It is time for the insurance industry to pool its resources and make a national impact on disaster preparedness, mitigation and response by supporting the creation and operation of a new organization--let's call it the Insurance Institute for Emergency Management and Disaster Planning.

Insurers, as the guarantors of the general public for protection from catastrophic events, need a world-class research and policy organization that studies not just the financial cost of disasters, but how this nation plans and prepares for them, and how we mitigate the risks confronted.

Insurers need an organization that can evaluate and advocate for various building designs and construction methodologies, and forcefully opine on where those buildings should and should not be built. The same holds true for traffic and movement patterns, adequacy of public-sector response capabilities, and other important issues that transcend the nature of a specific disaster to be applicable to all events.

By having its own organization, the insurance industry--as it now does with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety--can convey its message in a thoughtful, well-reasoned manner, and not in the context of immediate market dynamics, as has so often been the case.

Consider the evidence.

The reports are starting to stack up. In June, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued the second in a series of studies on the state of the nation's preparedness for disasters--natural or man-made--titled "Nationwide Plan Review: Phase 2."

This report focused on an analytical assessment of the readiness of state and local governments for catastrophes, benchmarking many of its observations and findings upon the experiences surrounding Hurricane Katrina last year. This followed upon Homeland Security's "Phase 1" study, which was an initial assessment of state and local government efforts in this area.

The most striking finding is clearly the position of many in state and local governments that they are not susceptible to a large-scale disaster. Therefore, the reasoning goes, they need not prepare themselves or their citizens for such an event.

This is not the first time this kind of attitude has been documented. In fact, in a disturbing trend of like-mindedness, other reports have found similar detachments from the frank realities of the modern world.

There is, without a doubt, a trend that many in the private and public sectors in America are not preparing for disasters because they do not believe they will face one. This unfortunate situation may be caused by the compartmentalization of catastrophes--the public and its representatives have bought into a mistaken assumption that disasters only come in a few shapes or sizes.

Because hurricanes--the disaster du jour--occur in coastal areas of the eastern and southern United States, people in the heartland need not be concerned. Likewise, Al Qaida-like terrorism has been ingrained into the collective thinking as a big-city problem, driving a false sense of immunity for rural and suburban America.

Earthquakes, as everyone knows, only happen with any destructive force on the West Coast. Further, so much of the public discussion on preparedness has been placed in the context of these three perils that there is a sense that nothing else quite rises to the level of a true calamity--although the good people of New England, who recently experienced tragic flooding, might have a broader view of all this now.

The one common thread in the discussion of disasters, as well as disaster planning, prevention and response, is insurance.

Governments--especially state and local units--are keyed into the particular vulnerabilities within their respective jurisdictions, and businesses are even more myopic in their thinking of disasters only within the context of the four walls of their enterprises and the parties they deal with in the chain of commerce.

Insurance, however, is the great connector, having to be concerned about all disasters everywhere, and even more concerned about the national passivity to the issue of proper disaster planning and emergency management.

After all, insurance--more than government in many cases--ends up footing much of the bill for disaster recovery and reconstruction, both of which are directly influenced by the level of pre-event preparedness.

The insurance industry, however, is currently based upon a business model that has little patience for the operational aspects of risk management. The property-casualty industry is almost singularly operating off a financial model focusing on the large-scale aggregation of risk and the financing thereof through fluctuating supplies of reinsurance.

Seemingly lost on the industry is the notion that aggregated risks are actually individual risks pooled together. The growth of the alternative risk-financing business has been predicated largely on that failing of the traditional marketplace.

This point is further borne out in the market-conduct trends within the industry to retrench positions across numerous lines and in relation to a growing number of perils, as well as in the one-dimensional solution being proffered by the industry in the form of large-scale federal subsidies for terrorism and natural disaster risks.

There may be a place for federal involvement in risk financing, but it cannot be the only method by which the problems are approached by the insurance industry.

Another key element--largely missing in the public discussions on preparedness, risk mitigation, loss prevention and catastrophe financing--has been the voice of the insurance industry itself.

There has been virtually no voice of the industry on matters of building codes, land use planning, construction techniques, operational response to emergencies and other critical issues that go to the heart of the nation's problem in dealing with emergency preparedness--the dangerous perception that no matter what we do, there will be someone to pay for it at the end of the day.

Certainly, there have been a smattering of voices by those few within the industry who still think about risk on an individual as well as aggregate basis, and there are companies that maintain some elements of operational risk management, in terms of underwriting, rating, loss control and prevention.

But many risk reduction services have become ? la carte offerings to business clients, detached from the underlying insurance transaction--which, to the companies, in large measure, remains strictly a financial proposition.

The trend to the financial model of insurance from the operational/financial model of the past is largely the reason why insurers are bogged down in litigation over whether their policies meant one thing or another, and why insurers are incapable of shedding the image of the industry that is so prevalent today.

One place where that has not occurred is in the area of personal lines insurance--specifically auto coverage. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is a valuable vestige of the old model of insurance, where operational risk is as important as, and a major component of, financial risk for the industry.

From their well-publicized crash tests to their regular interactions with vehicle manufacturers and government agencies to advocate for positive change in vehicle designs, driver behavior and other direct elements of risk and loss, insurance companies as a consortium have contributed mightily to the vast improvements in vehicle and roadway safety.

The IIHS works off of, and continues the tradition of the insurance industry as a thought leader and change agent, carefully researching and analyzing matters that greatly affect their constituencies--policyholders and shareholders.

This was once the case when boards of fire underwriters and other industry-sponsored technical organizations were in the vanguard, and remains only so today in the IIHS and a few other organizations. The IIHS model needs to be applied to the area of disaster planning and emergency management.

Given the stakes involved--so high as to prompt the industry to repeatedly go hat-in-hand to the halls of Congress seeking relief--and the cross-over appeal for both personal and commercial lines writers, the time is right for the creation of an Insurance Institute for Emergency Management and Disaster Planning.

In a way, the insurance industry so far has only half-baked the bread. It supports in a very meaningful way the work of the Insurance Information Institute--the ubiquitous voice of insurance on all things economic and financial as it pertains to the industry.

The I.I.I. does provide helpful consumer tips and other practical resources, but it is not, by design or operation, an engineering and technical research organization. It does not have as its regular beat the interface between operational and financial aspects of insurance and risk. It does not, by design, delve into issues of public sector emergency management and disaster preparedness efficacy.

A new insurance institute focusing on these issues would be greatly complementary to the fine work of the I.I.I. Additionally, it would enhance the efforts of the industry's own Institute for Business and Home Safety--a well-meaning but insufficient effort to bring some of these operational matters to a full boil in the national forum of public discussion and policymaking.

It would also encourage broader support across the spectrum of the industry than that which has been enlisted so far for the commendable ProtectAmerica program, through which Allstate and others seek to establish federal and state disaster funds.

If the insurance industry went to those same halls of Congress, state capitols, city halls and business organizations with the type of broad-based, credible technical information that routinely comes from the IIHS, the entire public debate over catastrophe planning would take on a totally different character.

The discussions within which the insurance industry could take a leadership role would turn from just building code modernization to construction methodologies, land use planning, evacuation procedures, government financing of adequate emergency response, and all the other issues that contribute to the final amount of money that is ultimately paid out by the insurance industry in the aftermath of a disaster.

Without the knowledgeable voice of the insurance industry, supported by the institutional expertise that an IIEMDP could lend to the public discourse, we are bound to see more reports like that of the June Homeland Security paper issued while making little or no progress in truly securing our homeland.

Special Reports /

Insurers Should Back New Disaster Management Group

Related Stories

Recommended For You