Don't Mess With Mississippi!

[stormcrow]

Understand one thing, the only people who will ake anything out of this are the lawyers. Yes you will likely win in Ms courts (although judges hate being overturned on appeal). And two years from now good luck buying any type of Hurricane coverage within 50 miles of the coast. Enjoy dealing with Fema.
You obviously had a bad experience working for an insurance compay (what type of insurance?) I have worked for good and bad companies. But in your anger you fail to recognize not everyone is a wage slave, I will never work staff again. As an Independant adjuster my pay is on a sliding scale, the more I pay out the more I earn. All I get from the companies is a piece of paper and if I'm lucky a check when I turn in my report.
It is understandable why people stick there head in the sand when they are upset and hurt and why they need someone to blame. But the result of a bad lawsuit my be worse then what was available before.

[Lindaloo]

No one here is sticking their heads in the sand. I am offended by that statement. Bet I can speak for everybody affected by Rita and Katrina.

I see you avoided what I said about regulating. IMO, NUFF SAID!

I worked property and casualty. Allstate as a matter of fact for 12 years. I have seen it all and heard every excuse in the book.

[BayouVenteux]

Don't be like the police in Baton Rouge who thought they were entitled to $2000 from Fema just cause they were in Lousiana and expect something you didn't pay for.

Ouch. Please don't judge us too harshly.

Just to set the record straight, there are plenty of decent, honest people working in government here -- my wife is one of them. Just like elsewhere, and possibly even where you reside, readers and viewers only hear about the corrupt scumbaggage. Those folks who perform public service jobs efficiently and with an intact moral compass simply don't make for compelling journalism.

[stormcrow]

Please believe I do understand the challenges that people here are going through. I drove through the 9th ward 10 days ago, and it still looks like it was only a week ago it got hit. So many people with no place to return to, and so much work ahead of them. The vast majority of police fire etc have risen above and beyond anything that could be expected of them. The see and meet spring break students gutting houses on their holiday was amazing. It is more newsworthy to talk about the bad, but the good is there. In all services and industries.

[MSRobi911]

Nationwide is a joke, I have not heard of anyone that has received any money on claims that have been filed against their company. My policy does NOT include the words "storm surge" that is my point! In Mississippi the policy has to be WORD SPECIFIC......tidal surge and flood waters is not "STORM SURGE". There was no one down here when the storm came through, no one saw anything. How can you look at a slab and say what happened to the 2000 square foot house that was totally brick is no longer there? There were lots of brick homes around me that still had outside structure and some inside structure left....so only my house and the one next to me is gone and the ones on either side of us were still there? I showed the "structural engineer" a picture of the day after the storm from the NOAA site, you can plainly see a path and anything that we did find, little tiny broken things were to the north east, not north west where the water sent everything. No roof, no walls, no furniture, nothing, no clothes, tell me where that all went. I had 4 sets of inside stairs sitting on my property. You could tell they were from some where else cause we didn't have stairs in our house and all four had different carpet and were different woods.......so yes, their debris landed on my property when the water settled, but wouldn't you think that some of my stuff would have been underneath???? Well no it wasn't. We hired a crank to pick up piles and piles of stuff so we could look underneath and we found nothing! That tells me that something hit my house and exploded it and everything in it. Yes we lost some trees and yes there were scars where the floating debris took off the bark of the oak trees, but as high as those marks were...there had to be plenty of water already for the debris to be floating by and nothing to stop it. We had a brand new roof that had been on for approximately 3 months....no signs of it. We did find about a 10 foot section of one side of my husbands workshop roof and found some Christmas Ornaments and my daughters first baby doll, a cabbage patch preemie named Bubba underneath that, but that was it. Somehow it got caught in the rafters and stayed there. The plastic container was minus the top, but the ornaments and their boxes were dry, no water at all...that was so strange!!!

Oh well, Nationwide will get sued and not all the lawyers will take the money. My attorney offered to take on my case pro bono...he is fighting because he is in the same position.

Mary

Oh I forgot, as far as FEMA goes, its a joke. I have been approved and denied so many times its funny. I got the initial 2,000 that everyone did. As you know the NFIP does not pay for loss of use of her house, so I had to live somewhere for 3 months after the storm and had to pay rent. I didn't get the other money people did because I had insurance. Like that was gonna do me a fat lot of good. Our FEMA trailer came on October 31st.....2 months after the storm hit and then it took another month for them to bring the keys and set up the electricity,,,,,,so no help from FEMA! It just irks me that people are still not working, living on money that FEMA and everyone else has given them and all the business are begging for people to come and work! Oh and get this, some people that were living in shelters while they were still open said they didn't want to live in a FEMA trailer park because they would have to pay electricity bills and by gas for their trailers................they wanted it all to be FREE!!! Come on, take care of yourself and your family, don't look for the government to do it, cause it ain't gonna happen. I just hope to the Good Lord Above that we don't have to go through another season like the last two, I don't know if we could take it again! FEMA still has no better hand on the situation than they did before Katrina. And to KNOW that they were telling the President and other people how bad it was gonna be and not telling the general public one thing...that was just plain not right. They should have trucks staged all the way down here, but as it was they waited till Katrina hit then tried to get things together. If it had not been for church organizations a lot of folks in Mississippi would still not only be shoe less (yea I know the old joke) but naked as well!!!

Mary

[Lindaloo]

Well said Mary!! WELL SAID!!

[Camille_2_Katrina]

Nationwide is a joke, I have not heard of anyone that has received any money on claims that have been filed against their company. My policy does NOT include the words "storm surge" that is my point! In Mississippi the policy has to be WORD SPECIFIC......tidal surge and flood waters is not "STORM SURGE". There was no one down here when the storm came through, no one saw anything. How can you look at a slab and say what happened to the 2000 square foot house that was totally brick is no longer there? There were lots of brick homes around me that still had outside structure and some inside structure left....so only my house and the one next to me is gone and the ones on either side of us were still there? I showed the "structural engineer" a picture of the day after the storm from the NOAA site, you can plainly see a path and anything that we did find, little tiny broken things were to the north east, not north west where the water sent everything. No roof, no walls, no furniture, nothing, no clothes, tell me where that all went. I had 4 sets of inside stairs sitting on my property. You could tell they were from some where else cause we didn't have stairs in our house and all four had different carpet and were different woods.......so yes, their debris landed on my property when the water settled, but wouldn't you think that some of my stuff would have been underneath???? Well no it wasn't. We hired a crank to pick up piles and piles of stuff so we could look underneath and we found nothing! That tells me that something hit my house and exploded it and everything in it. Yes we lost some trees and yes there were scars where the floating debris took off the bark of the oak trees, but as high as those marks were...there had to be plenty of water already for the debris to be floating by and nothing to stop it. We had a brand new roof that had been on for approximately 3 months....no signs of it. We did find about a 10 foot section of one side of my husbands workshop roof and found some Christmas Ornaments and my daughters first baby doll, a cabbage patch preemie named Bubba underneath that, but that was it. Somehow it got caught in the rafters and stayed there. The plastic container was minus the top, but the ornaments and their boxes were dry, no water at all...that was so strange!!!

Oh well, Nationwide will get sued and not all the lawyers will take the money. My attorney offered to take on my case pro bono...he is fighting because he is in the same position.

Mary

Oh I forgot, as far as FEMA goes, its a joke. I have been approved and denied so many times its funny. I got the initial 2,000 that everyone did. As you know the NFIP does not pay for loss of use of her house, so I had to live somewhere for 3 months after the storm and had to pay rent. I didn't get the other money people did because I had insurance. Like that was gonna do me a fat lot of good. Our FEMA trailer came on October 31st.....2 months after the storm hit and then it took another month for them to bring the keys and set up the electricity,,,,,,so no help from FEMA! It just irks me that people are still not working, living on money that FEMA and everyone else has given them and all the business are begging for people to come and work! Oh and get this, some people that were living in shelters while they were still open said they didn't want to live in a FEMA trailer park because they would have to pay electricity bills and by gas for their trailers................they wanted it all to be FREE!!! Come on, take care of yourself and your family, don't look for the government to do it, cause it ain't gonna happen. I just hope to the Good Lord Above that we don't have to go through another season like the last two, I don't know if we could take it again! FEMA still has no better hand on the situation than they did before Katrina. And to KNOW that they were telling the President and other people how bad it was gonna be and not telling the general public one thing...that was just plain not right. They should have trucks staged all the way down here, but as it was they waited till Katrina hit then tried to get things together. If it had not been for church organizations a lot of folks in Mississippi would still not only be shoe less (yea I know the old joke) but naked as well!!!

Mary

I have an Allstate policy. They did a pretty good job for us. It took
them about 4 months to get it all figured out... but that's to be expected
after a storm like Katrtina.

[MGC]

I have Nationwide on my house in Diamondhead. I only had wind damage. Nationwide sent out two adjustors and they were at the house for a couple of hours, mostly up on the roof. The roof was declared an entire loss, mostly because two big pine trees had fallen on it and broke the decking in several places. I got my check in the mail a week after they showed up. Nationwides estimate was a couple of grand higher than FEMA's. I got my second rejection letter from FEMA last week. Even turned me down for monies when I evacuated. Good luck with your lawsuit.....MGC

[stormcrow]

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/ ... 314287.htm
If this engineer is telling the whole truth then it is time for the engineering firm that hired him, the adjusting company supervising the claims and the manager at the insurance company to seek employment elsewhere. Maybe pushing a broom, and if the case can be proven then the resulting bad faith cases are justified (even if it means that the lawyers get richer then anyone). Every industry has the bad and the ugly, but in my experience they are always in the minority. This still doesn't change the issue of coverage, rather on a individual claims where real wind damage can be proven.

[Lindaloo]

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/14314287.htm
If this engineer is telling the whole truth then it is time for the engineering firm that hired him, the adjusting company supervising the claims and the manager at the insurance company to seek employment elsewhere. Maybe pushing a broom, and if the case can be proven then the resulting bad faith cases are justified (even if it means that the lawyers get richer then anyone). Every industry has the bad and the ugly, but in my experience they are always in the minority. This still doesn't change the issue of coverage, rather on a individual claims where real wind damage can be proven.

As to your last statement, this has been going on for years and years! Which is why I said Don't Mess With Mississippi!!

Talk about burying ones head in the sand!

[alicia-w]

What is the difference between storm surge and tidal surge?

[Lindaloo]

storm surge arises from a hurricane. In insurance policies they state that tidal surge is not covered. BUT, they did not specify that it was not covered during a hurricane. They use tidal surge instead of storm surge. Major difference. Working for the insurance industry for years, I knew this would bite them in the rear one day.

And because there is no way to tell wind damage from water damage when there is nothing left but a slab, they choose to lie and adjust their claims to not pay.