FEMA bread

Either way, it generated no small amount of head-shaking from the folks at the table, some of whom pointed out that incidents like this are why government aid programs always seem destined to fail. I did not agree entirely, but I sure did see their point. Catalina and Aaron left me feeling angry and disappointed.

Not long after, Christine’s husband Matt came home. He runs a local airport and owns his own banner plane service. You know those single-engine planes that fly signs overhead at the beach? That’s what he does. And he flies all over doing it, too, so if you have seen one of these planes at any beach on the East Coast, the chances are pretty good that you have seen him at some point.

Matt had come home late because just a few hours before, he got a call from FEMA to fly banners with 800 numbers for people to call if they needed to file a claim. Matt is officially registered with FEMA for just such emergency work, and he had been on standby to do the job for a day. All they were waiting for was for the state to be declared a federal disaster zone. Once it was, FEMA could pull the trigger on hiring Matt. Even though he got the call late in the afternoon, within 30 minutes Matt and his ground crew had the sign manufactured, airborne and photographs of it sent to FEMA to prove the work was being done. FEMA was stunned. They were not prepared for how fast Matt and his crew were able to turn the job around.

Matt flew his plane all up and down the coast, where he got a firsthand view of the devastation. “There isn’t a single part of the coast that looks right,” he said. He also said that he got choked up while surveying the damage. Even for as much media coverage as there was, he said, it still did not do the scope of the damage justice. He showed me pictures and video he took from his plane. Shore towns where the streets were still flooded. Others that looked like collections of buildings poking out of new sandbars that covered everything. Other towns where homes has been blasted off their foundations and had ridden the storm surge hundreds of yards away. It was like the entire coast had been an elaborate system of sandcastles then destroyed by the bored child that had built them.

I told Matt my FEMA bread story, and he just laughed. He knew FEMA well enough to know that folks like Aaron and Catalina didn’t have a prayer of actually getting any money from FEMA, because FEMA actually checks to see if you deserve the money you are asking for. That said, he was angry about it. People really need that money, and they are not getting it as fast as they could be because the government has to try to make sure that nobody gets resources they don’t really need.

I keep thinking about FEMA bread, and how in a single day I got to see both deplorable and laudable approaches to how we recover from disaster. There are people who will see the loosening of somebody else’s purse strings as an opportunity to get a free lunch. There are others who will see it as an opportunity to conduct honest, hard work as well as a chance to be part of the solution for everybody else. We are a great nation filled with great people who have prevailed through disasters before, and will prevail through this one, too. The reason why we prevail, though, is because for every Catalina or Aaron, there are two or three or five or ten Matts. The notion of selfish or ignorant freeloaders stings us so deeply because we are a hard-working people who honor sweat and toil far more than gaming the system. That is how it should be.

I have long said that one of the most difficult challenges the insurance industry faces — and this applies to both the life & health industry as well as to the property & casualty industry — is that people who buy insurance often have a skewed attitude toward it. They see it not as a product they buy, with specific terms and conditions, but almost as a right to a disruption-free life that they happen to pay for. Filing an insurance claim for destroyed property or a liability situation is often seen as entry into some weird kind of lottery where you might get more paid back to you than you actually lost. Filing a life insurance claim can feel even more so by those who never took part in the purchase, and see themselves as suddenly winning a pile of money they never worked for. Life insurance is meant to keep wounded families going, but my late father, who was the executor for many estates, lost track of how often he watched members of threadbare families look at life insurance payouts as the only reason for maintaining their family ties at all.

Insurance is just another form of FEMA bread. The question is how we look at it. Do we look at it as some kind of massive freebie to cash in on, either because the money is coming out of somebody else’s pocket or because we naturally distrust insurance companies of all kinds and relish the thought of them paying more than they ought to? Or do we look at it as something that we collect for unhappy reasons, and should treat with respect?

We have paid for it in one form or another, both in the premiums we pay and in the loss we experience to justify a claim. But collecting on it, no matter how much we deserve it, should never be done with a cavalier attitude. Insurance is serious business. The reasons for filing a claim are serious business. And to treat it otherwise does far more than disrespecting the men and women of an industry that does so much to maintain certainty in an uncertain world. What it disrespects is the fragility of life itself and the worlds we build around it. It disrespects the pain suffered by others. And it disrespects the fact that everything we have can disappear in the blink of an eye. We would do well to remember that always, and to be thankful.

For more from Bill Coffin, see:

5 lessons from Hurricane Sandy

Happy birthday to you

Innovator or fraudster?