While disasters can happen at any moment, sending catastrophe adjusters all over the nation to handle the massive claims that can result from a disaster, these are usually calamities that no one sees well in advance.
As one of the co-authors of Catastrophe Claims — Insurance Coverage for Natural and Manmade Disasters, there was one type of disaster that I did not discuss in my chapter on manmade dilemmas — the urban riot.
This article was written in March after the election in many states including Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Florida. The outcome promises to create a big a ruckus in Cleveland, Ohio, at the Republican Convention this month and verbal duels until November. As an adjuster in Miami during the 1972 Republican Convention it, too, resulted in riots and burning neighborhoods, and for a week or more there were certain neighborhoods where one did not venture without great concern.
|Adjusters need to be prepared for urban riots
Eight years earlier in August 1964, there had been similar riots in Chicago during the Democratic Presidential Convention. Political battles are common in America, despite the primary system, and animosity of a mob can turn to damages that are covered by property insurance policies. Adjusters in Cleveland need to be prepared.
This Iconoclast does not often venture into the hot wires of politics; he's been accused of going too far in past columns even when he wasn't expressing much more than a warning. But whether he is a hot blooded, gun tottin' radical, four steps to the right of Genghis Kahn or a “Let's look at this reasonably and weigh the options” voter, he tries to be realistic. There is so much pent-up emotion, fear and hatred in this country that it is going to explode, and that explosion is likely to occur in his hometown of Cleveland.
Despite recent events, such as the shooting by the police of a black twelve-year-old boy with a toy gun and Detroit-like urban blight and unemployment, Cleveland is a beautiful city. Remember the Higbee's Santa Claus in the movie Christmas Story, where Ralphie couldn't find the words to say “I want a Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock” and was offered a football instead? Back in the 1940s I sat on that Santa's lap too. Only today Higbee's is a gambling casino, and passenger trains no longer run through the Terminal Tower (other than the Rapid Transit trains on which I rode to school and college.)
There is still a magnificent Playhouse Square and some good hotels, but the beating manufacturing heart of the nation that Cleveland was until the mid-1960s has suffered a thrombosis and several by-pass operations. What a riot at the GOP convention will do to the city remains to be seen, but the scene may not be very encouraging for the November election.
|Risk management issues for cities
Any time a big event comes to any city there will be turmoil. Los Angeles and Atlanta have seen political conventions and the Olympics, and both have presented risk management issues. These events are expensive for cash-conscious cities, with the over-time pay for law enforcement, fire service, crowd control, and in the aftermath, medical care for the injured and court costs for the arrested.
Rioting and vandalism can be just as expensive for a city (and its citizens' insurers) as any flood, windstorm or forest fire. It is also a perfect target time for terrorism, foreign or domestic. Not only will the politicians and candidates slug it out before TV cameras, there will be masses of people on the street, probably half of them who really have no interest in the political issues.
Cleveland, the “Forest City” with its “green necklace” of parks including the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, of which I wrote in 1993 in Valley of the Gray Moon, deserves recognition as one of America's greatest cities, not the brunt of jokes, as so often is the case. It is now a city of many races and cultures, first, second and third generations of founding immigrants (my own parents included), and of great institutions and universities. Hopefully it will escape the devastation that is predicted for this convention.
Ken Brownlee, CPCU, is a former adjuster and risk manager based in Atlanta, Ga. He now authors and edits claims-adjusting textbooks. Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own.
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