Last fall, Jonathan Stettin decided he and his longtime partner Jeanie would stay put in their Cape Coral, Florida, home, rather than evacuate for Hurricane Ian. Meteorologists had warned that the storm was destined to make landfall around Tampa, which is 130 miles north of Stettin’s one-story modern stucco home near Fort Myers.
But the meteorologists were wrong. On September 28, 2022, the Category 4 storm’s 150-mile-per-hour gales whipped the canal in Stettin’s backyard into rapids. Stettin says the hurricane partially lifted his roof from its beams. Meanwhile, he and Jeanie huddled nervously in their bedroom’s walk-in closet.
“We actually feared for our lives at one point,” he says.
Their concern was surviving. He wasn’t worried about how they would fix their home.
“’Thank God we’re insured. It will be okay,’” Stettin, 61, remembers thinking. “That turned out to be the biggest miscalculation that I ever made in my life.”
Stettin says it took roughly three months for his insurance company, Heritage, to get back to him with a payout: approximately […]
There are many points in this article worth consideration. First, Ron DeSantis didn’t do this by himself, he had a compliant legislature to work with. Second, Americans will need to address the cognitive distortion that their legislators represent them. The legislators represent those who pay for their campaigns, and rent them for specific votes. Third, there are no free lunches. The cost of climate change will be shifted to someone, most likely the taxpayer as the article states: ” Moreover, the legislation shortened the window in which policy holders can file claims with their insurers, invested $1 billion of taxpayer funds into a state-run reinsurance fund to help insurance companies mitigate their losses in the event of catastrophic events, and narrowed eligibility for Citizens, Florida’s state-run nonprofit insurance company that provides insurance to people who cannot find affordable coverage on the regular market.”
One cannot expect all of the taxpayers of Florida to subsidize the lifestyle of those by the beach. You just can’t keep building again and again after floods. We have known this has been coming many years but it appears to have suprised the insurance industry: ” Hurricane Andrew, the state’s first Category 5 storm in 57 years, was a turning point for the industry. Home insurance carriers in the state faced more than $16 billion in insured losses from the 1992 hurricane—which destroyed more than 50,000 homes and caused 23 direct deaths—a circumstance the insurance carriers thought was “highly unlikely and were not prepared for,” according to research funded by the National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the federal government.” This was the start of the trend. Florida is facing disaster. The sooner they acknowledge it the better.