Flood

The State of Florida wants a private flood insurance market. Toward that end, the well-known Florida Commission on Hurricane Loss Projection Methodology will start reviewing flood models in 2018.

The primary determinants of a structure's flood vulnerability are its location, occupancy, construction, height, and age (which determines the building regulations its construction was subject to).

AIR is developing worldwide flood hazard maps for markets where it is not yet possible to create fully probabilistic flood models (as we've done for the U.S., the UK, and Germany).

This is a very exciting week as AIR ships the industry's most detailed fully probabilistic and event-based inland flood model for United States.

September is National Preparedness Month in the U.S., and families, communities and workplaces are encouraged to "Be Disaster Aware, Take Action to Prepare" to improve their resilience.

Insuring high risk properties is a thorny issue in many regions and different countries have their own ways of dealing with it.

Even now, it is very hard to put into words the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 when it made landfall along the Jersey Shore. Homes were razed, Manhattan went dark, boats were washed ashore, coastal roads were destroyed, and subway tunnels filled with water.

Whether inland or coastal, flood is a very complex hazard. No other natural hazard comes in as many varied forms, and few cause damage in so many different ways. The velocity of moving water can apply damaging forces to structures, scour and undermine their foundations, and slam them with large debris.

A few years ago my father moved to Arkansas City, Kansas ("Ark City), very near the great Arkansas River. His house is a few blocks away from the snaking dike that shields nearly the entire city from flooding. Ark City lies at the confluence of two great tributaries of the Mississippi—the Arkansas River and the Walnut River—and spans two separate river basins, the Lower Arkansas and the Walnut.

You can prevent flood damage to vulnerable property by raising it above expected inundation levels or by building defenses to prevent water from reaching it in the first place. But what if you could simply make the problem go away by helping homeowners relocate and then removing the exposure?