Planet Money
00:00:00 · S0, Ann Cope, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
Ad[00:00:00] S0: This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. Purpose built AI agents work around the clock and across business systems to help execute the work. Visit avalara.com/aviator. [00:00:15] S1: This is Planet Money from NPR. [00:00:20] S2: One muggy hot morning in rural South Carolina a few months ago, I found myself walking into an enormous warehouse in the middle of the countryside. I was there to meet a woman named Ann Cope, who was on a very particular mission. Do you ever get nervous before setting a house on fire? [00:00:38] S1: Well, no. I don't get nervous before setting a house on fire because, like, once you light it, you lit it. And and you're gonna get whatever you're gonna get. [00:00:47] S2: Ann tells me that over the last decade or so, she and her coconspirators have torched dozens of household structures, sheds, decks, all the way up to full on single family homes. And while that may sound like the work of some kind of serial arsonist, Ann explains that she and her colleagues specifically build these structures in order to destroy them. [00:01:06] S1: Absolutely. We wanna sacrifice the structures here in the lab, and we outfit them. So fas, magazines, potato chips in the kitchen cabinets. We outfit them exactly the way they would be in a normal community, a normal environment because we need to know when that stuff burns, what kind of heat, what kind of embers, what kind of threat is that creating for the rest of the community so that we can burn fewer of our neighborhoods?
00:01:06 · Ann Cope, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, S0
[00:01:06] S1: Absolutely. We wanna sacrifice the structures here in the lab, and we outfit them. So fas, magazines, potato chips in the kitchen cabinets. We outfit them exactly the way they would be in a normal community, a normal environment because we need to know when that stuff burns, what kind of heat, what kind of embers, what kind of threat is that creating for the rest of the community so that we can burn fewer of our neighborhoods? [00:01:33] S2: You can think of this place kinda like a destruction sandbox. Here, structural engineers like Ann Cope regularly subject homes to trials not only by fire, but also by hail and hurricane force wind. They wanna see how different building techniques stand up to stress in the time of catastrophic climate change. [00:01:52] S1: So you really have, like, a front row view of mother nature's worst. [00:01:56] S0: Like a machine for creating acts of god. [00:01:58] S1: It is. [00:01:59] S2: Now the act of god we are here to witness today is a little bit less catastrophic than a full blown hurricane, but it's still pretty biblical. Anne and her colleagues are preparing to burn a bush. [00:02:11] S1: Right now, we're working on wildfire. And so we're we're looking at, what is the impact of having beautiful landscaping right next to your house?
00:02:11 · Ann Cope, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, S0
[00:02:11] S1: Right now, we're working on wildfire. And so we're we're looking at, what is the impact of having beautiful landscaping right next to your house? [00:02:23] S2: Like, would a well watered ficus five feet from your house make it more or less likely to burn during a wildfire? What about a dehydrated juniper? They wanna see which kinds of plants at which distances and drought levels might pose a threat to the homeowners who plant them. The experiment is gonna take place in what I like to call the main destruction lab, which is basically a massive concrete airplane hangar of a space. The ceiling is six stories tall. On one side, there's a looming wall of industrial fans. [00:02:53] S1: There's 105 of them. Each one is a 350 horsepower motor. [00:02:58] S2: It's a lot of horses. [00:02:59] S1: It is. It's a lot of horses. So that's how we can recreate a category three hurricane right here. [00:03:05] S2: And on the other end of the hangar, you can see what looks like a tiny home. This is what they're gonna use to test how much danger each burning plant poses. The front of the house is covered in heat sensors, and about five feet in front of it, there's a single green bush that has been sentenced to burn. Off in the distance beyond the house, I spy with my little eye a couple rows of other plants waiting for their turn in the hot seat. Are those the the test subjects? [00:03:30] S1: Yeah. Those are all the plants, and, they are coming to meet their demise eventually. [00:03:36] S0: They're meeting their maker? [00:03:37] S1: Yes. Yes. Dead plant walking.
00:03:37 · Ann Cope, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, S0
[00:03:37] S1: Yes. Yes. Dead plant walking. [00:03:39] S2: We retreat to a safe distance before two men in firefighting suits carrying what look like tiny flamethrowers walk over to the mulch pile. Oh, is it? [00:03:48] S0: It's getting close. [00:03:50] S2: I'm really rooting for the plan. I know that's not totally scientifically sound. Then the men aim their little flamethrowers at the ground and set the mulch ablaze. They're lighting it on fire right [00:04:01] S0: now. Yes.
00:04:01 · S0, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi
[00:04:01] S0: now. Yes. [00:04:02] S2: As to the question of who would go to the trouble and expense of doing all this, the planting and burning dozens of plants and building and destroying a small town's worth of homes and sheds and decks, This destruction lab is not administered by FEMA or any other part of the federal government. It's not a part of South Carolina's firefighting infrastructure or a wing of the construction industry. No. No. This playground of catastrophic mayhem is funded by some of the biggest insurance companies in the world. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexey Horowitz Gazi. We're living in a time when climate change has made billion dollar disasters into basically a monthly occurrence, and that unprecedented level of destruction and loss has pushed insurers toward a sort of existential crisis. Today on the show, why the insurance industry decided to create crash test dummies for houses, how that research is changing the way we think about building new houses and fortifying old ones against disaster, and what all of this reveals about the ways the insurance industry has been quietly shaping the world around us for over a century.
00:05:20 · S3, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Julie Rochman
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