Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Claims adjusters busy
Insurance companies are logging as many damage assessments in a day as they would in a week.
ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times
Ryan Thomas, a claims representative with Farmers Insurance Group, measures a garage that was damaged in Roanoke.
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When a tree falls on a home, neighbors, construction workers and insurance companies feel it too.
An ice- and snow-laden tree "karate-chopped" the corner of Penn Anthony's Martinsville house and punched gaping holes into two bedrooms on Feb. 5, he said. His neighbors covered the tree with plastic until the truck driver, 63, could return home, file an insurance claim and have the tree removed.
Farmers Insurance Group reimbursed him for about $17,000 in damages after his $1,000 deductible, insurance adjuster Ryan Thomas said.
Homeowners and insurance adjusters are busy assessing damages from wind, snow, ice, fallen trees, frozen pipes and gutters caused by winter storms that have pummeled houses across Virginia since December.
"It's nuts. I can't even keep track of the storms anymore," said Riko Metzroth, Farmers' Virginia state executive based in Richmond. "We'll be handling this until the end of the winter."
Skyline Tree Service, which worked on Anthony's home, has removed about 60 trees from houses in Henry County and Martinsville since the first December snow. That's triple what the business did in past winters, and owner Tim Moran doubled his work crew and bought new equipment to handle the demand, he said.
State Farm Insurance's customers in Virginia filed 1,600 homeowners claims in the past few weeks because of winter weather. That includes 40 claims in the Roanoke Valley and 175 claims in the New River Valley, spokesman Jon Hannah said.
And as of last week, Nationwide Insurance had more than 500 homeowners file claims in Virginia because of weather damage, spokesman Charley Gillespie said.
Thomas, Farmers' Roanoke-based adjuster, has hurried across his Southwest Virginia territory this winter, assessing seven or eight claims a day, the same amount he usually gets in a week during the rest of the year.
He visited Rebecca and John Mangiaratti's house in Roanoke's Raleigh Court neighborhood on Friday to assess a carport roof partially collapsed under the weight of snow. The homeowners had held up a cracked beam with a two-by-four placed vertically.
At first, Rebecca Mangiaratti didn't expect the damage to be much more than her $500 deductible.
"I just know you pay insurance your entire life, I didn't know you ever use it," she said before receiving a check for about $1,900 from Farmers, the first claim she said she's ever made. She'll have the carport torn down and replaced with a pergola, she said.
Roof collapses, such as at Blacksburg High School's gym or at Rostraver Ice Garden in Pennsylvania this weekend, aren't as threatening to homes as they are to large, flat-roofed, commercial buildings. Houses typically have steeper-sloped roofs that prevent snow and ice buildup, said Doug Childress, chief estimator at J.M. Turner & Co. general contractors in Roanoke.
Ice-laden gutters, however, can cause problems for homeowners. As snow melts and slides off a house's roof, it can back up in gutters and refreeze, creating an ice dam. As the snow continues to melt, it can seep backward beneath the shingles and drip into the house, Thomas said.
A Christiansburg home that Thomas surveyed Friday had about $2,000 in damages because of ice damming.
"In essence, you're at the mercy of outside air temperature," Thomas said. "Ice damning does not occur every time it snows. It's an unlucky sort of thing."
The problem is more of an annoyance than a catastrophe, a frustrating circumstance homeowners can do little to prevent or stop once it has started.
Besides leaning out of a window and pushing muck off the roof with a broom -- a potentially unsafe maneuver -- or using a snow roof rake to pre-empt damming, homeowners should catch drips in a bucket inside the house once the damming is done, Thomas said.
