The Risks of Hazard

Last month there was an article published by the Tampa Bay Times (see here) on flood insurance that really stood out for The Risks of Hazard. Not only was the author, John Romano, supporting the continued expansion of private (i.e. actuarial, i.e. market-driven) flood insurance – he was advocating for the logical next step, universal flood coverage.

Last week, Risks of Hazard explored a new way to view flood risk – Where, not When. The general concept was that floods are going to happen in the US every year, and underwriters should be more concerned with where the floods will cause damage, and not when the floods will come.

Risks of Hazard took a look at Houston last year after the flooding that ravaged the city in May. We discussed the flooding problem in Houston, and a way to handle it for underwriting flood insurance. Since then, in the past 12 months, Houston has had three (THREE!) headline-making floods.

According to The Weather Network, Houston is America’s Flooding Capital– a designation easily assigned. According to the article, Houston has had 96 days with reported residential flooding (pretty much entirely pluvial) in the past 20 years, averaging a little under five such days each year. It’s a staggering statistic – forget 100 year flood plains, because Houston is in a 2 MONTH flood plain based on the past two decades.

To try and get a better view of the flood risk, here is a very handy flood management tool published by Harris County. It’s a mapping portal that displays the FEMA (NFIP) flood zones, the bayous/waterways designed to whisk flood waters into the Gulf of Mexico, and ponding areas where water is expected to accumulate during storms.

While it might seem pretty obvious to most readers that good underwriting is an important part of a healthy insurance industry, it has not always been. When interest rates were high in the past decades, underwriting was the scoop with which insurers piled as much premium as possible into their coffers. With rates of return on capital at historic lows, for a long time now, underwriting is no longer a scoop – it needs to be a finely honed source of profit.

In a recent article on AM Best, Pat Gallagher – chairman and president of the eponymous brokerage giant, made this point. Here is the relevant bit:

For more than five years he (Mr. Gallagher) said he’s warned about the lack of investment income, and thinks the renewed emphasis on underwriting helps carriers and customers.
“From 1986 to 2001 we saw a ton of insurance companies go broke,” said Gallagher, as pricing “went down and down, and then after 9/11 everyone went up 100%. That’s not a good thing.”

At first, I thought it was an odd thing to say, and even more odd to publish. It seemed a bit like reading: people eating is good for the restaurant industry. But, I filed it in my ideas folder and kept coming back to it…why?

Wow, 2016 is now half over. It has been an eventful half year, including private flood legislation coming closer to implementation and historic wildfires in Alberta and California.