Posted On: August 1, 2007, 7:45 pm CDT

Posted By: Harold Polsky

Broker, you ask some very valid questions, and I will try to answer them as well as I can.
We did not live on the water. We lived about 2 miles east of the Gulf of Mexico. Our damage was not from flood, as all of the damage we had came from wind lifting the shingles of our almost new (less than 2 year old) roof, rain getting under the shingles and flowing down our walls. This was verified by the first (you notice I said first ... there were many) adjuster that ever looked at our house, which was almost 3 months after we initially filed our claim. We checked with our insurer (who for the record was Citizens Property Insurance Corp., simply because there was not one single private insurer who would write a policy in our zip code ... I believe the term is redlining, which I thought was illegal) and they advised us that what we had was definitely not flood damage, and we did not have to file a flood claim. I believe this makes it obvious enough there was no line of demarcation in our case. It was wind damage.
Our insurer took no action to settle our claim, and fought us every inch of the way, going so far as to include us, without our knowledge or consent, in the Mierzwa Wind vs. Flood class action lawsuit. To top things off, over a year after we originally filed out claim, the insurer then decided it was a flood and not wind damage.
It took almost 2 years before we received anything from our insurer, and at that we had to hire a lawyer and settle for half of what the original damage estimate was set at, before lawyer fees, of course. They still insisted it was a flood, but the check we received clearly stated it was for the wind damage sustained during the storms. My wife and I have a timeline of all the events that happened during this period, and if you want to see it, we will post it here.

Now, FLA Agent, you're right. I am not an agent, nor do I work in the industry. What my wife and I are, though, is that most dangerous kind of consumer. We research. We look for the information we post or say before we post or say it. We did more research than you could imagine, on both sides of the issue. We helped start an organization to try to get things fixed in the Florida insurance industry, and when we left the group because we had to move, there were close to 1000 members who had paid a membership fee to join and help defray the costs of research and other legitimate expenses for this fight. There were thousands of others who for whatever reason chose not to join, but offered support in other ways. We heard stories like or own, or worse, from hundreds and thousands of people, mostly in the state of Florida. After Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi (as well as parts of Florida, we started seeing the same horror stories on the national news channels, in the national newspapers, and even heard directly from some of the people involved. Believe me, this is not just a Florida issue.
My wife and I became so acknowledged as being very well informed outsiders that, when the US Senate Banking Committee held it's hearing on the growing insurance crisis in April 2007, we were contacted and I was asked to testify before the committee, which I did. So no. Neither of us are agents or insiders. What we are, are very well educated outsiders who know more about these things than we ever wanted to know. We educated ourselves because we had no choice.