Here is our 2nd installment of questions we are fielding from the flooding in the Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina. Hopefully we can help others seeking similar answers with flood insurance claims issues. Q. My lower cabinets were damaged by the flood waters. Does my flood insurance pay to match them and pay for my upper cabinets?…
Whenever there is a severe storm like the flooding in the Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina area our inbox gets inundated with questions from policyholders who are entering the insurance claims world for the first time and are seeking answers on how to recover from their damage. Over the next week we’ll publish some of…
While some media outlets are reporting that water is starting to subside in some of the hard hit areas of Columbia and Charleston, others are reporting on the dam failures that could compound matters and make things much worse. If some of the media reports are correct, many of the good folks in South Carolina…
Some of the news reports and photographs from South Carolina support the claims that this flooding event was indeed unprecedented and historic. The only thing close to this magnitude was the flooding in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The flooding from Katrina was in large part a result of the levies being beached.…
When involved with complex insurance claims (believe me, nowadays with all these new forms and restrictions, they are all complex and controversial), the policy language and the facts of the loss all must be taken into account to apply them to the coverage in order to get the correct payment to the policyholder. But this…
I read with a great deal of interest comments that were made by the big chiefs at a hearing held by the Office of Insurance Regulation in Tallahassee concerning the rate request Citizens Insurance Company was asking for in the South Florida market. In my view the back-and-forth discussion that took place on August 25…
As often happens in the adjusting business, you think you have seen or know most of the issues. But then a surprise comes along and you realize there is always something new in the business of property insurance adjusting. To put it another way, you don’t know what you don’t know. So here is what…
Well, maybe not new, but things are changing and we have seen this coming for some time. In our last blog Tampa Bay Residents Wait on FEMA we noted that staff from FEMA were in the area to inspect the flooding that resulted from three weeks of intense rain. Attempting not to jinx the process, I held…
An excellent Tampa Bay Times article, Did the National Hurricane Center Flub Erika? aired some of the discord between the National Hurricane Center folks and others, some of whom are well-respected meteorologists. The chief complaint seems to be that the reported track of the storm varied considerably as Erika moved up from the Caribbean. As a result,…
An email from a client down in the Leeward Islands this week prompts me to write this blog. While Tropical Storm Erika is not forecast to cause a lot of damages to the Windward Island Chain is was clearly a reminder to these folks about last years storm. Here is what my client had to…