Rise in Tornadoes, Floods Poses Risk to Colleges

Insurance companies see danger from extreme weather

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By SCOTT CARLSON

Here's a frightening thought for every college administrator planning for a big disaster: What if the sort of extreme weather that has left the University of Iowa inundated in floodwaters is not a freak event? What if it is a sign of things to come?

In June the U.S Climate Change Science Program, which is sponsored by 13 government agencies, released a report saying that extreme weather like heat waves, heavy downpours, and superpowered hurricanes would be more common in the future. The timing of the report — coming just as officials in Iowa were surveying the damage from the swollen Iowa River — could not have been better. The news media jumped all over it, saying that the world could expect "Iowa-like floods," as Bloomberg put it.

While it is folly to link any single storm or wacky weather event to climate change, experts have long argued that extreme weather will very likely be a trend in a warming world. The recent predictions, paired with the situation in Iowa, already have some college officials thinking about how to revise their disaster plans.

Among them is Donald J. Guckert, associate vice president and director of facilities management at the University of Iowa. The university went through a so-called 100-year flood in 1993 and put measures in place to make sure the campus could withstand that kind of flooding again, he says. But the recent flood was the kind that comes once in 500 years.

"My question is, are we having to shift our thinking from 100 to 500 years, not only in Iowa but wherever you are building?" Mr. Guckert says. "Is the 100-year-flood plan still relevant, given the weather and development?"

Some experts maintain that losses from severe weather can be attributed to development in catastrophe-prone areas, like fire zones and flood plains, not from climate change.

Either way Mr. Guckert says, the university will plan as best it can. "The bar has been moved on us, and we are going to build with that different bar in mind," he says. "But is that going to be good enough? I know this conversation has been going on on the coasts, with hurricanes. We may need to start this conversation inland, at institutions that never thought they were at as much risk as coastal areas."

Insurance companies have started thinking about climate change and the risks from weather, but trends and potential impacts have been too difficult to model accurately, says David Williams, who directs a catastrophe-modeling division at Arthur J. Gallagher and Company, an insurance brokerage and risk-management corporation.

"There have been some attempts to model" effects of climate change, he says. "They have tried that in Europe and Great Britain, and to some extent here — but it has been very difficult to come up with anything that makes any sense."

Observations and studies have reached few conclusions, other than that things are changing. But how they are changing? "That is what everyone is trying to figure out," Mr. Williams says.

New Insurance Worries

Insurance companies are nevertheless taking a closer look at potential climate effects when considering coverage of some colleges, says John McLaughlin, who specializes in higher education for Gallagher. Coastal areas have been traditionally thought of as areas that are most susceptible to extreme weather events, but that has changed. His company has been asked to do catastrophic modeling for campuses that normally wouldn't go through that process, he says.

Since Hurricane Katrina, coastal universities themselves are more aware of their exposure to destructive storms. At Eckerd College, which lies near the coast in St. Petersburg, Fla., administrators attend lectures at other colleges on the risks of climate change and the trends in weather, and over the past few years administrators have had extensive discussions about how to prepare for a cataclysmic hurricane or tropical storm.

St. Mary's College of Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay, has been hit by strong tropical storms or hurricanes in 1999, 2003, and 2006. In 2006 a storm destroyed the college's boathouse, which has been rebuilt. The last hurricane to hit the college before the recent spate was in 1972.

"We have been victimized by what seems to be an increasing cycle of extreme weather events," says Torre Meringolo, vice president for development.

Even the college's summer concert series seems imperiled, he says. In recent years, administrators have had to worry about violent summer storms that pop up and force the evacuation of 3,000 to 5,000 people from the concerts — storms that didn't seem to appear in earlier years, Mr. Meringolo says. The college is looking at setting up an athletics facility as an evacuation site.

An Inland Focus

However, in the annals of storm disasters, it's the inland colleges that have made headlines this year. Union University, near Jackson, Tenn., sustained $40-million in damage when a tornado ripped through its campus in February, leveling more than a dozen buildings, many of them dormitories. (People at the Christian college aren't shy about saying it was a miracle no one was killed.)

Gary L. Carter, Union's senior vice president for business and financial services, noted that the tornado was the third major storm on that campus in recent years. A tornado hit in 2002, causing $2.3-million in damage, and baseball-size hail from a tornado closer to Jackson in 2003 caused $600,000 in damage.

Mr. Carter and other administrators have gleaned many lessons from the devastating storm. The college may be inland, but the replacement dormitories are being built to "coastal standards" — that is, to withstand tropical storms and hurricanes, with thick, 2-by-6 lumber and specially reinforced "safe rooms" where students can hide out in a storm.

The storm also offered some hard lessons in insurance coverage. The university's business-interruption coverage was not as robust as the college needed after the tornado, and it was recently increased fivefold. (Mr. Carter won't reveal the amounts.)

Mr. Carter had always assumed that "replacement-cost insurance" meant that the insurance company would rebuild to modern specifications. Actually, it means that buildings will be replaced at their original condition — which, in the case of some Union dormitories, means how they were in the 1970s.

Since then, building codes in the area have adopted some seismic requirements, as the region is near the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which suffered huge shocks in the early 1800s and may be at risk for a catastrophic quake in the near future.

The floods in Iowa and tornadoes at Union should make people stop and think, Mr. Carter says. "Any time we see these things happen, we need to take it as an opportunity to review our insurance-policy coverage."

But on the list of crises that could hit a college, extreme weather is not at the top, says Sal D. Rinella, a strategic consultant and president-elect of the Society for College and University Planning. Mr. Rinella, who was president of Austin Peay State University when it was hit by a tornado in 1999, has lectured and written extensively about how a college can survive a disaster. But in traveling the country, he has found that college administrators are more worried about a random gunman than a violent storm.

"The magnitude of this particular event along the Mississippi River … raises the question of whether institutions of higher education should be thinking about this kind of thing," he says. "There is something happening in the climate that colleges should pay attention to."