Many Won’t Rebuild After Next Major Quake

The recent story about how earthquake insurance has been rendered useless didn’t go far enough [“Flirting With Disaster,” Aug. 2]. The author thinks a lot of people will be economically devastated.

Having gone through the Northridge quake (and the psycho-like aftershocks) and piecing our lives back together, the feeling around here is that if it happens again, and one survives again, the U-Haul trucks would start arriving. People would load up whatever salvageable debris they could find and head east out of California. I am not going to rebuild in this area ever again. When the initial shaking stopped and my wife and I were still alive, it put the value of just being alive in a perspective that finally made sense.

If we survive another one, we will not be ruined. Nothing financially is capable of “ruining” us. The bank that holds our mortgage will be out the money since bankruptcy is the only option when one considers the panorama of this kind of loss.

Who is trying to kid whom? Five thousand dollars for personal property, $1,500 for the total of living expenses, anteing up $45,000 before the first insurance dollar is paid on repairs (based on a $300,000 home)! A lifetime enslavement to rebuilding a structure so that I could risk going through this again?

It is science fiction to think people would have the means to recover from any Northridge-size earthquake ever again. The L.A. Times writer seems to think we would feel bad about seeing our home destroyed. If I am alive, I could care less what pile of rubble it turned into. It would be the excuse my family and a lot of other people I know to move out of California. We would just “walk away,” based on the modus operandi of 30% of the real estate owners up in the Antelope Valley.

But I guess these banks are not all that concerned since the federal government will probably bail them out of these bad loans. The banks are the ones who will be holding a tin cup on some corner in the Valley. Anybody with any sense will be as far away from this insanity as their gas money will allow. Why any bank would issue mortgage loans now is beyond me.

Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush is the golden choirboy for the insurance companies, but I wonder what the banks think of him.

ANTHONY J. SKIRLICK Jr.

Valencia