Elaine Meinel Supkis
Southern states menaced by hurricanes decide to raid insurance funds built up by all Americans. Namely, they want us to pay for all those expensive condos and beach houses, not once but forever. This is bankrupting America. China won't pay for this forever.
Federal laws forbid repeatedly rebuilding housing destroyed by hurricanes over and over again.
By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff WriterHALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. -- In this hurricane-battered state, living near the coast has always been a gamble.
In recent years, though, the estimated storm risks soared, and homeowners' insurance premiums doubled and tripled beyond what anyone deemed tolerable.
Now the entire state is in on a vast meteorological wager.
Last month, state legislators voted in an emergency session to lower insurance rates, primarily in South Florida, by pledging tens of billions in public money to affected homeowners if a major hurricane or two strikes again.
I keep refering to the grasshopper/ant story by that ancient Greek slave/philosopher, Aesop. We know that if you build very expensive stuff with lots of windows right on the edge of the ocean in any of the hurricane coastlines, they will be destroyed. Not 'might be' but WILL BE destroyed over a 100 year period. Some areas, every 20 years or less. Not that this fact stops anyone from building vacation/retirement/ investment housing on these fatal sites.
It used to be, before the USA went steeply into the red ink seas, the government would insure these reckless, poorly-designed buildings and rebuild them over and over again. Encouraged by this largess, developers went wild and overbuilt all up and down hurricane alley. Now, every time a hurricane strikes, the government takes a huge hit! So to curb this constant drain on the national treasury, laws were passed forbidding recompensation more than once.
Even so, the money losses are climbing steeply since 90% of the development on the coast is less than 30 years old. Also, since most homeowners are new comers, they are unaware as to the dangers. And the states sponsoring this ridiculous homebuilding, encourage it despite the obvious dangers. This is doubly so in California, land of flash fires, flash earthquakes and flash floods.
We just had a huge blizzard here. I spent many hours snowplowing out my neighbors. No one rescued us, my neighbors had to dig themselves out, the government doesn't save us, our town has to tax itself to provide snow plowers for the public streets and us homeowners have to clear our own roads which is why I have not one but two snowplows. In Vermont, barns are collapsing so they put a call out on the radio for VOLUNTEERS to shovel off barn roofs because of ice damming whereby the heavy snow which was mostly ice to begin with, doesn't melt but makes big dams which have to be pulled off of the edges of the roofs, I have special tools for that and my arms ache from helping people remove ice dams.
Hurricanes are natural weather systems for the south and all coastal areas so they better have the equipment and more importantly, the architecture for their climate! But they refuse, deliberately and stupidly. If one of my neighbors built a flat-roofed barn, I would refuse to shovel it clear. Heck, my chicken roost roof is sort of flatish but it is also low so I can clear it, easily. And it is very strongly supported by center posts.
The point is, I have to build for the dynamics of my own climate: winds almost never exceed 90mph but we can get up to 8' or more snow in the worst cases. We also have tornadoes. One skipped over the roof of my house several years ago. My house isn't built to take tornado strikes but then, few structures in America can survive anything greater than a direct F1 tornado hit.
Unlike tornadoes, hurricanes can wipe out huge swaths of housing and buildings. A tornado can wreck parts of a city but a hurricane can destroy an entire city, every bit of it. And unlike capricious tornadoes, we know exactly where tidal surges during hurricanes occur and unfortunately, this is the golden zone for vacation/retirement housing developments!
This is unacceptable. Building into the path of where there is a 100% chance of a hurricane tidal surge is insanity. If people want to waste their wealth this way, so be it! But they want me, up here, shovelling snow, paying for snow plowing equipment, to rebuild their vacation homes!
Insurance companies are throwing in the towel.
By Garry Mitchell
Associated PressMOBILE, Ala. -- Facing hundreds of hurricane-damage lawsuits on the Mississippi coast, State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. cited back-to-back years of storm losses in announcing Friday it will not renew coverage for about 2,600 policyholders mainly in Alabama’s beach resorts.
Bloomington-based State Farm has the biggest market share on the Alabama coast and is the state’s largest home insurer. Most of those affected by the non-renewal notice own beach condominiums, state regulators said.
All those grasshopper-red voting southern states are happily hopping off and passing laws granting themselves the right to keep rebuilding over and over again in totally inappropriate places. They don't give a whizz about all this, some dupes in dour Northeastern or Northern states will pay much higher home insurance rates to raise a kitty of cash for the grasshoppers in the south. Florida's government just passed a law giving themselves money they don't have and worse, have absolutely no intention of saving for, to rebuild after hurricanes.
California is just as vapid. Exactly how much do they have in an account to cover the costs of rebuilding infrastructure after the earthquakes that are more than 6.0 Mag? Nothing? Ha. They, like the south, are all grasshoppers. We in the snowbelt, know with grim certainty, snow will fall and we will have to deal with it. But the same isn't true of the earthquake belts or hurricane alleys.
Since these things happen once and a while instead of yearly, everyone shoves reality aside and parties like there will be no tomorrow and these are the same sorts who build no barns for their cows and then demand the National Guard helicopter in bales of hay! I still am very irked about that.
CBO estimates that the hurricanes may reduce real (inflation-adjusted) growth of GDP in the third quarter of 2005 by between 1 and 1½ percentage points, but as cleanup and repair begin, the economy in the fourth quarter is likely to grow at a rate not much different from what it would have been without the hurricanes and possibly even a little higher. Real GDP growth for the two quarters together--that is, for the second half of 2005 as a whole--is likely to be dampened by about half a percentage point. By the first quarter of 2006, though, spending to repair or replace the capital stock (homes, business structures, and equipment) is likely to drive the level of output back roughly to its previous trend and to continue to add slightly to growth during the rest of that year.CBO's analysis does not include any dynamic feedback effects--that is, the tendency of increased spending in one area of the economy to increase incomes, and consequently spending, elsewhere. Such effects are likely to be small, particularly if the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve does not alter its apparent plan to raise interest rates. (The Federal Reserve increased rates by 25 basis points, or a quarter of a percentage point, on September 20, as had been expected before Hurricane Katrina.)
All government figures about economic activity do NOT deduct interest payments and red ink from the positive numbers. So spending our treasure to rebuilt the same garbage over and over again as global warming hammers our cities is pure stupidity. This isn't making us richer. If so, I would build paper barns out here and then become a billionaire, rebuilding it over and over again...but only if this were at government expense or costing unwitting home insurance payers a fortune while I rake in the dough!
Speaking of preparing for the inevitable:
While the Bay Area has done a good job designing for earthquakes, it hasn't done so for sea-level rise, said Will Travis, executive director of the bay conservation agency, which approves shoreline development. Aside from cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Travis said, "The amount of planning and preparing that we do is really what will affect how severe the impacts are here.''Cities can protect vulnerable shorelines with sea walls and levees, but the fixes and maintenance would cost billions of dollars. Officials will have to decide what to save and what to let go. Some development plans in the works may have to be shelved or drastically re-engineered, Travis said.
The same places hammered by earthquakes and hurrianes are also the first places to feel Mother Nature's wrath as she heats up. Even if we built dams to hold back the rising waters, earthquakes will destroy these levees and dams or, as we plainly see with Katrina, dikes give way in epic storms and then the damage is even worse.
New Orlean is having a wild grasshopper's party, the annual Mardi Gras. We don't have that up here, the snow is too deep. We have salutations to the iron rod Mother Nature holds. My snowplow broke in this last blizzard, rescuing two neighbors. They and I have put together enough cash to fix it. No National Guard has come to dig us out. No Federal agencies are coming by with checks for me. We just have to suffer, grin and bear it.
This is why I am a fiscal conservative.
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Florida recently passed a law stating that insurers can't drop coverage on homeowners in hurricane areas.
Florida needs to be careful: what insurers can do is refuse to write any business at all in their lousy state. Then Florida is entirely on the hook for its own hurricane damage (with the help of the Feds, of course.)
But you got this one excatly right, Elaine - the purpose of insurance is not to enable people to make the same stupid mistakes over and over and over.
Posted by: JSmith | February 21, 2007 at 09:02 AM
Just like if you smoke cigarettes, insurance companies charge much more. If you lie about it and then a cigarette burns down your house, they don't have to pay, you know.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | February 21, 2007 at 04:01 PM