Hurricane Insurance Time

Today I’m trying to finalize my homeowner’s insurance.

Last year, I paid $8,000 for insurance. A fortune. Most of it was due to the hurricane problem.

In my mind, Florida policies are divided in two parts: ordinary insurance and hurricane insurance. The latter part is what kills us. I can get pretty good insurance here for under $1,300, but I have to omit storm insurance.

Storm insurance usually has a deductible so high it is useless for anyone whose house doesn’t, at minimum, lose a big percentage of its roof. If, for example, a storm ruins your landscaping and takes out a garage door and a bunch of windows, you’re going to pay for all of it, plus your insurance premium. I’m looking at deductibles in the area of $40,000. I would have to have extremely serious damage to make a $40,000 deductible anything but a total liability shield for my insurer.

The question for a homeowner is whether the high price and low reward are justified by the risk of damage.

Determining the risk of damage is difficult because just about everyone in every industry behaves like a hysterical woman when discussing hurricanes. They make gross exaggerations.

I just saw a graphic saying that winds above Category 4 were catastrophic and would “destroy” “most” affected homes. That’s not even nearly true.

I was in Andrew, before the post-Andrew building codes. Sustained winds in my county approached 180 mph. Hurricanes are measured by sustained winds, not gusts. A wind is sustained if it lasts at least 60 seconds. Anything beneath 60 seconds is a gust.

The Chicken Littles love to rate storms by their gusts. That’s dishonest. They’ll say, “This storm packs winds of up to seventy miles an hour!” Yeah, and they last 4 seconds. It’s the sustained winds that count.

When Andrew hit Miami, tens of thousands of homes were hit by sustained winds over 150 mph, so of course, most were completely destroyed. Not. In fact, only a tiny percentage were destroyed. I was in my dad’s house, and we got winds of around 170 mph. We didn’t lose the roof, one wall, or one window. We didn’t lose one roof tile.

It was a bad time. The yard was a mess. Big trees went down. But the house wasn’t destroyed.

Even in the famous Country Walk development, which suffered damage so bad tourists drove by and shot video, generally, houses were not completely destroyed. Many lost their flimsy second stories, but they were not destroyed.

Over the last few years, I have held the belief that I live in a hurricane-proof area. I based that on research. I was not able to find any evidence that my area had EVER sustained hurricane-force winds, meaning winds of at least 75 mph. There have been tropical storm winds. The term “tropical storm winds” means winds of between 40 and 74 mph. But in reality, we almost always get the lower end of the scale, for brief periods.

I have walked around in my yard during periods when Chicken Littles on news stations were screeching about our winds, and it was actually pleasant.

Because I have been preparing to reinsure, I have been doing more research lately. I saw something disturbing. A website implied Ocala, the nearest big city, had been hit by a storm with 161-mph winds in 1928. I was about to get insurance without wind coverage, but that made me pause and do more research. I thought maybe I was wrong to forgo wind insurance.

Then I found out the website, Firststreet.org, was broadcasting nonsense. It looks like it’s a garbage website.

The 1928 storm made landfall in West Palm, with winds of 145 mph. Hurricanes weaken as they approach land, and when they come ashore, they weaken even more. West Palm is 250 miles away, so you can imagine what the winds were like once the storm got to the place where my house stands.

The way hurricanes weaken is interesting.

When you see a meteorologist joyfully proclaiming a storm has Category 4 or 5 winds, most of the time, the storm will be over water, far off the coast. That’s because hurricanes get all of their power from hot air rising off warm water. Closer to shore, the water is cooler, so the winds drop. Just before hurricanes make landfall, they are generally considerably weaker than they were over the water.

When their eyes hit land, things really fall apart. The power source is gone at that point. You never see a hurricane eye in Georgia or Alabama. Just disorganized rain and wind.

I am about 40 miles from the coast on one side and 70 on the other. Forty miles may not seem like a big distance compared to a hurricane, but it’s a very effective buffer.

I can’t find any record of hurricane winds hitting this place. Orlando is slightly less favorably situated, and it has never had anything worse than Category 1, which means 75-95. I haven’t found any authority saying they even hit 75. ChatGPT thinks Orlando maxed out at 59, and I can’t find any record of Disney World being hit by a hurricane.

Disney World is about 53 years old.

ChatGPT’s best guess at my area’s top recorded sustained wind is 61 mph, back in 2017. I was here. The house was here. No damage. Just tree problems, with two landing on fences. I don’t recall seeing anything that looked like a 61-mile-per-hour storm. Humorously, there is an article from the local paper that says Irma came through “packing” 65-mile-per-hour winds. They love “packing” and “hurtling.”

What about water?

Coastal people are the real hurricane victims, unless you count inland people who live in feeble structures or near trees that should be cut. Coastal people get the highest winds, and they also get storm surge and flooding. Flooding comes from both rain and storm surge.

I get no storm surge. I get no flooding. Before my dad bought this place, I checked it out, and it really can’t flood. The government has a website that tells you where floods can happen.

Flooding and storm surge are impossibilities.

What about tornadoes?

There, I have a problem. No one can predict where a tornado will hit, and there have been a few in this area since I arrived. They didn’t flatten houses, but they did damage roofs pretty badly. If I give up wind insurance, I won’t be able to keep tornado insurance. It’s all or nothing.

There are thousands and thousands of houses here. Almost none have been hit by tornadoes since I arrived, but it could happen to me, just as I could be struck by lightning. Should I insure against it?

Doubtful. Those deductibles are really something, compared to the likely damage.

One nice thing about a tornado is that getting repairs fast afterward is a cinch. After a bad hurricane or tropical storm, all the contractors get booked up fast, so people with homes they can’t live in have to find temporary quarters and hope no one loots their properties. Tornadoes don’t affect enough people to tie up a lot of contractors.

I can build a new house without help if I have to, but there is no way a storm will make total reconstruction necessary, so there is no way an insurer will pay that much. I might need total reconstruction if there is a fire, but that’s covered without wind coverage.

My inclination is to forget wind insurance. It’s mainly a way to put coastal people on welfare. Insurers know I won’t have any wind claims, and they know coastals don’t want to pay $15,000 for insurance, so they spread the cost out, putting the screws to me in order to make their product cheaper and more appealing to coastals. It’s like the health insurance people in their twenties pay. They don’t get sick, so their money goes to old people with COPD, cirrhosis, and type 2 diabetes.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. My buddy Mike knows an insurance broker, and he told Mike the purpose of high premiums in areas like mine was to pay for damage far away, on the coasts.

I wish people would stop lying about hurricanes. They get excited about them. We love exaggerating misfortune, trying to impress each other with our delusional versions of what is likely to go wrong. In the case of hurricanes, it makes it hard to get important information.

I will make a decision today.