U.N. wants better disaster protection: Here’s why the Caribbean offers a lesson
TALLAHASSEE
Florida’s property insurance market was in free fall in
2006 after a series of hurricanes. Premiums were rising. Insurers were going out of business or threatening to leave the state.
In response, a group of St. Petersburg businessmen and lawyers came up with a sweeping solution: Have the state offer hurricane insurance. Let private insurers offer everything else.
Armed with data and political connections, group members flew private planes to Tallahassee on repeated trips to meet with then-Gov. Charlie Crist, lawmakers and the state’s insurance regulator.
Instead of being welcomed, they found their idea was “a political hot potato,” one member said.
Although the dozens of
PUNTA DEL ESTE, URUGUAY
When the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center in Trinidad and Tobago first received word that the La Soufrière volcano in nearby St. Vincent and the Grenadines was showing increased activity, director Erouscilla Joseph wasted no time getting to work.
Joseph, a volcanologist, immediately assembled a team. While working to get them into the eastern Caribbean nation amid COVID-19 restrictions and no commercial flights, she also was trying to forecast the eruption while advising the island government and National Emergency Management Organization when to begin evacuations.
“We had to mobilize very, very quickly; pool as many resources as we could to get additional equipment to deploy and strengthen the network rapidly in St. Vincent,” Joseph said, recalling the uncertainty and logistical challenges in late December 2020. That’s when she had received an alert in an email from one of her observers on another island that a NASA fire information system had detected a hot spot in the vicinity of the volcano located on the northern end of St. Vincent.
“We had to prepare for the eventuality that it would transition to explosive,” Joseph said. “So we had to then start getting that message out and that preparedness down to the community level so that they would know how to respond in the event this thing went explosive very quickly.”
La Soufrière eventually erupted on April 9, 2021, sending six miles of ash into the sky. It was the first eruption in 40 years, and was followed by more eruptions. Several severe tropical storms and rains slowed down the recovery.
The response to La Soufriere, which was recognized internationally, stands as a textbook example of how early warning and community engagement minimized loss of property and lives — no one died in the aftermath of the eruption. But it is also a cautionary tale about the challenges disaster specialists everywhere face in the race to
In storm-free years, the small Florida insurance companies that make up the bulk of the state’s industry can make considerable profits for insuring relatively few homes, thanks to charging the high premiums required for wind