North Dakota tornado kills 1 man wreaks havoc on small town
The News Review:
- North Dakota tornado kills 1 man wreaks havoc on small town
- Heavy storms hit waterlogged hio prompting tornado warnings
- New rleans – Hurricane Katrina – Housing – Insurance – Natural…
- New rleans – Hurricane Katrina – Housing – Insurance – Natural…
- New rleans – Hurricane Katrina – Housing – Insurance – Natural…
North Dakota tornado kills 1 man wreaks havoc on small town
International Herald Tribune – Aug 26, 2007
Grand Forks County Sheriff Dan Hill said the extent of damage “just floored me. ” “There were cars that looked like they went through a crusher” he said. The tornado demolished two neighboring trailer parks on Northwood's north side which had 19 units in all and killed Larry Weisz 57 who was pinned between the base of a mobile home and a tree Grand Forks County Sheriff Dan Hill said. Forecasters said North Dakota could get more severe weather Monday due to a mass of warm unstable air followed by a strong cold front.
Heavy storms hit waterlogged hio prompting tornado warnings
San Diego Union Tribune – Aug 26, 2007
CNTENT>CLUMBUS hio – Storms slammed rain-soaked hio yesterday as hundreds of thousands of people in the Midwest were without power after their homes were battered by lashing winds and flooding rains. Tornado warnings were issued late yesterday for parts of central and southeast hio. Unspecified damage from straight-line winds was reported in the central part of the state though a tornado had not been confirmed said National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Hatzos.
New rleans – Hurricane Katrina – Housing – Insurance – Natural…
New York Times – Aug 26, 2007
(“The worst place to go if you’re taking risks” says one cat-bond investor “is the Weather Channel. They’re just screaming all the time. “) But entering the 2005 hurricane season the Seo brothers had reconsidered their habit of buying in a storm. “The word had gotten out that buying in the storm was the smart thing to do” Seo says. “And we were afraid our past successes would give us an irrational interest in buying. Everything’s all fuzzy in these events. And when things are fuzzy your brain gives you an excuse to push the envelope… the modeling company declared that it was rethinking the whole subject of hurricane risk. Since 1995 scientists had noted a distinct uptick in hurricane activity in the North Atlantic Basin. The uptick had been ignorable because the storms had not been making landfall. But between July 2004 and the end of 2005 seven of history’s most expensive hurricanes had struck the American coast leaving behind 5. 5 million insurance claims and $81 billion in insured losses. The rise in hurricane size and frequency was no longer ignorable.
New rleans – Hurricane Katrina – Housing – Insurance – Natural…
New York Times – Aug 26, 2007
“You could take it and take all the science that also wasn’t being used and you could package it in a model that could spit out numbers companies could use to make decisions. It just seemed like such an obvious thing to do. ” She combined the long-term hurricane record with new data on property exposure building-replacement costs by ZIP code engineering reports local building codes etc. and wound up with a crude but powerful tool both for judging the probability of a catastrophe striking any one area and for predicting the losses it might inflict. Then she wrote her paper about it. The attention Clark’s paper attracted was mostly polite. Two years later she visited Lloyd’s pregnant with her first child hauling a Stone Age laptop and gave a speech to actual risk-takers… They assumed that even the worst catastrophe could generate no more than a few billion dollars in losses but her model was generating insured losses of more than $30 billion for a single storm and these losses were far more likely to occur than they had been in the previous few decades. She projected catastrophic storms from the distant past onto the present-day population and storms from the more recent past onto richer and more populated areas than they had actually hit. (If you reran today the hurricane that struck Miami in 1926 for instance it would take out not the few hundred million dollars of property it destroyed at the time but $60 billion to $100 billion. ) “But” she says “from their point of view all of this was just in this computer. ” She spoke for 45 minutes but had no sense that she had been heard. “The room was very quiet” she says. “No one got up and left.
New rleans – Hurricane Katrina – Housing – Insurance – Natural…
New York Times – Aug 26, 2007
Thirteen years before what would become Tropical Storm Katrina churned toward Florida on Monday Aug. 24 1992 Karen Clark walked from her Boston office to a nearby Au Bon Pain. Several hours earlier Hurricane Andrew had struck Florida and she knew immediately that the event could define her career. Back in 1985 while working for an insurance company Clark wrote a paper with the unpromising title “A Formal Approach to Catastrophe Risk Assessment in Management. ” In it she made the simple point that insurance companies had no idea how much money they might lose in a single storm. For decades Americans had been lurching toward catastrophe. The 1970s and ’80s were unusually free of major storms.