In recognition of February as Earthquake Awareness Month, the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance (DCI) has revealed the most recent findings of its earthquake preparedness report, which revealed that residents of the New Madrid Seismic Zone stay “largely uninsured.”
The New Madrid Seismic Zone is a continuing supply of intraplate earthquakes, the place a lot of the seismic exercise is detected between three and 15 miles beneath the Earth’s floor. Four of the biggest earthquakes in North American historical past originated from the zone, with magnitudes as giant as 7.0. It has been reported that earthquakes from the zone threaten seven US states – Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi.
The DCI produces an Earthquake Insurance Market Report every year to trace protection ranges in at-risk areas of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. It discovered that because it started monitoring this info practically 30 years in the past, the variety of residences with earthquake protection has “declined dramatically.”
A launch from the DCI famous that inside a six-county part of southern Missouri, the variety of houses with earthquake protection fell by over 47% between 2000 and 2020, from 60.2% to 12.7%.
“We continue to be concerned about the lack of earthquake coverage in Missouri,” stated DCI director and NAIC president Chlora Lindley-Myers. “As a department, we will continue to work with the insurance industry, local and state government, emergency management, and with our surrounding states to build awareness, educate, and look for solutions to this earthquake insurance gap. We must be prepared before a major event happens in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.”
The DCI has instructed in a launch that whereas the decline in earthquake insurance coverage ranges might be attributed to the escalating prices of protection within the space, one other issue could also be that residents mistakenly imagine their common owners’ insurance coverage will cowl quake-related harm.
Citing analysis the DCI carried out along with NAIC and the University of Missouri’s Disaster and Community Crisis Center, the company stated that many householders and renters within the area wrongly assume that earthquakes are lined by their conventional owners or renters insurance coverage. DCI has suggested that earthquake protection should be bought individually.
The most up-to-date and notable earthquake exercise to rock the US was the magnitude 6.4 quake that struck Northern California on December 2022. Considered the area’s strongest in years, the quake led to “widespread damages” and energy interruptions.