“Tragically over 80% of the people who had flood damage did not have flood insurance. So over 80% of the damages weren’t insured and that now means many of these people are still struggling to figure out how they’re going to rebuild their lives, more importantly how do they rebuild their homes without insurance?

Year after year we’re seeing as many as ten or more natural hazards exceeding a billion dollars in losses, and that’s a trend that unfortunately doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Here in the United States its also we have more stuff, increasing wealth. So cost of disasters has not necessarily followed inflationary trends; as we build bigger homes with more value, that’s also driving the increased cost in disasters.”

 “Literally we’ve been spending billions and billions of dollars in responding and recovering from disasters. We’ve only spent tens to hundreds of millions of dollars before disasters to mitigate risk and I think that’s one of the things we have to look at.

A recent study came out, said that for every dollar we invest in mitigation we can get up to 4 dollars’ reduction, 6 dollars for targeted mitigation. Think of that investment, if we were spending billions to buy down risk, instead of billions to respond to a disaster.”

“We cannot continue to use bailouts after disasters to make communities whole. We’ve got to start building resilient communities. Climate change is going to change and grow disaster risk in areas that may not have seen it before. Yes, we’re seeing more disasters, yes the costs are going up and much of that is because of the way we built and where we built. Can we do a better job? Absolutely. When’s the time to act? Now.

People need to quit depending on bailouts to clean up the mess. We have to fix it on the front end.”