FLOOD INSURANCE: Did underwhelming El Niño leave us overinsured? – Press
FLOOD INSURANCE: Did underwhelming El Niño leave us overinsured?
Riverside proprietor sKeith Swann and Donna Black watch inundate waters surg ein 2010. No such flooding erupted this winter during an underwhelming El Nino season.
, FILE PHOTO, DAVID BAUMAN
91 percent
Spikes in flood-inusrance policies:
Los Angeles County
Riverside County
Orange County
San Bernardino County.
In record numbers, homeowners via a state and segment rushed out to buy inundate word in expectation of a widely hyped – and feared – beast El Niño.
But rainfall has been anything though record-breaking. Instead of behaving like a stone star, this El Niño has served adult a continue homogeneous of conveyor music.
Now a finish is in steer for a stormy season, that typically runs by April.
And some are seeking a question: Did all these word buyers make a beast mistake?
Perhaps not surprisingly, supervision officials contend no.
“We positively don’t consider it is a rubbish of money,” pronounced Mary Simms, a mouthpiece for a Federal Emergency Management Agency in Oakland. “When you’re healthy, we don’t cancel your health insurance.”
Besides flooding a word market, Southern Californians stocked adult on sandbags, privileged ditches and drains, embellished trees and bushes, and bound their leaky roofs.
None of those was a squandered exercise, pronounced Jody Hagemann, a mouthpiece for a Riverside County Fire Department. The group distributed thousands of sandbags during dozens of glow stations widespread around a county as a stormy deteriorate approached.
“It’s never a rubbish of time to be prepared,” Hagemann said. “No matter if it’s fires, floods or earthquakes, it’s a pursuit to make certain that people are prepared.”
THE BIG 1997-98 RAINS
Besides, pronounced Bill Patzert, a meridian scientist during NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, some preparations still have been put to a test.
“If your roof indispensable repair, there was adequate rainfall to clear it,” Patzert said.
But chances are, if we bought inundate word we didn’t have to use it. Save for a array of textbook-El Niño storms a initial week of January, a deteriorate has been noted by light sleet and prolonged stretches of warm, dry weather.
For a deteriorate to date, rainfall totals are lagging behind even what would be approaching in an normal year.
That, of course, is not what was approaching this year.
After widely publicized warnings, Inland residents expected something along a lines of what happened a final time we had a large El Niño. During a winter of 1997-98, 30 inches of sleet fell on most of Southern California.
With memories of 1997-98 in their minds, many ran out and bought insurance.
