Bill Clinton: “One of the things I was going to suggest--and it may be a hair-brained idea; wouldn't be the first one I had--but the…”

“One of the things I was going to suggest--and it may be a hair-brained idea; wouldn't be the first one I had--but the position you're in with this mudslide business, it's not as if you deliberately ignored a clear and present danger. For example, the last time we had a big flood at home in the 1990's, we had all these little towns just flooded out along the Arkansas River. Now, there were some people who had built in the 100-year flood plain and some people who built below that, that basically, reasonably should have known that every 25 years that was going to wipe out. I don't think we had three 100-year floods in about 10 years, so I guess we can wait 300 years before we have another one. [Laughter] But anyway, it's not that sort of situation. It's just a question of what happens if you have a vulnerable ecostructure, as you do in California, and you have a lot of people that have to live somewhere; there always may be kind of unforeseen circumstances. And one of the things that I was kind of interested in was whether you might be able to devise some partnerships with insurance companies where you get all the people involved in litigation, all the people involved in all this and then you say, okay, give me the laundry list of things everybody in this neighborhood has to do, but if they do it, then you can get kind of a blanket insurance policy. Even if it's got a fairly sizable deductible, it would protect you against what you're worried about now. And I think that in a place like California where--see, all these things relate to one another. For example, if you have an earthquake that doesn't damage your home profoundly, but loosens the foundation a little bit, then you're more vulnerable to a mud-slide that may come along 6 years later. I mean, all these things reinforce one another. And so if there could be some way that, growing out of this Project Impact, there could be some more comprehensive look at insurance plus prevention plus mitigation plus all these things going together, I think it might bring a lot of peace of mind to all those people on your block now, for example, that are worried to death they're going to have a study and the study's going to say, come up with 3 times your annual income if you want to save your house. That's like saying if I were 25, I could jump higher. [Laughter] It's nice to know, but you've got a pretty good idea before you do the study. Let's talk a little more about mitigation, though. I know a lot of you have been involved in this. [At this point, the roundtable discussion continued.]”