Re: MTD Yardman Transaxle Rebuild
The people who do the enviromential science that I have difficulty understanding made mention of much more violent storms.
Down here we have already upgraded our building codes.
People bitch about the extra cost .
A couple of smaller towns on our north coast have actually moved the whole town or part of it to be out of the highest ever recorded flood level.
The towns got hit with floods and just about totally wiped out so the insurance companies simply refused to offer cover if they rebuilt on the same site.
Now the banks will not lend you money if the building is not insured and the new buildings had to be built to the new codes so were going to be a lot more expensive than the old ones, and a goodly chunk of the payouts went on temporary accomodations.
Thus it was a choice of move, move out completely or rebuild yourself.
This created a big stink and the insurance companies were pilloried for this, but the 2 towns that did relocate have survived another few floods unaffected.
To prevent building on the flood banks , enlightened councils rezoned it either public space or native plant santuaries and several years latter the locals thank the insurance companies for forcing them to do what their grandparents should have done in the first place.
As an aside, it also killed racial tensions as the white people claimed they were traumatised having to move from the patch of dirt that 3 generations of their family were born on, finally came to understand the connections to a particular patch of dirt where 5,000 generations of black families had been born on.
OTOH a couple of miles from my place is a couple of streets of houses built on land split off the golf course, Fairway Cres & links View Rd Winmalee
Now when it was golf course it formed part of the fire buffer between the bush & the houses.
Every couple of years a bushfire takes out a few of them as they are directly in the fire path due to the geography and prevailing winds.
The fire department has been trying to prevent these houses getting rebuilt , but the property owners fought them tooth and nail.
So because of there not being an adequate fire buffer between the forest & the houses 6 years ago 182 houses were destroyed including 12 in Links View and 15 in Fairway Pde that were less than 10 years old.
Fire insurance is no longer available for the houses but the morons keep on rebuilding, seeing themselves as some sort of "Heros" for defying nature.
And for the remaining houses the fire insurance is 2 times the municipile taxes so the residents are spewing.
My insurance has quadrupled since 82 when we moved in but the house & land was $ 92,000 back then, now it will cost $ 350,000 just to rebuild the same house so than heavens the insurance rate has not kept pace with the building costs.
And we are supposed to be the most intelligent species.
Insurance companies do not derive their profits from the policies they sell.
They lend your policy money or otherwise invest it.
Down here 1/3 must be in blue chip stock or government bonds.
So when the stock market is high , policies can be low.
