Milton rapidly intensified to a Category 5 hurricane late Monday morning.
Within hours, Milton strengthened to a Category 2, then a Category 3, then a Category 4 and finally a Category 5.
Milton now ranks as the third-greatest 24-hour wind speed intensification for a hurricane in the Atlantic Basin. (Records are based on data since the satellite era began in the 1960s.)
At least the insurance companies will only have to rebuild some houses once after 2 hurricanes
If your policy covers wind they claim the damage is from water. If your policy covers water, they claim the damage is from wind. If your policy covers both, they claim a hurricane is exempt as an act of god.
Which, to be fair, is really about all they can do. You CANNOT stop a hurricane from obliterating a house. There is NOTHING the average American can do about it except leave and hope it survives.
Insurance companies don’t build shit. They just collect money from people, and sometimes give some of it back.
They’re actually required to give 85% of everything back, so they give back most of it. It seems like Florida is becoming too much of a hassle to insure, though. Some companies have pulled out of florida.
Everyone in FL should have pulled out.
This joke works on multiple levels and I’m happy about that.
Does that 85% include their costs or is that the full amount returned to policy holders?
unless they can find a way to screw you over for profit, then they absolutely will no matter how ridiculous the “reasoning”*
What insurance companies? They all backed out of Florida years ago. Now it’s state funded home insurance footing the bill.
I read a thing recently that insurance companies are getting increasingly skittish all over the country, even places that wouldn’t traditionally be considered risky, because yay, climate change.
The interesting thing about it was that insurance companies’ insurance is increasingly the thing that’s causing issues, because it’s getting harder for the risk to be spread out. That is to say that insurance companies financially rely on areas with low rates of natural disasters because they end up being a net positive due to insurance premiums and no need for payout. Fewer of these “safe” areas mean the insurance companies struggle to stay solvent and have to rely on their own insurance policies to have their back, but those meta-insurance companies have apparently been historically loud about climate change — probably because besides the government, they’re the ones who have to pony up
Here in Missouri, home owners insurance is starting to lose hail damage from coverage. Damn near 90% of the houses around my area have now replaced their roofs, and have the roofing signage out front. It’s almost a running joke now: guessing which house will be next to get one, and counting the company’s signs to see who’s making a killing.
If people don’t have the common sense to not build houses in places that are guaranteed to be destroyed by a natural disaster sooner than later, then I shouldn’t have to subsidize their rebuilding costs through my insurance premiums.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable place to build that’s not obviously at threat from hurricanes. But sometimes shit happens that couldn’t be easily foreseen, and THAT’S what insurance is for.
My point, however, is that insurance is NOT to make other policy holders foot the expense of someone repeatedly repairing/rebuilding after completely foreseeable/inevitable events.
To anyone that insists on having a house right on the beach on the Gulf Coast, I say, “Insure thy self.”
Yeah, used to be that insurance costs were almost directly skewed based on risk. But then people were upset that it costed so much to insure some places(the ones that should be prohibitively expensive to insure). And then slowly over time they baked in little increases in price everywhere else to subsidise huge price cuts in those areas to out-compete the companies that put the onus entirely on the people taking risks. Eventually, as it became more and more widespread to do that, it became financially more viable to spread it out rather than have drastically more expensive areas. And now we all have to partially cover people who are taking way more risk than we would.
That’s communism in a nut shell, Republicans should be up in arms over it
That or build something that can stand up to being hit. Tall order, but the inner armchair engineer in me thinks it’s like, totally possible.
