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State Farm works to prepare for natural disasters
 | 04.16.2008 | 08:43:15 | Views: 8444 | ID:

April 16 '08: State Farm is working to create partnerships among federal, state and local governments with the private sector and individual policy holders which will boost cooperative efforts to prepare for and to respond to natural disasters and emergencies. "The private insurance market - on its own - has insufficient capacity to handle exposures for catastrophic natural disasters and still cover all of its other insurance obligations," State Farm said about its partnerships."

To push those initiatives, State Farm has created five goals: to adopt statewide and modernized building codes; educated consumers on the risks of living in catastrophe-prone areas and how that affects insurance policies; how to coordinate emergency response and recovery with emergency management and its logistics; to establish state catastrophe funds in prone areas; and to have a financial safety-net on the federal level when costs exceed the state's ability to pay.

Other insurance groups like AIG have been working in wildfire-prone areas to establish special relationships with the local fire response agencies to help in the event of large incidents. In some cases, private homeowners pay extra money to have special firefighting response coverage delivered by the insurance company.

And in Buffalo, NY Merchant Mutual Insurance Co., has been working with the city on "what-if" scenarios involving pandemic planning. There, the disaster response team's director for Merchant told Buffalo News they made sure the "company still had enough staff to function, run its operations and meet its customer's needs - including handling telephone calls and insurance claims."

State Farm said on its website that community preparedness, response and resiliency in the face of disasters must be met with solutions "to better prepare [sic] and protect America from major catastrophes in a sensible, cost-effective fashion. ... State farm supports a coherent, comprehensive and coordinated approach involving American citizenry, private insurers, and local, state and federal governments."

National Blueprint Tags: Economic & Infrastructure, Citizen & Community.

 

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