Risk & Business

Image via Wikipedia Due to Congress adjourning April 12 th without extending the National Flood Insurance Program , NFIP , the flood insurance program's authority to write new policies expired after midnight on March 28 th . It seems the agreement to continue the program was attached to legislation pertaining to unemployment benefits , which was blocked in the Senate from being voted on. As of right now, if you are pending the closing of a mortgage related to the purchase of real estate requiring flood coverage you are out of luck. This same situation occurred at the end of February and the program was closed until renewed by Congress on 3/2. Hopefully Congress will act on this quickly and reinstate the program retroactively to the current expiration date.

Image via Wikipedia Based on an article published on www.insurancenewsnet.com , insurance companies state that users of the popular Facebook and Twitter social networking sites are prone to burglaries . Apparently many of the users post information such as when they are going on vacation or are simply out of the house. When this information is posted online, many would be burglars are targeting these users. Coupled with the use of increasingly sophisticated location based tools such as Google Street View, would be burglaries are building a list of targets and monitor these networking sites for when the potential victim announces where they are on a particular day. This brings to mind what employees are posting on these sites in relation to their places of employment. Is potentially sensitive information relating to your company being discussed on the web? If so, what kind of security risk is this posing to your company's assets? Employer monitoring and discussion with emp...

Image via Wikipedia I was on the OSHA website this morning and found an interesting statistic. You can do a search by classification/SIC code and find out OSHA citations/violations broken down by specific industry SIC codes . Out of curiosity I did a search on the SIC code 1751, carpentry , a classification shared by many of our insured's at CNC . I found that the most prevalent violation found by OSHA for this class is failure to provide and or use fall protection at job sites. For the period from October 2008 to September 2009 OSHA issued 7425 citations with related fines adding up to $10,334.609.00. That's an astounding figure!! Seems like a good question to ask would be are your job sites paying proper attention to this area. While the standards aren't that hard to follow it would seem that many aren't taking the proper precautions at job sites. If you are unsure of the standards it would be a good idea to visit www.OSHA.gov. The site will provide a weal...

Image via Wikipedia Based upon an article yesterday in www.MarketWatch.com, this year's Atlantic hurricane season could be "extreme". The forecaster quoted in the article, Jo Bastardi , chief long-range meteorologist and hurricane forecaster at AccuWeather .com, stated that this year's hurricane season would more closely resemble 2008 than 2009. If you remember, in 2008 Hurricane Ike smacked the coastline of Louisiana and Texas , accounting for losses of approximately $11.5 billion. We've spoken about this before, time to take a look at flood coverage before the possible event, rather than lamenting the lack of it afterwards.