I have the honor of providing coverage for a couple who recently moved to Dallas from Fort Worth. Their decision was driven so they would be closer to the wife’s clients and his office. Instead of selling their home though, they decided to lease it to another family. Before doing that, he called me to discuss what they needed to do insurance wise on their Fort Worth home and their Dallas home, one of the loft apartments near down town.
ast week we looked at the insurance lessons we could learn from the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas on April 17th. The explosion destroyed the plant, killed 15 people, injured 200 and damaged or destroyed 350 homes, a school, an apartment building and a nursing home. Preliminary estimates of the damage and destruction were pegged at $100 million.
I was 14 or 15 at the time and sitting in the back seat of my dad’s 1972 Pontiac Grand Am. My two younger sisters were on the back seat with me while my youngest sister sat on my mom’s lap in the front passenger seat. No one had a car seat back then and most of us rode in our cars without buckling our seat belts.
Every couple of months, I get a call from a realtor, an insurance agent, or a mortgage loan officer. The stories are variations on a theme; they have a client that’s trying to buy a home but there’s one little issue that’s threatening to derail the close. Usually these gotchas present themselves when the home buyer has found their dream home only to discover their current insurer is unable to insure it. This usually is not discovered until two weeks or less before the scheduled close and creates a mad scramble to find insurance for the buyer’s dream home. They call me.
On Wednesday, April 17, a fire broke out at the West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas, a community of 2,849 about 70 miles south of Dallas. 10 volunteer firemen and two people who joined them responded to the calls that began being fielded by the 911 call center at 7:33. As first responders, they began to assess the massive fire and plan how to begin putting out the blaze. They were killed moments later from the explosion that occurred at 7:51 pm.
What was the first word that popped into your mind when you read the title? Safe, slow, controlled? Or was it aggressive, fast, exciting? I don’t ask this question anymore because most people described how they drive. They weren’t thinking in terms of a type or class of driver. Needless to say, some of the answers I received were both humorous and telling.
