Earthquakes Shake Up Haiti. Will They Wake Up America?

One earthquake of 7.0-magnitude on Tuesday January 12, 2010 was bad enough. A second earthquake of 6.0 magnitude on the Richter scale on Wednesday January 19, also hit the impoverished and now-imperiled island nation of Haiti.

Risk-modeling firm Risk Management Solutions estimated that the Haitian earthquake killed an estimated 250,000 people and destroyed more than 4,000 buildings in Port-au-Prince, according to an article in insurance trade publication National Underwriter. The publication also reported that the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (a risk pooling facility that includes the Haiti government), will receive less than $8 million for earthquake damage.

The road to recovery looks long and difficult for everyone in the small island nation, which before the earthquake already faced overwhelming poverty. But the world rallied to the side of the Haitian people, with military, financial, food, water and other resources being brought to Haiti in the days following the quake. The efforts range from the donation bins that sprang up in fast-food restaurants (see photo), to a text-message fund-raising campaign, to thousands of U.S. Marines, to multiple charitable donations from insurance firms in the United States.

A recent article from Trusted Choice, the brand campaign launched by the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, reported another number: 5,000. That’s how many earthquakes are felt in the United States each year.

Many Americans may think California is the state at most risk of an earthquake. Since 1900, though, earthquakes have caused damage in all 50 states, according to information from the Insurance Information Institute. California is at greatest risk for widespread and catastrophic damage to property, however. In 2006, a forecast  from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Southern California Earthquake Center, and the State Geological Survey said that the state is likely to be struck by a major earthquake by 2028.

But only 12 percent of Californians own earthquake insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute (I.I.I.). That’s sharply lower than 30 percent in 1996 (when California was in recovery from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which at an estimated $20 billion in property damage was the most-costly quake in U.S. history).

Whose job is it to change this before the “big one” hits? Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of property owners. But isn’t it almost always true that when a community recovers from a disaster, there’s a team of local insurance professionals behind it? And independent insurance agents often are the captains of those local teams.

– Charles Wasilewski