![]() ![]() Homeowners have filed three class-action racketeering suits against insurers and engineering firms. ![]() senators and pushed FEMA to agree to a number of concessions. The accusations have drawn the ire of U.S. They have ordered Allstate Insurance, American Bankers Insurance Company of Florida, Hartford Casualty Insurance Company of the Midwest, and other insurers to turn over all “draft” engineering reports ahead of a major hearing to be held Thursday. District Court for the Eastern District of New York are now looking into just how common it is for insurers to minimize damages by altering reports. “Worse yet,” he wrote, “this unprincipled practice may be widespread.” Judges in the U.S. ![]() Magistrate Judge Gary Brown blasted the “secretly” rewritten report on Ramey and Kaible’s home. The NFIP has held a spot on this “High Risk” list since 2006, reflecting two running themes: the political turmoil on Capitol Hill that surrounds flood insurance pricing, and FEMA’s lax oversight of the raft of private contractors that administer government-backed flood insurance. Last week, the Government Accountability Office featured the NFIP in its latest report to Congress on troubled government programs. Those storms have weighed heavily on a program now $23 billion in debt to the U.S. In terms of total insured losses, Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, wrought $81 billion in damages, and Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, caused $31 billion (in 2014 dollars), according to reinsurer Aon Benfield. Congress enacted the program in 1968 to hedge disaster recovery costs – which, in recent years, have mounted alongside the more frequent and severe weather events associated with climate change. Some 5.3 million homeowners in America’s flood plains depend on the National Flood Insurance Program for coverage against the most frequently occurring natural disaster in the United States. Amid the slog of a court battle over cost estimates and policy coverage, allegations of altered engineering reports have swirled like a tempest. Many have sued the private insurance companies who sell policies for the federal government – FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program. Some 1,500 homeowners in New York and New Jersey, including Ramey and Kaible, are still fighting for insurance payouts they say they’re owed from Hurricane Sandy flood damage. Kaible snapped photos of key excerpts with a cell phone. It differed substantially from the document Kaible had received from Wright Flood, which advertises itself as the largest flood insurance carrier in the U.S. Kaible testified that the engineer retrieved from his car a version of the damage report he said he had written. “I said: ‘George, how can you possibly write this report?’ According to Kaible’s testimony in federal court last fall, he confronted the engineer about the document the couple had received from the insurance company. To Kaible’s surprise, it was the same man who’d showed up about six weeks earlier from an engineering firm called U.S. A report the couple received was particularly troubling: It chalked up the uneven floors and leaning walls to “long-term” deterioration – not flooding.įinally, the insurer agreed to send an engineer to take another look. ![]() Yet their insurer, after sending an engineer to inspect, had agreed to pay them only about $60,000. A city inspector recommended the home be torn down, and valued it at $205,000. He had to bust down the back door just to open it. The yellow house they owned and rented to tenants, one block from the ocean, did not look right. They called Wright National Flood Insurance dozens of times. The winter after Hurricane Sandy tore through their Long Beach, New York, neighborhood and filled the streets with thick sand, Deborah Ramey and her husband Robert Kaible tried desperately to reach their flood insurance carrier. ![]()
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