In some areas, massive flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes and other natural disasters strike regularly. This may affect hundreds of thousands of people or even millions in some cases. Many insurance companies are offering insurance coverage for protections against natural disasters. However, we shouldn’t be those who are too easily encouraged by quick settlements. Obviously, it doesn’t mean that we should be uncooperative, we should be particularly careful. The process should move along in a smooth, business-like manner, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be rushed too easily. In some cases, natural disasters will eventually happen and we should contact our insurers, even if we suffer very minimal damages to our house or other assets.
When a disaster strikes, we should make sure that everyone is accounted for and safe, including our pets. If possible or necessary, we should get medical attention those who need it, including our pets. We need to contact the public utility companies to ask them to shut off gas, power and water immediately. This should increase the overall safety factor and prevent further damage to our dwellings. It is also a good idea to speak with local building inspectors and fire Marshall about the state of our building. We need to make sure that our house is still a safe place to live in. But, if it’s not, we should perform immediate repairs and perhaps live in other areas. It is clear that we can replace our items and assets, but we can never replace ourselves. Now, it is important to document our assets after they are subjected to damages, we may use video cameras or digital cameras to record or take photos of our dwellings.
Because the electricity has been cut, it would be necessary to bring a powerful light source, so we could properly show the condition of the interior. However, we should make sure that the house is safe for us to walk through. It is necessary to take video footages of all rooms in the house, whether they have or have no damage. This can be a time consuming process, because we may need to take shots of each room at all four sides. If the fire departments need to throw out our items in the yard, we should take footages of their debris, but with high resolution digital camera and video camera. Even if we only have our smartphones to perform the documentation process, we need to do it. Regardless of what device we use, we should clearly show damages of our house on film. In this case, it is clearly a bad idea to give the original video or photo files to the insurer. We should make multiple copies of these evidences and give the insurers one of them.
A photo always worth a thousand words and it could provide any information about the building sections and items that are damaged or destroyed by natural disasters. In any insurance claim, time is of the essence and if possible, the insurers should be given all the necessary evidences.
