Earlier this week, I covered South Carolina’s “1,000-year storm,” questioning whether we can actually say with any kind of certainty that such events are, in fact, all that rare. But South Carolina wasn’t the only state affected by the passage …

Over the weekend, the nation saw the horrific toll of massive flooding across South Carolina, which has left at least nine dead. The Charleston area got nearly a dozen inches of rain on Saturday, while some parts of the state …

The California Supreme Court recently decided to break with its own precedent and declare that insurers can’t stop policyholders from assigning the benefits of their policies before a claim is settled. Like many developments in the world of insurance law, …

Post-World War II, the United States experienced a simultaneous boom of babies and buildings. To keep pace with the need for new development, homes literally could be ordered out of a Sears catalogue. The true expense of such homes was …

In his ongoing efforts to foster a competitive private flood insurance market in Florida, state Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, recently requested help from the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation to obtain data from the federal government that justify the …

The California Earthquake Authority – the state’s quasi-public earthquake insurance pool – long has had a problem with take-up. Only about 10 percent of homeowners in this most seismically active state actually buy coverage for the biggest catastrophic peril they …

Hydraulic fracturing – the process of extracting oil and gas resources that requires breaking rock through the high-pressured injection of liquid into the ground, popularly known as “fracking” – has caused an uptick in the number of earthquakes that are …

Social activist Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” was written as a how-to guide for community activists looking to compel political change. Yet its rules are no less applicable to parties already in power, particularly …

“Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.” – Unknown Cowboy aphorisms have a lot to offer contemporary culture, in spite of their dubious origins. The National Conference of Insurance Legislators, an organization designed and …

In the midst of a serious drought, it’s time to become concerned about a coming flood. Orbiting high above the Pacific Ocean, a Japanese weather satellite has spied the embryonic stages of a massive El Niño weather system that, once …