Shake, Rattle, and Roll

There have been 478 earthquakes in California in the last week, according to the USGS CalTech Seismic Net report, 104 of them in the greater Los Angeles area. That's just an average week. It's been said that living here in the basin is like living in a bowl of splinters; the ground is never quite still. Most of the rumblers are small, well below the level of conscious detection, but they do add a subtle insubstantiality to life in LA that keeps us all a little  off balance. 

Only one of those 104 quakes really matters to me, however, the 5.4 temblor that struck near the Chino Hills--about 35 miles from here-- at about 11:30 this morning. It was a roller, lasting about 20 seconds or so and, because we haven't had a good one like that in a while, it got everyone's heart pounding. Though most of us are used to them by now, we have been in what feels like a prolonged period of seismic quietude and when we get a little wake up call like this one, the adrenaline starts pumping and we overload the phone system needing to ask everyone we know, "Did you feel it!?" We are a considerate city, if not the brightest in the world.

Of course, the  rocker could not have struck at a worse time for Casita Moreno.  With most of the interior walls gone, the floors stripped of any sheeting that might provide shear strength, and the 10 ton tile roof held up by little more than a few temporary 2x4s, she swayed and shimmied like a coked-up go-go dancer. The framing crew scampered out of there as fast as their legs could carry them, pie-wide eyes praying for the extra minute it would take them to burst through Montezuma's window to the relative safety of the front yard.

Luckily, the old lady stood her ground.  And a good thing she did. I did not, as of 11:30 this morning, have any insurance at all for earthquakes.  Eep!

Not for want of trying, mind you. When I went through the whole Allstate-dumped-us-buy-new-insurance thing, I asked about earthquake coverage. Somehow, it fell through the cracks (maybe I couldn't bring myself to write the check, again 2x what we were paying before). About 10 days ago, however, clear from any incipient paperwork demands, I restarted the process, which was set to go save for a single document the company required before issuing the policy. The company needed my contractor to sign off on the fact that the house was retrofitted.

For those of you unfamiliar with California earthquake building codes, the wooden frames of most houses built before the 1994 Northridge Quake basically sat on their concrete foundations like a hen on her nest. When Northridge hit , houses danced and jumped off their foundations like bacon in an iron skillet (we nickname our big quakes by epicenter, thus everyone knows what you are saying when you say "Northridge," "Loma Prieta," "Sylmar," or "Long Beach"). Thus was born the earthquake retrofitting industry, started by a nice orthodox jewish guy named Shelly Purluss. 

Shelly appeared at my door one day in 2001, kepah on his balding head, and patiently explained to me that retrofitting involves drilling through the sill plate of the house and sinking compression or epoxy bolts in the foundation, the bolting the house down to keep it from doing the jitterbug every time Mother Nature shakes her thang. Where cripple walls support the first floor above the foundation, plywood sheeting gets nailed to all the walls, stiffening their shear value and greatly reducing the tendency of these weakly constructed framed walls from collapsing. These were the two largest causes of damage in the Northridge quake, and Shelly, having pioneered the process before it hit, had pictures of two identical old houses near the epicenter, one of which was totally destroyed and the other, which he had just retrofit, virtually unscathed. The LA Times ran the picture shortly thereafter, and an industry was born. There are now hundreds of companies running around bolting houses. 

Shelly was kind enough to come out and bolt our home when Charlie was born, part of my "new Dad sleep better" initiative, reducing the fear that my house too would choose to tango-slide down the hill and, I suppose, fulfilling that primal father instinct to protect the young cubs. That, combined with the red yarn my mother suggest I tie under Charlie's crib mattress to keep the evil spirits from rising up from below and stealing his life in the middle of the night, seemed to appease the anxiety, at least until we discovered the cracked ridge beam and I almost simultaneously realized that being a parent meant slaying the dragons of free-floating anxiety every night for the rest of your life. But that's another story.

Writers are often given gifts by life, and in case you haven't gotten ahead of me here already, I could never, from the workings of my meager brain, create the delicious irony that I don't have earthquake insurance because the company writing the construction insurance policy on my denuded, matchstick-supported house needs to be assured that this fragile house of cards with the 10-ton roof, currently held together by little more than some old nails and luck, is properly attached to the foundation. 

The comedian Shelly Berman (no relation to the Quake guy) had a classic routine in the 50's describing the experience of flying on airliners assured that he was wearing his seat belt, because if he wasn't strapped to his seat, he might very well fall out of his seat, say, if the plane came to a sudden stop, say, against a mountain, in which case only the top half of his body would fly out of the seat, the bottom remaining sitting there, legs crossed, a macabre picture. I love the word macabre and this is where I learned it. Certainly, the mental picture of my collapsed house, a pile of splintered sticks and shattered red tile whose sill plate in nonetheless firmly attached to its foundation would be, in some small way, similarly macabre, if not nearly as funny.

Just to prove that some lessons are hard to learn, it actually crossed my mind to have a conversation with my new  insurance company in an attempt to explain the insanity of their request, but Alice's rabbit hole immediately opened its maw and, having spent quite enough time down there of late shaking my earthen head, I chose to banish the thought  and get Stephen to sign the damn paper.

On the bright side, I ordered a cup holder for my scooter, which arrived today, an invention that makes eminent sense.

Insurance travails pt1

There are too many things we do not know about how to live a life in USA 2008. More than any one person should have to know. In fits of political pique, I often attribute this to Ronald Reagan, who first deregulated virtually everything in our lives and in so doing set loose the mad dogs of hypercaptialism. On a practical--nonpolitical--level, this means that rather than deal with one phone company every month, I deal with four, plus my internet provider, plus my satellite TV company plus plus plus plus, well, you get the picture. Life, the monthly maintenance of which used to involved writing about five checks to pay my various obligations, now requires several hours of bookkeeping (the only word in the English language with a triple double letter, btw) and even more phone calling, the latter activity aimed at correcting the various ways various service suppliers try to fuck you up each month, either through gross errors or deliberate malice.

Which brings us to the topic of the day: Insurance companies.

In what I can only attribute to an unquenchable need to reinforce every stereotype and cliché of the industry, our homeowners insurance company, Allstate, has decided to drop us from their rolls.

Just to get the pathos out of the way early and get to the meat of the matter (corporate criminal behavior), let me paint the human picture for you. We live in a slightly shabby rental home, with rented furniture, rented dishes, rented candles, rented brooms, etc. (see This Rented American Life) while we await the rebuilding of our almost totally destroyed home. 80% of our personal possessions have been totally destroyed, the remainder being precious (artwork and photos) but not practical (can't eat off a painting). Elicia and I both work full time, high value jobs in addition to the ongoing reconstruction of our lives. 

For Elicia, that means managing a personal possessions claim involving 120 pages of totally lost items, 15 items per page, handwritten in almost indecipherable penmanship by the team hired to excavate our lives after the fire. Each item requires that she correctly identify it (name, make, model number), ascertain its original purchase price, age, quantity, and replacement cost, and then back that info up with receipts if we have them, going back 7 years. Her process is further complicated by Allstate's insistence that all submissions be handwritten on the same messed up pieces of paper they handed us and their refusal to provide us or allow us to use any electronic means of communication, like a database.

For me, that means managing the complete reconstruction of the house, in addition to the ongoing wrangling with Allstate to get them to pay a reasonable amount of money to accomplish this.

Both, full time jobs, in addition to our full time jobs.

Now, as if we were not burdened enough, Allstate is trying to dump us.

So, other than the obvious lack of compassion, what is wrong with this picture?  Here's what you don't know about your homeowners insurance.

Insurance companies have what they call "underwriting guidelines," basically, the circumstances under which they consider you an insurable risk. They have the right to dump you if you exceed these guidelines, as long as they do so uniformly and without discrimination, ie, everyone gets treated the same. Though these guidelines are registered with the state insurance commission, however, Allstate (and probably your company too) does nothing to make this information readily available to its customers. 

Why is this a problem? Their lack of transparency allows them to profit at their customer's expense by selling products you cannot use.

Here's how it worked in our case. We paid top dollar for Allstate's lowest deductible policy, covering the replacement cost for all losses to our home and personal property above $500. Allstate's unpublished underwriting guidelines, however, allow them to dump anyone with two claims against their policy within a five year period. Last year, believing that I had paid for insurance that would cover me for relatively small losses, I filed a $3000 claim to replace my golf clubs, which were stolen from my car during the summer (the car was stolen and recovered, sans clubs, which were in the trunk). Allstate was very cooperative in handling the claim, and happily applied my $500 deductible before paying me about $2000 toward the cost of the replacement clubs.

Then the house burned up.

Now, a mere two weeks before we begin reconstruction, Allstate has sent us a letter telling us that they are dumping us from their insurance rolls, leaving us uninsured during reconstruction and at the new house, which, by the way, they are paying for. They have decided, and incredible as it sounds, that having filed 2 claims within 5 years (for a stolen car and a destroyed house, neither of which we were within a mile of), that we are a higher risk for filing another claim this year.

So after 10 years of dutifully paying premiums, adios dude.

Now I am out in the wooly world of insurance shopping with claims on my record.  Not fun. No, not fun.