Sparta residents discuss claims and climate change

SPARTA — Ken Johnson sat outside his home on Nature’s Way in Sparta on Monday, playing with his eight-month-old puppy on the front porch.

Johnson couldn’t go to the back yard, because the massive ash tree that had uprooted during Hurricane Sandy was still lodged in his deck more than two weeks after the storm.

“You could stick your head out the window and you see the trees bending 45 degrees at the tops,” Johnson said of the hurricane, “It sounded like a freight train.”

He called his insurance company, Amica to assess the damage, which he now expects will be cleaned up sometime this coming spring, he said.

Johnson is among several neighbors who experienced property damage along Green Road, Nature’s Way and Brookside Drive, where winds tore down rows of evergreens and whittled tulip trees into jagged wooden pikes.

With Sandy marking the second time in two years that a major storm has affected the East Coast, Johnson and his neighbors are also among the growing number of policy holders whose insurance companies are now considering links between climate change and insurance claims.

Natural or artificial?

In a continuing effort to understand how climate change is affecting the insurance industry, regulators in the states of New York, California and Washington in February required insurers to participate in a survey asking them to explain the risks that climate change pose.

Johnson’s insurance company, Amica, said that weather-related damages and especially damage from hurricanes posed a significant risk to the company.

Although Amica does not have a set policy to respond to climate change and does not include the trend in its modeling of risk, the company said the phenomenon is likely to impact its business.

“The most immediate threat posed by climate impact is an increase in weather related losses. Amica has concentrations of business in the Northeast, Atlantic and Gulf Coasts that are exposed to Hurricane risk,” the company stated in the survey. “A catastrophic loss has the potential for sudden and significant impact on our business from a financial and logistical perspective.”

Jennifer Piniaha now has an unobstructed view of her neighbor’s house across the street, after winds from Sandy blew down more than 20 pine trees that once stood in her front yard.

“We’re trying to have a good attitude. We had the privilege of living in a really wooded neighborhood for 14 years, and now we’re going to live in a really open neighborhood,” Piniaha said. “We’re looking forward to redesigning it, but we cried a lot of tears watching the pine trees go.”

An adjuster from her insurance company, Peerless, came out to assess the damage to her home and property last week, she said.

Peerless was represented in the climate change survey by parent company Liberty Mutual.

“Severe weather related events of concern, such as hurricanes and severe thunderstorm/tornados, are localized, short-term weather related events that are a second order of impact of a warming global climate,” the company reported.

Despite seeing such storms as a “second order of impact” the company also said that “the precise impact to the frequency and severity of such events relative to historical levels is uncertain.”

Like her insurance company, Piniaha said there may be a connection between the storm and climate, but they did not blame the damage on a man-made rise in greenhouse gases.

“I think it’s cyclical,” she said. “I won’t believe in environmental warming, because I don’t want to. I am hoping it’s just a passing multi-year cycle and then the polar bears will have more room.”

A changing perspective

Views about the greenhouse emissions and property damage may be changing after a new report published this month by the American Academy of Actuaries, which stated that the rise greenhouse gases may soon have recognizable local impacts on quality of life and public health and safety.

“Specifically, an insurer might be interested in reducing exposure and risk to claims associated with changes in the statistics of extreme weather, which are expected to occur under global warming,” according to the report.

Jeff Dellow’s house on Nature's Way was spared from the damages of the storm, which he believes was made more extreme by greenhouse gas emissions causing sea levels to rise and ocean water to warm.

With neighbors still without power and trees all around them blown down or leaning sideways, Dellow said he could not deny seeing a connection between the storm and the science of climate change.

“I do believe that it’s global warming changing the weather patterns,” Dellow said. “I don’t know if anyone is still arguing whether it’s real or not. Now they are just arguing over how much of it is man-made. Regardless, the science shows that the earth looks a lot different than it ever has.”