Thursday, August 15, 2013

Lloyds of London and their take on the Herbert Hoover Dike - if you read nothing else today, read this.

Click title for link. This is the first report they have EVER done. From the report:
Because we believe the potential for catastrophe in this region may not be fully accounted for by all insurers, in either the modelling or pricing of potentially affected policies, we have decided to make this the focus of the first Lloyd’s Emerging Risk team’s report.
 And these are two of the five points from the report:
 2 A report was commissioned by the South Florida Water Management District in 2006 to review the stability and safety of the Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee. Report concludes “The current condition of Herbert Hoover poses a grave and imminent danger… … [The dyke] needs to be fixed. We can only add that it needs to be fixed now, and it needs to be fixed right. We firmly believe that the region’s future depends on it.”
3 A separate report also concludes that the dyke is vulnerable to failure caused by water seepage and piping at high water levels, whether this high water level is produced by long-term changes in rainfall or by hurricane events. The findings from the research led to the re-evaluation of the design of the dyke improvements which the US Army Corps of Engineers had begun to implement.