Tag: Hurricane

Pregnant Hurricane Sandy Victim and 2-year-old Daughter Homeless

A pregnant Hurricane Sandy victim was booted from her hotel room yesterday and forced to hunt for a place to stay because FEMA dropped the ball on her reservation.

Keri Christian, 27, was living at Brooklyn’s Nu Hotel with her daughter, Serafina, 2, after the storm destroyed their Staten Island home.

Now the eight-months-pregnant mom is couch surfing at an acquaintance’s home in Bay Ridge until she finds a new place.

Her husband, Anthony Marotto, 41, has been in Staten Island, trying to raise their charred and flooded home from the ashes.

“I feel like a homeless person . . . like a street rat,” said Christian, who’s expecting a boy in January. “It’s aggravating and physically demanding. I’m really pissed.”

via NYPOST.com.

Insanity.  If this was the Bush administration this would be national news every day.  Every day.

 

Bloomberg Turns Down National Guard Over Guns

Bloomberg has reportedly turned down additional help from the U.S. National Guard. “We don’t need it,” Bloomberg insists, despite pleas from the boroughs for back-up. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”

via TheBlaze.com.

Do I have this right?

New Yorkers would rather starve than have someone with a firearm bring them something to eat?  If so then they deserve to starve.

Dem Governors Force Ins. Premiums Higher

Tens of thousands of homeowners who suffered wind and storm damage this week will get financial relief from rulings by several governors that insurers must treat Sandy as a tropical storm and not a hurricane.  …

“Whether they call it a hurricane or something else, that translates into the percentage I have to pay to get my apartment redone,” she said before Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that homeowners would not have to pay hurricane deductibles. “I had no idea. It’s crazy, and it’s going to cost so much money.”Homeowners’ insurance policies in coastal areas almost always include a provision that the deductible will be higher when damage is caused by a hurricane than a lesser windstorm. The difference can be steep — in the thousands of dollars — because the regular deductible is a flat dollar amount, while the hurricane deductible is connected to the replacement value of the house.

via NYTimes.com.

Right about now dozens of actuaries at all the big insurance companies tossed a huge pile of paper in the air and started to bang their head against the wall.

The title of this story at the NYT is “Governors Promote Lower Deductibles for Homeowners” which is one way of looking at it.  The other way is to say, “Governors pander for votes, interfere with the insurance system, annual premiums going to go up up up.”

You don’t get to negotiate your insurance policy terms after the fact.  If you wanted a lower deductible then you could have purchased insurance with a lower deductible.  If you wanted hurricane replacement value insurance then you could have bought that as well.  But if you went cheap and bought the typical policy… then you got the typical policy.

So when the insurance companies start running the numbers they will figure out how much more they’re going to pay out as a result of Gov. Cuomo’s unilateral action.  Then they divide that amount over all the policies in the area over 5 or 10 years.

So take your joy now.  Because when you get your insurance bill next year something tells me the NYT will not be writing a story about how you can’t afford to pay it.