Monthly Archives: August 2011

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East Coast Has Time to Prepare for Hurricane Irene, “But We Don’t Have Forever.” Start Getting Ready.

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Hurricane Irene battered the Caribbean and may now have its sights set on the Mid-Atlantic. It’s still to early to accurately forecast the storms trajectory, but FEMA is urging the entire East Coast to prepare.

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After lashing the Turks and Caicos islands and the Bahamas, Irene is projected to skirt Florida and instead hit the Carolina coast by the weekend, but Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, said Irene’s exact path cannot be predicted this far out.

The storm, he said, will affect a large area.

“People think hurricanes are a Southern thing but people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast need to take Irene seriously,” Fugate said.

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“We have a lot of time for people to get ready but we don’t have forever.”

Last year around this time, there was much made of the damage Hurricane Earl might do well north of the traditional hurricane-exposed region of the country. Then it came and went without any fury to speak of.

That non-event will likely cloud the minds of some who will expect the same result. Hopefully, nothing disastrous will happen. But eventually a storm will make it up to the Northeast. We don’t know when. And that’s why you have to prepare for each as if it may.

Here’s a good article on how to keep track of the storm’s path.

State Liability Cap Leaves Lawyers Looking for Damages Elsewhere Following the Seventh Death from the Indiana State Fair Stage Collapse

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The Indiana State Fair stage collapse last week has now claimed a seventh victim. Meagan Toothman, a 24-year-old cheerleading coach from Cincinnati, will be taken off life support later today after doctors remove her organs in “a surgery that will provide gifts of sight, health, and life to dozens who are in need,” according to a statement from her family.

The event will forever serve as a reminder of just how bad things can go when organizers do not put safety at a premium. And now because Indiana state law caps damages that it can incur, it is also likely to also become an example of wide-ranging lawsuits filed against all those involved in a tragedy.

Reports Property Casualty 360:

The Indianapolis Business Journal reported that Indiana law limits individual damage claims against the state to $700,000 and overall claims to $5 million per event.

Legal experts said that could result in several other entities aside from the state fair becoming targets of negligence lawsuits, including the designer and builder of the stage and the promoter of the Sugarland concert.

“I think there will probably be a large number of defendants listed, just because there’s a limited pot of money,” attorney Tom Schultz said.

Based upon the reported instances of shoddy management we have heard (the stage likely was never inspected, the were no storm warnings relayed to concertgoers and one meteorologist’s advice to cancel the fair was ignored), there are likely a lot of people to blame.

And it sounds like there are several plaintiff attorneys ready to find damage over and above the $5 million limit.

Dan Chamberlain, a partner at the Indianapolis personal-injury firm of Doehrman Chamberlain, said his firm could sue on behalf of one victim within the next week.

“You’ve got 50 people injured, five who have been killed, and you’ve got $5 million in coverage,” Chamberlain said. “It’s nowhere close to fairly and adequately compensating the families.”

In addition to any potential challenges to the $5 million cap that lawyers will file, there is also a case that may challenge the legality of Indiana’s same-sex marriage law.

Justice Department Investigation of S&P

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The Justice Department is investigating Standard & Poor’s for improperly rating the garbage mortgage-backed securities that tanked the economy once the world caught on that they were toxic assets.

The anonymous folks who leaked this info to the press claim that the inquiry began prior to S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt, but many have speculated that the fervor and depth of the probe has ratcheted up since the nation lost its AAA-status.

Either way, the law dogs are — finally — poking around in the ratings world.

he Justice Department has been asking about instances in which the company’s analysts wanted to award lower ratings on mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by other S.& P. business managers, according to the people with knowledge of the interviews. If the government finds enough evidence to support such a case, which is likely to be a civil case, it could undercut S.& P.’s longstanding claim that its analysts act independently from business concerns.

It is unclear if the Justice Department investigation involves the other two ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, or only S.& P.

Any inquiry should of course involve looking at all three. Each overrated the used diaper mortgage-backed securities to a baffling degree. Whether or not it was incompetence or something more insidious is really the only question, I have. I presume they are capable of both.

But if this investigation focuses solely on S&P then it falls even more into how one talking head on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown described it: more of a Washington story than a Wall Street one.

Honestly, the only weird thing about hearing today about an investigation going on right now is that it was something I expected to hear in 2008.

In related news, and not just to toot our own horn, but I would feel remiss not to mention that our Risk Management magazine cover story this month was titled “The Future of Ratings” and examines “how rating agencies gained so much power, helped tank the economy and figure into the future of risk assessment.”

I’m not going to pretend that I knew just how much play rating agencies would be getting in August when I commissioned the piece a few months ago. I’m many things, but clairvoyant is not one of them. But the piece speaks to many of the questionable issues surrounding the ratings world that have been curiously dormant in the mainstream media for years until recently.

A wonderful writer, Lori Widmer, did a fine job so please do give it a read.

Slowly But Surely, Joplin Is Recovering

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Dictionary.com defines resiliency as “the power or ability to return to the original form … after being bent, compressed, or stretched.” True devastation takes a while to bounce back from. But Joplin is showing us how it is done every day.

Above is a video from CBS, which calls the fact that kids in the ravaged Missouri town “simply having a school to attend this fall is nothing short of remarkable.” According to the report, 10 of the town’s 19 schools were destroyed by the storm that killed 160 people. But by setting up classrooms in warehouses and using other creative methods, officials expect 90% of the students to be back in school.

Joplin East Middle School Principal Bud Sexton is happy about that, noting that “getting students back to school on [August] 17th was paramount. It was what drove all of us all summer.”

Mission accomplished. Now they just need to rebuild.

As you can see from one of the nine amazing before-and-after shots MSNBC featured from Joplin, they still have plenty of work to do.