The lost summer of 2009
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For many, it was the summer of our discontent. Record temperatures hit parts of the west while rain and cooler days were too common in the rest of the country. When Environment Canada released its list of top weather stories of the year, the summer and its unpredictability came in on top. IBC’s Vice-President of Policy, Barb Sulzenko-Laurie spoke to ILSTV about what the lost summer meant for the insurance industry.
Barb Sulzenko-Laurie, Vice-President, Policy, IBC: The lost summer for us meant a lot of rain. In fact, we saw that the Maritimes had a 42 percent increase in precipitation this summer as contrasted with the previous summer. So that meant an awful lot of water-related claims, from sewer backlog in particular. Infrastructure in our municipalities and cities tends to be old and not able to accommodate these huge deluges.
And the way in which the water is falling apparently has changed as well and all of this is being attributed to climate change whereas in the past, the accumulation of precipitation would take place over a longer period of time than we are commonly having happen now with a lot of precipitation falling very quickly and, of course, being very challenging to the sewer system. Of course that causes a backlog and that causes water damage.
We see that the personal property loss ratios have risen to unprofitable levels in most jurisdictions across the country. In some cases, they erupted into catastrophic events, whereas in the States, this has been a year where they haven’t had a large number of catastrophic events. For us, we have. IBC did data collection on three major catastrophic events and we’ve calculated or estimated the loss for those three events as $637 million. Those three events being the windstorms in Alberta in the beginning of August, the tornadoes in Ontario and the rainfall in Hamilton and Ottawa in late July – and again, that was the kind of rainfall that comes down so quickly and causes such devastation in terms of water damage. PACICC looked at seven events including those three and they estimated losses of $816 million.
