Is too big not enough?

Posted by Bill Raymor on May 16, 2018 8:18:05 AM

President Trump signed a hurricane relief bill that includes $16 billion in debt relief for the embattled National Flood Insurance Program. The flood program has a Congress mandated debt ceiling of $30.4 billion, which it reached during Harvey, Irma, and Maria (HIM). This action will allow U.S. Treasury funding of the program.

Is help on the way?

Well, kind of. Premiums are on the rise as the search for actuarial solvency continues for the NFIP. You can read the entire Insurance Journal article from April 5th titled Federal Flood Insurance Average Premium to Rise 8% but here is how it ends: ‘However the premium hikes are likely insufficient to keep the program from sinking into debt, according to a recent government report.’

What is being done currently –

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Topics: Flood Insurance, Private Flood, FEMA

Private Flood continues to grow despite HIM

Posted by Bill Raymor on Mar 27, 2018 8:00:00 AM

A tumultuous U.S. Nat Cat 2017 year bookended by huge first quarter losses from hail and tornado and an estimated $50bn+ insured losses from HIM (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) still did not impede the private flood insurance market from growing by 51.2% according to information referenced in an Insurance Journal article published on March 18th of this year. That news comes despite Congress’ delay in reform and reauthorization of the NFIP, currently +-$25 billion in debt (pre HIM).

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Topics: Floods, Flood Insurance, Flood Risk, Private Flood

Feds Underestimating Flood Risk and ‘The Strangeness Index’  

Posted by Bill Raymor on Mar 14, 2018 8:00:00 AM

PropertyCasualty360 published an article in December, 2017 that begins with this eye-opening quote, “Research conducted by a team of U.S. and U.K. scientists and engineers suggests that U.S. federal flood maps underestimate the number of Americans at risk for flood by more than 27 million people.”

A study from IOPscience gave a more onerous estimate of 41 million Americans living on the 100 year floodplain. And, with a value of $5.5 trillion! In contrast, current FEMA estimates are around 13 million Americans.

At the 2017 American Geophysical Union Meeting Dec. 11-15 in New Orleans, scientists presented a ‘redrawn’ flood map of the U.S. (coastal areas excluded) simulating every river catchment area. Intermap’s InsitePro flood mapping tool uses a mathematical tree structure called the Strahler Number to predict risk. It is a numbering system that correlates a numeric value to stream size from small tributaries to large riverways. The entire algorithm then uses our proprietary 5m seamless & contiguous bare earth elevation dataset to generate location specific flood risk scores.

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Topics: Floods, Flood Insurance, Flood Risk, Risk Scoring, FEMA

The Protection Gap Quantified

Posted by Ivan P. Maddox on Feb 13, 2018 3:43:19 PM

Last week Insurance Journal ran a recap of the P/C Joint Industry Forum, held last month in NYC. If you underwrite flood or wildfire, go read it now and then come back here for a bit of commentary. If you are a blogger, chances are you have already read it.

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Topics: Flood Insurance, Flood Risk, Insurance Protection Gap, FEMA

Insurance Disruption? Only if… Part 2

Posted by Ivan P. Maddox on Jan 16, 2018 3:41:23 PM

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Last week, we explored how likely it is for insurance to be disrupted in 2018. It sounded rather unlikely.

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Topics: Flood Insurance, Property Insurance, Flood News

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