Monthly Archives: April 2013

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West, Texas, Devastated by Fertilizer Plant Explosion

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A mammoth fertilizer plant explosion late last night leveled much of a town called West in Texas. Reports list at least five and up to 15 dead and more than 160 injured. Several blocks of the small town near Waco have been wiped off the map by a blast that registered on the Richter scale. “Homes have been destroyed. Part of that community is gone,”  said Sgt. William Patrick Swanton, a local police officer, at a press conference.

One small girl explained the catastrophe as “a rock fell on the city.” Windows were blown out in houses miles away. Patients in critical condition have been airlifted to local hospitals.

The death, injuries and physical destruction (detailed here) are heinous. Listening to the child in the video account of the initial explosion, shown above, is heartbreaking. (More on that family here.) The area has been permanently altered by unthinkable devastation.

As more details emerge, we will know more about how and why this disaster happened.

Perhaps there are lessons to be learned, safety protocols to debate.

Until then, read how Zac Crain, who grew up in West, humanized a tragedy that comes far too soon after the attack on Boston that emotionally crippled the nation.

Crain wrote the following for Frontburner, a Dallas-focused website.

The fertilizer plant was about 100 yards from my old house — which may or may not still be standing. I could see it, and smell it, every day I was there. I played basketball in the park across the railroad tracks from it. The school that was partially destroyed was my middle school. I had a fight with a kid in the apartment building that was demolished; we later became friends and he showed me his uncle’s collection of throwing stars. My great-grandmother lived out her last days in the rest home behind that apartment building. The head of emergency services, Dr. George Smith, was my doctor. My friend Mike Lednicky’s parents’ house is gone. A lot of houses are gone. The explosion was the equivalent of a 2.1 earthquake, and it spit fire.

West is in my bones, no matter what. My dad was the superintendent of schools for West ISD for a long time. (He and my mom moved to Waco a few years ago.) My grandmother helped start Westfest, and we had a booth there for a number of years, selling beer bread sandwiches. I could map the entire town from memory. So it means a lot to me, maybe more than I realized. And it means at least a little bit to you. Every single one of you stops at Czech Stop for kolaches whenever you’re going to Austin or wherever, so keep that in mind when it comes to blood donations and everything else.

I stopped in West on the way home from Austin a few weeks ago. My friend Bob wanted kolaches. The last time I was really there was in September, for my high school reunion. I took a long look around my old neighborhood, in the shadow of the fertilizer plant. I’m glad I did, because it’s mostly gone now, and whatever’s left will never be the same. Miluji tě, friends. Stay strong. Sorry this was so rambling.

The only thing wrong with this passage is the apology at the end.

Tomorrow, I, like many East Coasters, will be boarding a plane to Los Angeles for the annual RIMS Conference. This year, after beginning a week with a tragedy so, literally, close to home in Boston, I will certainly be leaving part of my heart in West as I fly that way.

For Boston

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It has taken me a couple days to process what happened in Boston. As an editor for a risk management publication, you think it would be easier to be dispassionate about these sorts of things. After all, disasters, or at least potential disasters, are our stock in trade.

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If bad things didn’t happen, we wouldn’t need risk management and I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

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But every so often, words fail me.

Maybe it’s the visceral nature of a terrorist attack that conjures up memories of how it felt to be in New York on 9/11 or maybe it’s because I’m a runner who remembers how great it always felt to finally approach the finish line and the cheering crowds after a grueling race. Or maybe it’s because I’ve spent plenty of good times in Boston over the years and always considered it the place I’d love to live if I ever left New York.

But the truth is, all those reasons feel trite to me. It’s as if I’m trying to manufacture some kind of spurious connection to the tragedy to somehow make my shock over what happened more real than the next person.

The thing is, we all do it. The cynic in me wonders if it’s to garner additional sympathy or if it’s just a natural psychological tic that helps us cope.

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Really though, events like what happened in Boston affect us not because we remember 9/11 or because we’re runners or because we like the Red Sox. They affect us because we’re human. We need no excuses. It’s as simple as that. We care because that’s just what we do.

As my buddy and former boss Bill Coffin put it over at National Underwriter’s Property Casualty 360:

Even in a total loss, there is always recovery. Regeneration. And so it will be with Boston and its magnificent marathon, and with all those who have been so heartsick over the bombing. The humanity that was wounded will be the very thing that carries on and runs that next mile. And the mile after that, and the mile after that. For in the human race, there is no finish line. There is only the road, and the strength to go on, no matter how hard the course.

This tragedy will be dissected in the months and years to come, and we will learn new lessons and develop new plans for managing the risk of events large and small. In the end, we’ll be safer as a whole.

But for now, I think it’s enough, as the Boston College fight song goes, to just be “For Boston.”

(Covered below, for the heck of it, by Boston punks, the Dropkick Murphys.)

For Boston, for Boston,
We sing our proud refrain!
For Boston, for Boston,
‘Tis Wisdom’s earthly fane.
For here all are one
And their hearts are true,
And the towers on the Heights
Reach to Heav’ns own blue.
For Boston, for Boston,
Till the echoes ring again!

For Boston, for Boston,
Thy glory is our own!
For Boston, for Boston,
‘Tis here that Truth is known.
And ever with the Right
Shall thy heirs be found,
Till time shall be no more
And thy work is crown’d.
For Boston, for Boston,
Thy glory is our own!

Obama Budget Proposal a Mixed Bag for Risk Managers

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President Barack Obama released his budget proposal for the 2014 fiscal year on April 10. Media attention has focused on its plan to reduce the nation’s deficit. But for risk managers, the budget is also noteworthy for two other reasons: what it includes and what it doesn’t.

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As in years past, the administration’s budget includes a provision that would eliminate the current tax deduction for reinsurance premiums ceded by domestic insurers to foreign affiliates. Many in the industry, including RIMS, have expressed their opposition to this provision being included in any final budget.

In an April 15 letter to the House Ways and Means Committee, RIMS stated that the administration’s proposal would have “demonstrable negative implications for the global reinsurance market and the United States businesses that rely on this market” and would have a “chilling effect on the use of foreign reinsurance.” (View the full letter for a deeper explanation of the tax deduction.)

The Coalition for Competitive Insurance Rates (CCIR) published a study in 2009 (with an update in 2010) that found eliminating the tax deduction would lead to a 20% reduction in the overall supply of reinsurance available in the U.S. market.

This would in turn lead to consumer price increases of at least billion and up to billion annually.

A brighter spot for risk managers comes from an item not found in the administration’s proposed budget: a cut to the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act.

In President Obama’s first few budgets, support for TRIA was significantly reduced. In his proposed fiscal-year 2011 budget, for example, the administration called for eliminating nearly $250 million in federal subsidies to insurance companies for terrorism insurance; increasing deductibles and copays for insurers that participate in the program; and eliminating coverage for acts of domestic terrorism.

With TRIA set to sunset at the end of 2014, the industry looked to this year’s budget proposal for a sign on where the president stands on the issue.

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While not including a cut for the program in a budget proposal is not the same as support, it is viewed as a positive sign that the administration will get behind an extension.

It should be noted that government’s final budget rarely looks anything like the initial proposals put forth by the administration and Congress.

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While President Obama has included the reinsurance tax provision in the past, that provision has never been included in any final agreement. The same holds for years in which the administration included cuts to TRIA.

The administration’s initial budget proposal does still carry weight, however.

And what is — and is not — included remains notable for risk managers and worth keeping an eye on going forward.

Munich Re: Scientifically Proving Climate Change Affects Thunderstorm Losses

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“It has been possible for the first time to scientifically prove that climatic changes have already influenced U.S. thunderstorm losses.”

That’s the statement Munich Re put forth this week when it issued a report stating the correlation between climate change and severe thunderstorm losses in the United States, findings that were based on a 1970-2009 study produced by Munich Re and the German Aerospace Center.

The study examined hail, tornado, thundersquall and heavy rainfall losses throughout the United States, finding that the increase from thunderstorm losses remained, even after adjustments to take into account socio-economi changes.

“It is therefore clear that the change in losses during the period in question is largely driven by changes in climatological boundary conditions,” said Eberhard Faust, from Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research and co-author of the study. “In particular, the potential energy required in the atmosphere for the formation of severe thunderstorms has increased in the course of time.

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This report comes after a record-setting 2011, a year in which thunderstorms and tornadoes caused more than $25 billion in insured losses with 553 direct fatalities., according to the Insurance Information Institute.

The graph below illustrates U.S. thunderstorm loss trends from 1980 to 2012.

As Dr. Peter Röder, member of Munich Re’s board of management points out, “This scientific study shows, on the one hand, that some regions already need to adapt to changing weather risks. This concerns the insurance industry as risk carrier, first and foremost, but also those in the private and public spheres responsible for deciding on prevention measures.

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