After Hurricane Irene: insurance, health-care and small-business ...

Workers board up a restaurant in Manhattan's East Village on Saturday in advance of Hurricane Irene. Photo by Flickr user david_shankbone.

Covering a hurricane is writing about the destruction and what has happened to the people in its path.

But covering a hurricane is also a business news story.

That?s what I learned in August 1992, when the Tampa Tribune sent me to South Florida to cover the business angles of Hurricane Andrew, which caused more than $27 billion worth of damage in Florida and Louisiana and was at the time the largest natural disaster in terms of its cost. (It has since been passed by others, including Hurricane Katrina.)

As a business reporter, I looked at the story differently than my colleagues at the paper also sent to write about Andrew. They were looking at the destruction and the effect on people?s lives. I was looking at that, too, but from a business news perspective.

Covering a hurricane, no matter your angle, means improvising. In Florida after Andrew, many of the street signs had been blown away, so a map was useless. And if you had a street address, debris often blocked the most direct route.

My beat was insurance and health care, so in covering Andrew, I looked for stories from that perspective. But I also found a lot of other business news stories and ended up covering those, too, because I found that how the hurricane affected business was being ignored by the rest of the media.

In hindsight, the best thing that I did covering Hurricane Andrew was the prep work before I got to Miami. I spent the week before it hit land contacting insurance companies and asking if I could hook up with their adjuster crews once the storm blew through. The PR people gave me names and phone numbers of their workers.

Insurance and health care

Traveling around with those adjusters proved invaluable, and led to a Sunday story that I wrote for the paper. The adjusters simply flashed a pass that got them past police barricades and into areas where many media were not allowed. After a day with the adjusters, I wrote a profile of two sisters ? working for different insurance companies ? who were ?adjusting? their fourth and sixth natural disasters; it ended up winning a monthly writing contest at the Tribune.

Watching these people visit damaged homes ? houses where the owners had spray painted their insurance company?s name and policy number on the side ? and immediately write a check gave me insight into how they worked.? And I stuck close to them because some homeowners refused to leave their residences for fear of them being looted. They often greeted us at the door with loaded guns, wanting to know who we were.

A smart insurance angle to look at is how paying for the repairs will affect the bottom line of the companies. Some insurers specialize in covering homes and structures near the coast. If they?re overwhelmed with claims, some may not have the money to pay for all of the claims and could get seized by regulators. Check with your state insurance department a couple of weeks after the storm to see if any are teetering. Here?s a list of state insurance regulators.

Then there?s the angle of what?s going to happen to insurance rates after the storm, and whether any insurers will pull out of the market. Insurance companies have to file with the state regulators for rate changes, and whether they plan to withdraw. One of my best scoops during Hurricane Andrew was when I reported that Allstate planned to stop writing new policies in Florida, two days before the New York Times reported the story. I got that story by checking regularly with the Allstate people in Florida, not in their Illinois headquarters.

Health care is often disrupted during hurricanes, and I found hospitals and clinics setting up makeshift operations in parking lots. Check with local health care operations to see what they?re doing to help the injured ? and how these operations will affect their bottom line. Many times, extra health care providers are hired to take care of the increased number of patients.

Small business

I also spent a few days driving around Miami in my rental car and stopping to talk to small business owners who were in their shops assessing the damage and trying to figure out how they could get back up and running. After interviewing a few, I realized that these businesses were more likely to close as a result of the hurricane than bigger operations.

This boarded-up shop on Avenue A in Manhattan's East Village has a message for Hurricane Irene. Photo by Flickr user david_shankbone.

Writing that story was a combination of anecdotes and advice, which meant talking to experts on the best ways to get a business reopened as fast as possible. Some of them had bought generators to provide power to their stores, but others went weeks without electricity. A flower shop literally saw its product wilt before its eyes because of a lack of refrigeration.

If you can?t visit the damaged area to find these businesses, contact your state National Federation of Independent Business office. They?re helpful in finding small business owners affected by storms to talk to reporters.

Other businesses ? not many, but a few ? will try to gouge customers before and after a natural disaster by hiking up the prices of their goods or services. State attorneys general offices will be monitoring complaints about high prices and will take action against any company it feels is trying to take advantage of the situation, so check with their offices regularly.

In covering a hurricane, the best policy is to be a human being first and a reporter second. If someone needed help, give it to them. If they didn?t have a phone and needed to call a relative, I let them use mine. If they needed water, I gave them a bottle from the case I had bought and put in the back of my rental car.

People affected by a hurricane go into survival mode, and the easiest way to get them to bring down that barrier of not wanting to talk to a journalist is to show some compassion before you start asking questions.

Finally, be skeptical about economic forecasts that the rebuilding after a hurricane will boost a local economy. A 2002 study found that?s just not the case in the long run.

Resources

Here are some other places to add context to your business-related insurance stories:

Insurance Information Institute ? can provide data on insurance claims and provide spokespeople for interviews. It also has market share data by state.

AIR Worldwide ? a company that provides estimates of insurance damage from natural disasters.

EQECAT ? another company that estimates insured damages from natural disasters.

Source: http://businessjournalism.org/2011/08/28/after-hurricane-irene-insurance-health-care-and-small-business-angles/

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