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Hurricane Harvey 17

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As far as electric utilities, there's a small pool of them (the ones that operate nuclear power plants), that share insurance costs. Which is basically just another type of insurance.
The problem with flood insurance is that if a flood happens, you're going to end up with whole cities of claims. You can't cover hundred of thousands of dollars in losses for hundreds of thousands of clients. But the government can't practically stop people from living in flood plains (they can try, but as long as developers give campaign donations, they can't succeed), especially 500 year flood plains, and they can't leave them to die in poverty after a flood. It's a horrible system, but I can't think of a better one. If there's a house there, someone is living in it and that house contains voters and heart wrenching stories for the news.
Maybe if there was a lifetime limit on a house on flood insurance. You get it once, but the second time, you get enough for another house, and that one is torn down and the land is condemned.
 
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You get it once, but the second time, you get enough for another house, and that one is torn down and the land is condemned


Jed, I think you hit the nail on the head. Let the market (insurability of a piece of land) dictate zoning for floods, i.e. if a claim is placed against flood insurance, the land becomes permanently un-insurable against floods. The user could still build on that property, but would have to mitigate against flood damage on his/her own dime (i.e. build on a berm, build a floating house, whatever).

I think search and rescue operations should operate similarly, i.e. you get one free rescue from a dangerous place, after that you are on your own.
 
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We had some water damage in our house a few years ago, not from a flood but from a leak in the ice maker in our frig. We had the frig under maintenance contract but they somehow missed the problem until it ruined the hardwood floor in our kitchen. We made a claim to our homeowners insurance which ended-up having to replace all of the hardwood in our house since they could not get any of the original hardwood (the supplier had gone out-of-business). In the end, it cost the insurance company $25,000 to replace the hardwood floors (we understand that they sued the frig maintenance company since they were the ones who had insisted that it was not the ice-maker that was leaking but finally had to admit that they had missed it on their last couple of maintenance calls). The point is that a couple of years later we changed insurance companies and the new company put a rider on our policy that exempted any claim for water damage for five years as a result of our original claim. Why couldn't flood insurance to the same thing?

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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Of course, the replacement cost of a house doesn't reflect market values. So, if for whatever reason, a homeowner got snookered, or baited into buying a house in a bad zone and didn't do or understand their required due diligence, unless the insurance covers buying a comparable house, they're seriously SOL and likely to wind up back at the same address with no insurance whatsoever. If it's a handful of people, then they're SOL, but if there's a sizable population in that boat, the politicians are SOL, as are the taxpayers that will have to bail them out.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Floating homes? I think they do that somewhere else. Why not?

But just try to add on a bedroom.

I was told, and it may or may not be true, that in some places that were once flooded the people have to sell the land because of the new requirement of rebuilding on peers. The owners are older and can not climb the stairs. Even if it were not true, how do you make homes like that ADA compliant?

I believe the flood insurance issue is a company must spread the risk, but state insurance laws make that difficult, except within that state.

But what if someone put insurance on the net? You could buy, say 0.1% risk in 5000 homes, and you make 0.1% profit less transaction fees on 5000 homes.
So your home would be insured by a pool of 1000 people that are betting your home will not flood within some period of time.

If the pool were to include 100 homes in each of the 50 states, the risk is much less that a large number would be flooded.

But something like that would put government workers out of a job, so that won't fly.
 
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"You could buy, say 0.1% risk in 5000 homes, and you make 0.1% profit less transaction fees on 5000 homes."

only a minor problem that 0.1% of 5000 homes at $375k each comes to $1.875 million, which is exactly the same math that the insurance companies ran and they ran.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Cranky... "But just try to add on a bedroom." Never hear of a waterbed?

I think it's really silly for the government to underwrite flood insurance... they have no idea of what the future holds... and it's a waste of taxpayer money... the states are all for it because it means money in their coffers for a long time to come...

Dik
 
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"the states are all for it because it means money in their coffers for a long time to come..."

No, they don't; be they Republican, who then cut taxes until there's nothing in the coffer, or be they Democrat, who then spends it until there's nothing in the coffer.

I think government is actually in a good spot to do this, since they could crank premiums high enough to discourage people from risking taxpayer dollars, but no one seems to wan to be the bad guy. If the government didn't do this, every year there would a hundred thousand or so new homeless people roaming the streets of the mid-West and Southeast.


TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Building on peers is not uncommon. Floating homes is uncommon in the US. Except if you have a house boat.

Actually FEMA has a political problem with being the bad guy. Insurance companies have no problem being the bad guy, which is why flood insurance should not be government run.

But insurance companies, because of state insurance laws, have a problem in spreading the risk enough to offer flood insurance.

So why is flood insurance that much different than fire insurance in the West?
 
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cranky - it's "piers". Peers are people.

Please remember: we're not all guys!
 
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The Mafia build on their peers. Jimmy Hoffa is in a parking deck somewhere.

----------------------------------------

The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
 
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50 56 years on Christine Keeler is still alive.
Years ago there were false assumptions that Christine Keeler had died,based on reports that her body had been found under an old British Peer.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
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Yes, Bill remember that... she had drowned...bobbing up and down under a...

Dik
 
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HH... and the next one? Who pays for it... another 9%?

Dik
 
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HamburgerHelper - Texas literally seems to be a place where one hemisphere of the brain doesn't communicate with the other hemisphere. We have the property owner/property tax payer, FEMA (All Americans) & the City of Houston but what about the State of Texas (Texans), the Developers & the Oil Refineries including their downstream refining product partners. Isn't the whole concept of self regulation with minimal government intervention, based on the premise that the Risk/Reward ratio has greater cataclysmic results when risk comes due? This concept of self regulation with minimal government intervention is a Texas state of mind, not just Houston's and the government of the State of Texas needs to dig deep it to it's wallet. Likewise, the developers played a paramount roll in creating the conditions to manifest this disaster and now it is time to pay the piper. This concept of self regulation with minimal government intervention hearkens back to Dutch Republicanism during the time of the VOC/Dutch East India Company and the belief that in times of great despair or tragedy, it was inherent upon the wealthy & prosperous to see to the "needs" of the suffering population. Houston has been absolute gold to the Oil Refineries & their downstream product partners and anything short of these entities making vast contributions to the region's welfare proves that the concept of self regulation & minimal government intervention is not a model that deserves to continue because the Oil Refineries & their downstream product partners are not capable of confining their risk to their own operation nor demonstrating they are a good neighbor in a crisis. It is just weird that so much of the recovery discussion seems to be absent of the State, the Developers & the Chemical Industry. Mind you, the wealthy Dutch of the Dutch Golden Age didn't arrive at the principals of Republican Charity without prodding from their better halves, so failing to rope the State, the Developers & the Oil Refineries & their downstream product partners into the "good works" of the recovery plan from the onset, is just failing at the beginning.
 
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I sort of agree. But giving is a choice, and should not be forced, (unless you are the US government).

If a business is in good shape, than by all means they should give. If the business is not in good shape, they have other concerns to take care of first.

There are morals at play here, not forced mandates.

When you ask how much you should give, the answer is more, more, more. This applies to both giving and taxes.

 
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