Will Hurricane Florence damage trigger assessments against all NC property owners?
Residents statewide could be charged for hurricane damage that didn't touch their homes, under a 2009 state law created as a safeguard against increasingly violent windstorms that could obliterate the runaway development along the state's coastline. That year the legislature said the
The 50-year-old pool is the insurer-of-last-resort that accounts for half the property insurance revenue from the state's 18 coastal counties. The pool currently covers nearly 192,000 properties, valued at
But triggering the emergency payment mechanism would take an extraordinary sequence of catastrophes, possibly two back-to-back monster storms, said
Hurricane Matthew, which soaked
Matthew cost the coastal pool
Hurricane Florence appears to be following a similar pattern,
"There is substantial damage but it's not the wholesale structural damage we were thinking when this thing was out in the
Initial estimates for damage caused by Hurricane Florence will be discussed by the
"I have several modeling firms that have already sent us loss projections," Schwitzgebel said. "I have meteorology reports from multiple companies -- reinsurance, brokers, air models, RMS [risk management solutions] models."
The
The most destructive storm would be Hurricane Hazel, the Category 4 storm from 1954, which today would cause
Those property losses are in line with the 2017 damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey in
Goodwin, the former state insurance commissioner, said there is a remote possibility of an unprecedented hurricane season that would bust the bank for the Coastal Property Insurance Pool. Goodwin said the odds are going to get greater over time as global warming intensifies, sea levels rise and storms become more destructive.
"Can Armaggedon happen where we get two Hazels in the same year?" Schwitzgebel said. "That's what you're looking at."
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