes sense. I can see why a person would prefer that.
Get an attorney ASAP
It’s not “prefer”. You take that bet and it goes against you, the cleanup cost could be or exceed the value of your property and it would be dumped right in your lap and become part of country records so it would never go away. You could never escape it and you certainly would not be able to rebuild unless you cured the issue.
In my brother’s case he has $25K coverage and the cleanup costs are estimated at $250K. These are farmy properties, there are potentially underground 1938 fuel tanks you don’t even know about. This is: a 2200 sq foot very conventional stick built single story CA house, a 1000 sq ft guest house and a metal 30 x 60 “Butler” steel bldg aka barn. The barn, to me, looks like it could readily be reskinned with sheet metal, retaining the existing steel-beam skeleton but that is apparently not the case. (a good example of how “common sense” and “instinct” can destroy you) The bldg is not insurable, thus the contents would not be insurable, the concrete foundation cannot be known to be sound and the wind resistance of the structure cannot be guaranteed. So it is an impossibility for any part of that bldg to continue to exist and it has to be torn down and the foundation dug out and hauled away.
If you join the FB group Santa Rosa Firestorm update you will find other locals discussing similar issues if you search around. Of course you get a lot of lost pet info and donation questions but use the search box for FEMA or insurance or clean up and see what others are experiencing.
You are 100 percent correct. I should have put prefer in quotes to show it really would not be a good option by any stretch.
I’ve been doing an in-depth review of our homeowner’s insurance the past few weeks and when you say “[California] coverage is designed to pay for a burned down house in Des Moines” you are exactly right. I find we are modestly underinsured if a single disaster hits, i.e., our house burns down by itself. But we are grossly underinsured if a major disaster like Santa Rosa or an earthquake hits and materials prices shoot up 50% to 100% and labor is scarce as hen’s teeth. The broker I’m working with says lots of people in and around Santa Rosa are discovering this when it’s too late. There’s a special coverage item on our policy to specifically pay the costs of rebuilding compliant to today’s building codes. Their “replacement cost” analysis includes a specific line to cover the cost of clearing away the debris and it wasn’t very much, probably at the low end of your estimate. I think your advice is sound.
It’s been a while since Katrina but the way it used to work was you registered with FEMA, but the loan money was from the SBA. Fema passed out $1000 grants, but if you took the SBA loan, they’d roll it into the loan amount so you had to pay it back.
I do recall that while the Katrina victims had up to a year to get their acts together, the California mudslide victims only had 4 months to get it done.
Finally, as a footnote, SBA ODA in Fort Worth is hiring for the night shift. So the phone lines should be open about 20 hours a day.
In this particular case, from 20,000 feet and with the benefit of hindsight, you can see how this happens, and it is instructive. My brother bought the vineyard 5 years ago, from a woman whose husband passed away but in any event had probably bot insurance from one company maybe even one agent for 25 years. Maybe 40 years.
From the start of that saga, to the present, that particular area had morphed from “out in the boonies” to Gaia-worshipping ecological frenzy zone with the recognition that the entire area drains into the Russian River, also considered an eco-treasure. (it *is* nice up there)
Point being, the oil you pulled out of your tractor and dumped on the ground in 1978 is a crime against humanity in 2017. Now, you and your forebears may have stopped dumping your oil in 1965 but if FEMA finds it, today, under these conditions, you’re gonna have a problem on your hands that will destroy you.
I don’t know how applicable it would be on an ordinary house in the suburbs. But “out in the boonies” has evolved into a “nature preserve” and the enviro standards have gotten super strict. Just as one portion of an example, you could be on the hook for $100K just in lab reports and testing in a worst case scenario. I know of one case my bro worked on where the net value of a piece of property was potentially reduced from $2 million to about $150K because of toxics found and the costs for remediation that ultimately had to be performed. That’s a big hit.
I think the lesson is, it’s crazy to underinsure, because it’s generally a pretty cheap bet, few hundred bucks a year.
When our house in the Bay Area burned down in 2008, I learned a lot.
1. Hire a Public Adjustor. Much less expensive than a lawyer and will produce the same or better result. Our initial insurance company offer was $100k. Public Adjustor and I worked closely together and the final settlement was over the policy limits, more than $550k. He charged 6%. A lawyer will want 33 to 40%,.
2. Go ahead and sign up for the public clean-up. If they do it, they can’t gripe about how it got done. Exclude that cost from the Public Adjustor contract. Other than what others have said, there is another reason. The rainy season will start soon, and wet charred debris grows mold. A lot of this can not be taken to the normal dump, due to “mold hysteria”. Very expensive to dispose. If you do this disposal yourself and mold grows due to their delay in issuing a permit, that is tough luck for you. If you sign the money over to them and they don’t do it before it molds, that is on them. They will probably give themselves a waiver, which they will never do for you.
If you don’t they will torment you at every turn. Huge fines for overweight trucks, and only work certain hours, etc. Essentially, you will become responsible for the cost overrun for clean up of the entire county. And, they will charge you and fine you until you pay up.
3. Keep track of everything. Every scrap of paper, everything. I got some file folder labels that would fit in my printer and printed them with page numbers. I stuck a page number on every single piece of paper, so that when I copied them each page had a unique number. I think it ended up with over 500 pages, but I could periodically copy the file and send it to insurance, building dept, Public Adjustor, etc,. and we could refer to a specific page with no ambiguity. (The bid on pages 145 and 146, instead of the “fourth repaving bid”.)
4. I kept a “master copy — a first generation copy of all the originals as well as the originals. The master copy could feed through the document feeder at a copy center, which made supplying everyone who asked with all of the information a fast & easy job. This greatly disappointed the government checkers and the insurance company chiselers who count on you not having the records to prove what really happened.
4. Invest in a scanner. You will want to keep electronic files of everything also.
5. You may need a fax machine. Back then my insurance company would not use email, I don’t know if that has changed. I suspect the reason was to prevent me, or anyone else from keeping an easily searchable record of what they said, so everything had to be done by fax or snail mail.
I sent them a fax nearly every day and state regulations were that they had to respond in 48 hours. I kept them on the run. And since I had scanned copies of their responses, I could easily quote their past responses when they tried to reneg on paying for items they had agreed to.
Excellent lessons learned there, CD. Thanks for sharing all that.
I’ve learned on virtually EVERY transaction with a company to immediately start a telecon log file where I document everything said, name of who was on the call, date and time. I use a telephone headset so I have both hands to type the information directly into a Word document for every conversation. I name the individual files with the company, subject, and date of conversation. Companies these days hand you off to so many different people and they may or may not have been brought up to speed by the notes that they keep.
I had not heard about a “Public Adjustor” before. What is that? Was your policy capped at the $100k that the insurance company offered you? I’m astonished you got a settlement over 5X their initial offer. Also astonished at the difference in cut to the Public Adjustor vs. a lawyer.
Your recommendation for a scanner is spot-on. I bought an Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner probably 7 or 8 years ago and we use it all the time for scanning legal and business documents as well as family photos. I’m amazed how much we use it and the quality scans it puts out. The Epson scanning software is really poor; instead get the VueScan software from Hamrick Software. I think the company is run by the lone guy who wrote it and he is updating it all the time. I made a one-time $90 payment and have been getting his upgrades forever. It is rock solid. It also allows you to create single- or multi-page pdf documents straight from the scanning software. The files will be big, but you can use something like Apple Preview to shrink them 90%
Very interesting remarks about the mold issue and the issues of dumping moldy debris.
I like your idea of putting unique page numbers onto every single document. That’s brilliant.
A Public Adjustor is an insurance professional, recognized by the law, who has passed an examination and is state licensed. Usually they are former insurance company adjustors, who have struck out on their own. You hire one to represent you to your insurance company and help you in presenting your claim.
Because they know the ins and outs of insurance from personal experience and exactly how to make a claim, they can frequently get you a much larger settlement than you can on your own. They are not attorneys, but have some of the same rights. After you retain one, the insurance company can no longer contact you directly, they must deal through the Public Adjustor.
The policy limits were (from memory) around $540k when all of the "guaranteed replacement cost", building code upgrade, inflation protection, etc. was added in.
The company offered about $100k to start, and their representative acted surprised when I wouldn't let her "help me". When I heard the offer, and the shoddy way they wanted to make "repairs", I hired the Public Adjustor. A night and day difference.
It took months, but they ended up paying me the policy limits. I was convinced that the entire structure was a total loss, but they wanted to repair it. They explained the mold issue to me and wanted me to clean out all of the "wet debris", water damaged sheet rock, charred material inside, burned cabinets, carpets, etc.
I objected to this because if it was a total loss, it would be much less costly and more efficient to just demolish and remove everything at one time. They wouldn't budge, but the PA and I got them to agree that if it was a total loss, they would reimburse me for the separate wet debris removal.
Well, eventually we fought them to a standstill, and had a meeting with the Town building official. He told them that they could re-use lightly charred wood members, but could not salvage any engineered wood.
We met out at the house and their engineer explained to us how he was going to salvage almost everything, and I pointed out to him that the plywood shear panels and siding he was planning to save were engineered wood products. I watched his face fall as he realized the truth of that statement and the next day they settled for the policy limit plus an extra $15k for the wet debris removal.
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