Several news items of late have triggered both my interest and my imagination. One was a news item about a company that makes smart bombs, those nasty little devices of warfare that can locate a target and home in on it, eliminating collateral damage. Better to blow up one ammo bunker than 100 civilians. Yep, a good device to have in the military toolbox.

The other article was about smart cars and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous black boxes, which are basically data recording devices that are placed in new vehicles and can, according to an article June 8, 2006, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “capture up to 10 seconds immediately before an accident and 300 milliseconds of data during a crash. But in the future … the information could be linked to a car's global positioning system to track where the car went in addition to the driver's behavior.” Black boxes also may show factors such as braking force or turns.

I recall riding a Trailways bus from Cleveland to New York in 1956 back when I was 15, sitting behind the driver and probably driving him nuts with my questions. One involved a gizmo that sat above his dashboard. Second by second, it documented on paper the speed of the bus as a record to determine if the driver exceeded the speed limit anywhere along the route or, if the bus was involved in an accident, to determine the speed at the time of impact.

That's what the new computerized black boxes can do. The questions are, who owns this data and who will be allowed to obtain it? Presumably the owner of the vehicle will, but knowledge of a black box will tempt injured plaintiffs to subpoena it and insurers to insist that its data be provided periodically for rating purposes. Of course, 10 seconds of data won't mean much, but once the data is linked to the GPS, an insurer technically could tap into the black box during renewal and, if they catch the applicant speeding, issue him a “black ball.” Permission to view the data would become part of the application form.

In the case of commercial vehicles, black boxes linked with GPS already can show the employer — and potentially the insurer — where the vehicle is at present, whether or not it is on the correct route, and if it is on schedule. In this day of just-in-time delivery, such information is mandatory. But with the high number of commercial vehicle accidents, especially on the highways, the devices also could be used to track a variety of factors, such as compliance with the mandatory-rest rules. It is one thing to fudge a hand-written timecard showing the required hours of rest, quite another to foil a GPS locator or recorder that tracks when and where the vehicle is, was, and will be.

So far, only privacy-conscious Californians have gotten alarmed about black boxes. Legislation was passed in 2004 requiring car manufacturers to disclose whether black boxes have been installed in the vehicle and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration intends to issue rules in 2006 regarding the use of them in an effort to standardize the information stored. How much help black boxes will be in the investigation of auto accidents remains to be seen, but they are now another required investigative step for the adjuster. Better to know immediately if the insured was going 90 MPH and never hit the brakes before the air bag went off than to learn it when the plaintiff files a motion to produce the black box for analysis.

Smart Radios and Dams

As the 2006 hurricane season approaches, many of us in the P&C business are thinking about wind and water. Wind is not just a coastal problem; tornadoes, gales, and other windstorms cause damage all over the nation. On one Indiana-bound trip, my wife and I saw four tornadoes; on another trip in New Mexico, we witnessed the development of one from its beginnings as a puff of cloud (she said, “Somebody's sending smoke signals!”), just east of Tucumcari, N.M., where it ripped out trees and downed power lines. It then took off toward Wichita Falls, Texas, where it blew itself out in a cow pasture.

We have a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather radio that is on all the time and will blast us out of bed in the middle of the night to inform us that there is a thunderstorm 20 miles to the west. Bully! What am I supposed to do about it? Hide under the mattress? Of course, if it was a tornado 20 miles west, I do need to do something, like moving to the downstairs closet we've selected as our storm shelter. Or turning on the TV to watch the local Doppler weather radar.

But what if I'm driving and listening to a CD and I'm headed straight into a tornado? Maybe along with the black box we need a “smart radio” that will come on automatically if the NOAA detects that I'm in danger. The technology is already there; it couldn't be that more expensive than some of the GPS “turn left at the next corner, you dolt!” gizmos that we already have in cars. Why not mandate that as well?

While we're on the subject of wind, weather, and automobiles, I've noted that a pint bottle of Bubbly-Gusher Well Water or whatever costs around $1.10. That's more than $8 a gallon for water somebody probably filled from a kitchen tap. We pay that much for a gallon of water but complain about $3 a gallon for gasoline? Both require processing, packaging, and shipping. Something is screwy somewhere. Of course, I rarely buy bottled water (it's a rip-off) unless I'm traveling and awfully thirsty. But gasoline? That's a necessity.

The problem with water is that there is either too much or too little. It has rained once at my house in the past four weeks, so I have to water plants and my tomato with expensive city water. Meanwhile, the folks in New England are drowning in the stuff.

Buying the Waterworks

While it may only be in the original Monopoly! game that one can actually purchase the Waterworks property, nevertheless water is a major commodity. I always hoped that one of my nephews would ask me what profession he should consider. I was prepared: “Go into hydro-engineering!” I would have advised. “Water will be more important than oil in the 21st century, maybe even more important than atomic energy.” Instead, they all decided that the world needed another lawyer, another CPA, and another Marine officer more than good water management.

If we can build a pipeline to pump oil from Alaska's frozen North Slope across soggy tundra and jagged mountain ranges, why can't we build a pipeline to pump excess water from where it is not wanted to where it is desperately needed? (Politicians! Pay attention! Here's your 2008 Political Campaign Promise for something that will really benefit us all!)

My idea is a “smart dam” (I don't hold the patent, unfortunately). Smart dams would be built along streams and rivers or wherever flooding is relatively common. At the bottom, the flow would be carefully monitored and allowed to pass. (In an advanced form of the smart dam, the regular flow of water would be filtered so that pollutants could be captured and, if valuable, recycled.) When the flow meter detects an increase in the gallons per minute passing, the smart dam would allow water to accumulate up to a certain level. Then it would automatically pump the excess water to a distribution center to be “sold” to areas needing it and then pumped it to those locations.

Dams would be placed so that runoff over a wide geographical region could be captured and pumped to the distribution centers. The price paid for the water would finance the cost of building the dam systems. In normal or dry times, of course, the water would continue to flow through the dams without collection.

Smart dams might also be programmed to pump silt that often collects around the base of dams. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' flood-control dams on the Mississippi River effectively eliminated the natural flow of silt to the Delta region. Land that was once built up from the annual flow of silt and soil down the Big Muddy now is washing away into the Gulf, especially during storm surges. Meanwhile, the river is clogged with the stuff, requiring constant and expensive dredging operations.

Environmental Impact

Whether from human or natural causes, it is clear that the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are melting at a much faster rather than previously believed. All that melting ice and those receding glaciers add to the sea level, which causes beach erosion and the wearing away of barrier islands. Every time the snow melts or the rain floods a valley, that water is lost down Mother Nature's storm sewers (river valleys) to the oceans, adding to their levels. If some of that valuable water could be shipped to the deserts or dry farm land for irrigation, it would make those areas more humid, more prone to better weather systems, and perhaps better control the tornadoes that tear across America annually, devastating town after town. Rain dances never seem to work very well, but smart dams might just do the trick.

Could it happen? Sure. Will it happen? Well, that's up to a lot of us. How smart are our politicians who could make it a reality? How smart are we when we vote for our politicians? Would the insurance industry support such an idea? After all, flood isn't an excluded peril in auto insurance. Federal tax money pays for uninsured flood damages and crop-insurance claims in a drought, so what have we got to lose? Of course, if we start building that water pipeline, we'll hear from those who holler, “Not in my back yard!” Okay, I'll bet the railroads would love to collect a little extra rent on their right-of-ways on which they are paying property taxes.

Say, maybe I do need to patent this idea!

Ken Brownlee, CPCU, is a former adjuster and risk manager, based in Atlanta. He now authors and edits claim-adjusting textbooks.

Special Reports /

Getting &quot;Smart,&quot; from Cars to Dams

Related Stories

Recommended For You

Getting "Smart," from Cars to Dams