DISASTER INSURANCEMississippi River Towns Pilot New Insurance Model to Help with Disaster Response
The pilot will test parametric insurance, which pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers”–such as wind speeds or river heights –reach a certain level.
Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.
The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two elderly poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.
Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.
Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.
But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water-line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.
“What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.
River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble.
So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover.
MRCTI, which represents 105 cities along the 10 mainstem states of the Mississippi River Basin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product.
The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding.
Pilot Will Test Usefulness of New “Parametric” Insurance Policies
The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the President, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.
In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the