Passing the Halfway Mark

By the time this issue of Insurance Journal reaches your desk, we will be well over halfway through hurricane season for 2009. Though it’s too early to breathe a sigh of relief — hurricane Rita struck Southeast Texas/Southwest Louisiana in late September 2005, after all — we can at least rest a little easier knowing that the season so far has been fairly benign.

Whether that’s thanks to El Niño or just plain old good luck, I don’t know, but I’m willing to count blessings where I find them.

In past years of course, we’ve not been so fortunate. We’ve just acknowledged the one-year mark after Hurricane Ike devastated communities from Texas to Pennsylvania, wreaking havoc in multiple states in between. Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri and Ohio all suffered severe losses. In fact, insured losses in Ohio ($1.135 billion) resulting from Ike were second only to those experienced by Texas — a whopping $9.8 billion, according to Property Claims Services.

The losses can’t be figured only in monetary terms, either. Lives were destroyed, both physically and figuratively. Seven people were killed in Ohio due to Ike; 22 died in Texas as a result of the storm. Tens of thousands were left homeless.

Insurance regulators and professionals in every state vulnerable to severe storms, that is, just about every state in the U.S., call on consumers every year to review their insurance coverages, including wind and flood, to make sure that if disaster does unfortunately strike, protection will be at hand to help those in need recover from the catastrophe.

“The message for Ohioans at this one-year anniversary mark is not just its record losses, but to serve as a reminder that we are not immune to natural disasters,” said Ohio Insurance Institute President Daniel J. Kelso. Few in the 84 Ohio counties affected by Ike, including the 29 counties declared disaster areas after the storm, are likely to forget that. Those on Texas’ Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula, which was virtually wiped out by Ike, don’t need a reminder either. But as we move from one year to another with relatively low losses from natural disaster events, it’s easy to fall into a state of complacency.

That’s where insurance agents come in, of course. As those professionals with the closest relationships to insureds, agents play a tremendous role not only in helping their customers know what they need in terms of insurance coverage, but also how and where to secure the best coverage for the right price.

And we can be grateful for that.

Topics Texas Ohio