First Person: The Financial Side of Catastrophe

In June of 1972 I was a junior at Arkport Central School in rural upstate New York. I had two concerns in my life: girls and the Chemistry Regents I was about to take. Chemistry was the most difficult course I had ever taken, and the reason did involve girls. I held little hope for passing the test.

It was pouring rain that morning as I trudged the half mile to school. Water was flowing about six inches deep down East Avenue, and, somewhat humorously, in one side of our history teacher's basement windows and out the other. With girls and Chemistry on my mind, it never occurred to me that something was dreadfully wrong.

The Regents was canceled. I went home to discover from my volunteer firefighter father that Hurricane Agnes had decided to park itself over us and rain. It rained for days.

I laid sandbags. I moved furniture. I stood in amazement as the water pressure in the ground created fountains in a dry basement through cracks in the house foundation.

I wasn't so amazed when the same groundwater pushed into our basement. A neighbor helped move our chest freezer up on blocks to save it but the hot water tank and the furnace were under water.

We were a mile or more from the nearest river. This was not flood water, it was the soil being so saturated it could hold no more rain. The rain ended eventually, but for Hornell, Corning and Elmira the flood would linger for weeks. The damage to rail lines alone ended rail service to much of the area for good. Corning had to build a new downtown business district.

In 1991, I was living in Alfred, New York and working at the state college there. One morning in very early March I woke up to what sounded like gunfire. I looked out the window and discovered the trees, the wires and the ground covered in a layer of ice. During the night an ice storm had occurred. The news revealed that the storm involved most of Western New York and that it was serious. The gunfire was the sound of tree trunks snapping from the weight of the ice.

I walked to work to discover that part of our building was being used as a Red Cross evacuation center. The high tension electric lines that fed most of the area were down and many locals had no electricity. The school did because it was on a different line, though our public safety director soon informed us that there were trees on that line and it might go down at any time.

Lots of people had no power. And that went on for day after day after day. Distribution lines were down and many poles had snapped. We recovered faster in rural Alfred but some Rochester residents went without power for two weeks or more. Heat, cooking, sump pumps, freezers, and more that depended on electricity did not work. In a few cases, power surges during the storm or while the repair crews were trying to bring up the power burned out motors and caused fires. The losses to fully grown trees were enormous and shady streets would be scarce in Rochester for decades.

I married and moved to Rochester. In early April 2003, I drove to an emergency medical conference on the opposite side of Rochester in a mix of snow and sleet. During the morning break, I reached my wife on the phone to be told that our power had gone out. I inched my way home in very hazardous conditions.

It was a long and cold night. The electric company could not provide a time frame when the power would be back. With six cats, we needed a place to go and our options were limited. A motel about fifteen miles away had power and took animals. We inched our way south to the motel and settled in for what turned out to be five days of motel living.

Every day I drove home to see if we had power and to bail our sump. Half a large shade tree was down on our garage but it did not appear to have done major damage to the building. Based on assurances of power from the electric company, we actually came back once only to spend several cold hours discovering we could not rely upon those assurances.

This was an expensive disaster. Tree removal, motel and meals, the costs of food lost in freezers and the refrigerator and the mileage to and from the motel to ensure that the sump did not over flow all added up to several thousand dollars. Insurance covered most of the costs for my wife and I. The stress took its toll on our cats and two died within the next eight months.

I've experienced three disasters. No one would have ever believed that we could be flooded without being near a river. Two severe ice storms also were not in the plans I had made.

Lesson learned: Anticipate that disasters will occur. Learn about those most common in your area. An ice storm, especially the second one, ought not to have surprised anyone in Rochester. We also have violent thunderstorms and tornadoes. We have blizzards. We rely upon natural gas pipelines that run across the New Madrid earthquake fault.

I have not learned my lesson. I do not have a natural gas or propane powered electric generator, for example. My yard has three trees in it greater than 30 feet tall, any of which could fall on the house. I have not purchased flood insurance.

I have, however, not given in the the blandishments of either my telephone or cable company to put all of my eggs in one basket. Without cable, I may have telephone and vice versa. Both those services to the house have been replaced in recent years and branches trimmed from around both service and transmission lines. My homeowner's insurance is paid up.

I suppose I am like many people, combining hope, denial and a firm belief in insurance to absorb the financial blow of a future disaster.