3 months after Sandy: Where’s the money?

Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, February 01, 2013 01:00 am

Three months after Sandy, owners of storm-damaged properties along the coast are growing understandably impatient and demanding to know: Where’s the money?

For the most part, people with flood insurance are waiting for settlements that haven’t come, offers that haven’t been made, explanations that haven’t been given and itemized lists of damages that haven’t been shared. And those are the lucky ones, because they’ve had an adjuster visit their property and assess their damages.

Bob Blutinger, a third-generation owner of Boyar’s Market, said he signed off on Dec. 2 on a damage estimate from his insurance company. The store, in the 1300 block of Asbury Avenue, had $60,000 worth of damage, but was back in business in 12 days thanks to many helping hands in the community. Yet two months after Blutinger accepted his insurance company’s offer, he’s still waiting to receive a check.

At Mario’s Pizzeria and Restaurant, brothers Ernesto and Giuseppe finally hired a public adjuster to wrestle a $20,000 advance out of their insurance company, so they could start cleaning up the damage to their business in the 1500 block of Bay Avenue. About a week ago, a Dumpster appeared outside their building, the first sign of activity there since Sandy struck on Oct. 29, 2012.

Rich and Nancy Ginnetti say they haven’t received a dime in insurance money to offset the $12,000 in inventory and $10,000 in property damage Sandy did to Nancy’s Purple Lining in the 1100 block of West Avenue.

One of my neighbors in MerionPark says he’s shelled out $80,000 for new floors, new walls, and new electrical, heating and air conditioning systems. He hasn’t settled any claims either.

Everyone I talk to has the same two questions: (1) Where’s the money and (2) what do you think would happen if you paid your insurance premium as tardily as these companies are paying out settlements?

Everyone agrees: (1) Nobody knows and (2) our policies would be canceled. No insurance company would wait three months for action from a policy holder.

FEMA has been quick to tell people who have their own flood insurance coverage that they are ineligible for aid. I know. I’m one of them. I received a letter on Dec. 11, 2012, from FEMA telling me so. I received no communication whatsoever from my flood insurance carrier, so last week I paid a visit to my local insurance agent.

I asked her if she’d be so kind as to send out a search party for my adjuster, who hasn’t been in contact since he was last seen prowling around my property in November, taking the utmost care to write almost nothing down as I pointed out breakaway walls that were missing, soil that had eroded from beneath the foundation, a framed-out section of the house that the force of Sandy’s floodwaters had separated from the rest of the house, and other damages.

My local insurance agent looked up my claim in her computer and saw my adjustor had sent a final report and a paltry settlement figure to my flood insurance carrier two days prior. Final report? I asked. How can there be a final report when there hasn’t been a preliminary report? And on what did he base his estimate? Where is the itemized list of damages to my property?

There is no itemized list of damages. That’s apparently top-secret information. There is no preliminary report and no agreement with the policy holder before settlement. In a post-Sandy world, my agent said, those formalities have been dispensed with in an effort to get money into people’s hands sooner.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but it’s not working.

My insurance agent told me if I didn’t have a check in another three or four weeks to follow up with her. She said when the check came, it would be payable to the homeowner and the mortgage company and I would have to send it to the mortgage company to be endorsed over to me.

That’s so far into the future I can’t even tell what month it might be when I’ll get some funds to repair my home. And then, because the amount is so ludicrously low for the damage done, I’ll have to appeal the adjuster’s decision and fight with my insurance company for a better settlement, my agent said.

So tell me again how this system is better. This system is designed to disgust people, to make them grateful for whatever they get because they’ve waited so long for something that they’ve despaired of ever receiving anything.

There’s no reason to celebrate the fact that our government finally did the right thing and approved a total of $60 billion in federal aid to help in the recovery from Sandy. That money isn’t going to the little people.

So what can we be positive about? How about the fact that as bad as the insurance industry has treated us, we haven’t paid as exorbitantly for this abuse as we will in the near future, when the FEMA advisory maps go into effect?

Yay!! Party hats for everyone, no matter your BFE.