Editor’s Note: Hurricane Season: Ready or NOT?

Many southeast associations, representing hundreds of independent insurance agencies and thousands of employees in coastal states have launched aggressive hurricane preparedness campaigns. They have implemented their own hurricane preparedness plans and have been urging agencies to prepare for the likelihood of one or more hurricanes by preparing their offices, employees and customers for the 2005 hurricane season that started last week-a season that weather experts predict will be similar to or even worse than last year.

Almost as if Mother Nature was issuing a warning, in the middle of May Hurricane Adrian rolled in out of the Pacific doing damage in Central America and for a while was threatening to bounce over into the Gulf, and fizzled out-but perhaps signaled things to come.

In May, while attending several conferences in Florida, everyone was marveling at how there could be a hurricane two weeks before the announced start of the season, and how it could start in the Pacific Ocean and yet threaten residents in the Gulf of Mexico.

Most conferees, however, seemed unconcerned about Hurricane Adrian, the upcoming hurricane season, or about forecasters predicting that in 2005 we will encounter more hurricanes than in 2004.

In preparing the article on page 9, I talked to numerous insurance industry representatives, including associations experts, who were urging their members to act now to protect their employees.

At the May 21 Specialty Agents conference in Orlando, I talked to agents and exhibitors, many of which said they weren’t at all worried about hurricanes and would simply roll with the punches like they did in 2004. Those agents, as one would expect, had not gone through any of the hurricanes that devastated some agencies last year.

In contrast, several agents I talked to said they were still waiting for repairs to be made from last year, when they were hit within several weeks, by as many as two hurricanes. Several said that their operations were still not back to normal and that they still had repairs to be made from last year’s hurricanes! They were preparing for the 2005 hurricane season by developing an emergency business plan, installing generators, creating off-site backup computer systems, obtaining shutters for their windows and stocking up on food and water supplies.

Several agents described horrendous conditions in 2004: they were without electricity for weeks; their employees worked without computers, digging through their office with flashlights looking for policy information; and often put their client’s well-being ahead of their own families.

Associations should be applauded for their efforts to educate agents to be prepared for the 2005 hurricane season-but one has to wonder what will happen to other agents, who could very possibly be hit by a hurricane this year-but remain unprepared and are oblivious to that possibility.