A new Alabama The study of houses affected by hurricanes sends a clear message to insurers and owners of housing throughout the country: climate resistant construction methods can protect houses and save a lot of money.
The first of its type analysisPosted this week, check thousands of insurance claims linked to Hurricane Sallythat hit the coast of Alabama in 2020 with wind speeds of up to 105 miles per hour. Modernized or built houses to fortified standards, a voluntary construction code created by the non -profit insurance institute for construction and home security (IBHS) for wind and rain mitigation saw significantly less claims and less expensive.
If each house hit in Mobile and Baldwin counties would have complied with fortified standards, insurance companies could have spent 75% less on payments, saving up to $ 112 million, and policy holders could have paid up to 65% less in deductibles, saving almost $ 35 million, according to the study.
The results show “mitigation works and that we can build things that are resistant to climate change,” said Dr. Lars Powell, director of the Risk and Insurance Research Center of the Culverhouse School of Business of the University of Alabama, who directed the study with the Alabama insurance department.
Throughout the United States, insurance markets are buckling under pressure of most frequent and expensive climatic eventsAnd federal support is Proceed for resilience projects that could reduce that damage. The officials and researchers involved with the study say that it shows that the proactive approach to Alabama for the challenge (mandatory and considerable insurance discounts for those who use fortified and a subsidy program to help them pay) could be a national model to increase insurability and security.
IBHS created fortified to strengthen buildings against storm damage based on decades of research in its facilities, where it uses a giant wind tunnel to hit model houses with rain, hail and rolled up to 130 miles per hour.
“We are having records of one year after the year record of disasters and insured losses, and we have been looking for significant ways of reducing the severity and frequency of those losses,” said Fred Malik, managing director of the fortified program.
The three levels of designations (fortified ceiling, silver and gold, use methods such as improving roof holders, the use of doors and windows with impact classification, and safer anchor walls to their foundations. The program requires verification of third party work.
Around 80,000 homes in 32 states now have fortified designations, with more than 53,000 in Alabama.
The State began to look for ways to improve the results of the storms after Hurricane Ivan in 2004 shook the state insurance market. “Ivan was absolutely devastating,” said Alabama Insurance Commissioner Mark Fowler. “Our market was going crazy, the insurers left.”
It became the only state to implement minimum mandatory insurance discounts for fortified housing, currently half the wind of the premiums of the owners. He also launched the Strengthen Alabama’s houses Incentive program, which offers subsidies of up to $ 10,000 for housing owners modernizing their houses to fortified standards.
The State has distributed $ 86 million for 8,700 modifications fortified since 2015. Fowler attributes the initiative with a catalyzed demand for new fortified constructions and encouraging contractors and inspectors to learn the standards.
“It worked like gangbusters,” he said. “We have seen that the market stabilized substantially.”
Hurricane Sally He offered researchers his first opportunity to evaluate the benefits of the program in a real storm. “It really was a prototypical storm that anyone living on the hurricanes coast can see in a certain year,” said Malik.
They gathered insurance data in more than 40,000 houses in the affected area, a total insured value of $ 17 billion.
Fortified construction reduced the frequency of claim by 55% to 74%, depending on the level of designation and severity of the loss by 14% to 40%. Despite representing almost a quarter of the policies studied, fortified houses represented only 9% of claims.
It even was better than houses built with similar codes, but without the official designation, probably due to the strictest verification requirements of the program.
“It really begins to bring home that there is value for everyone involved,” said Malik. “There is value for insurers, there is value for the owner.”
Fortified does not address all kinds of hurricane losses. Almost half of the statements in the study were of fallen trees, which require separate mitigation strategies.
Improved standards add cost: between 0.5% to 3% more for new constructions, and from 6% to 16% for modifications. But long -term benefits have caused even non -profit organizations for disaster recovery as a habitat for humanity, the Rubicon and SBP team use fortified, often with the philanthropic support of insurers such as travelers and Allstate.
“Helping the owners hit by disaster to build smarter with storm -resistant construction and Fortified IBHS standards helps break the cycle of disasters and losses,” said Thomas Corley, director of Operations of the Operations of the Non -profit SBP based in New Orleans, which has built 671 homes with fortified standards in Nine States.
Possible insurance discounts also help recover families by reducing their monthly expenses and increasing the confidence that they can continue to offer their homes. “For low -income families, this could mean the difference between ascending mobility or years of financial instability after a disaster,” said Corley.
Alabama is expanding its subsidies program to three new counties this year. Fowler said that the results will encourage more insurance companies to offer wind protection in coastal houses, and that adoption will extend to areas less prone to hurricanes that are still susceptible to Severe climate.
The approach has caught the attention of other states that seek resilience solutions. Fowler spoke to a legislative committee of California last month in support of the California Safe Casa LawA proposed bill that would finance subsidies for safe ceilings on fire and defensible space to protect from forest fires.
“Natural disasters such as wind storms, earthquakes or forest fires will come regardless of what we do,” he told the committee. “That means that you must find ways to develop stronger before the event so that it has less damage after the event. Actually, it is a fairly simple concept.”
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