Though this year’s hurricane season has been comparatively quiet, insurance experts recommend that homeowners secure their investment against the catastrophic damage of a major storm.
‘You can’t keep the storm away. They’re coming and there’s not a darn thing we can do about it,’ said Dan Jones, clinical assistant professor of C.T. Bauer College of Business.
Jones said a typical homeowners’ policy should automatically cover damage from hurricane winds unless people are in a geographic area that is close to the coast.
Residents in Galveston County and parts of Harris County, whose insurance policies may exclude windstorm coverage, can insure their homes through the state-run Texas Windstorm Insurance Association.
Director of Environmental Health & Risk Management Robert Schneller said the standard homeowner insurance policy provides coverage for many different types of losses, but what insurance companies don’t enjoy insuring catastrophic damage from a geographical standpoint.
‘Insurance companies are set up for isolated losses. What they are not able to handle very well, is when thousands of homeowners have their loss on the same day,’ Schneller said.
For people in the coastal counties, most insurance companies exclude ‘named windstorms’ in their coverage, Schneller said. As a result, homeowners must purchase windstorm coverage through TWIA.
Residents of Harris County and Montgomery County should already have ‘named windstorms’ included in their insurance policy, Schneller said.
Flood insurance is offered through a federal flood insurance program, under the direction of FEMA, and all insurance agents have access to this program. FEMA coverage works well because people can get a policy for the full value of the home, Schneller said.
Jones and Schneller said people need to obtain the federal coverage, especially if a home lies in a 100-year flood plain, which is an area that has flooded during the last 100 years. Homes in this flood zone are more expensive to insure than homes outside such an area, Schneller said.
Local homeowners can use an application on the Web site floodsmart.gov to find out if their home address lies in a flood plain. Some people may be surprised when they learn that their home is not in a flood plain, but Scneller still advises people outside of these areas to purchase the federal insurance.
‘The problem is that the flood zones are based on prior history,’ Schneller said. ‘So with all the development that is going on in the Houston area, and all the concrete that is being poured, the natural terrain cannot absorb as much water as it did years ago.
‘One thing we learned during Tropical Storm Allison is that a lot of areas flooded that were not supposed to flood.’
Jones said retaining flood and windstorm policies are good ideas. Jones, who lives 28 miles north of Houston near Cypress Creek, carries both.
Because of the large number of claims insurers paid after hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Ike, some companies have ceased writing windstorm damage policies and doing business in the TWIA area.
Jones said a new measure for calculating storm surge has been implemented. Although this system was probably developed before Ike, Jones noted the irony in the rubric’s name: Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE).
Insurance companies are not using the IKE measure to evaluate coverages. Jones said it has been used in the development of a major flood prevention proposal.
Schneller said by keeping good records, a homeowner can help to ensure a quick and complete payment on a policy claim.
Schneller added that taking plenty of pictures of storm damage and confirming that contractors provide market-value pricing are also beneficial to claims.
‘Problems generally happen when you don’t do your due diligence in hiring contractors,’ Schneller said. ‘(They also occur) if you don’t have good photographic evidence of the damage so that the adjuster can’t satisfy themselves that it’s from (the storm).’
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