Ramblings

South eastern Ontario and parts of Quebec were hit by an earthquake last week, did you feel it?

fortunately, the magnitude was only 5.0 according to the US Geological Survey, and no extreme damage was documented. Only 61 km north of Ottawa is where the epicentre of the earthquake began.

Some people who experienced it called it “gradual rumbling, as if construction was going on on the lower floors of buildings” One lady even experienced it as high as the ninth floor of her office building. ‘It was pretty small, but I definitely felt it,’ a witness said.

While natural disasters happen very sporadically in Canada, they do occur and it brings home to us all how exposed we all are. So how do you try and prepare and protect your household for future natural disasters?

There are many things you can do to prepare yourself for such disasters, but one important thing to think about is life insurance.

When looking at the cost involved when a natural disaster takes place, earthquakes are up at the top along with floods. When looking at figures for damage taking place from natural disasters, from 1950 to 2001, 30% of this was attributed to earthquakes. Whilst disasters such as famine have an excessively high human cost compared to earthquakes, the damage during the same period was only 4% – without doubt a massive difference.

The facts and figures make troubled reading, people touched by natural disasters in the 80′s was 147 million, which jumped by another 64 million in the 90′s, with lives lost going from over 86000 down to 75252 per year in the same periods.

When looking at natural disasters today to the 1960′s we see that there are 3 times the amount taking place and the monetary impact has increased dramatically as well.

With more disasters taking place then it stands to reason that more and more of us are going to have their lives affected by them, as a result it is only natural to look at ways of minimizing the impact on your family.

The positive news is, all five influential Canadian insurance companies we surveyed will cover death in the event of a natural disaster. The one caution is, the natural disaster cannot take place in a place that already has a travel exclusion like a war zone.

Prepared by Lorne Marr, the president of LSM Insurance and mortgage life insurance adviser