Not in Kansas Anymore

Figures from the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) are not available as of press time, and so insured damage totals are not yet known for the series of 14 tornadoes that touched down in various parts of Ontario on Aug. 20, 2009.

The current/previous record of Cdn$500 million in insured damages for an Ontario storm was set almost exactly three years earlier, in 2005. Those storms flooded areas of the GTA and hit Kitchener and Guelph.

Tragically, the 2009 tornadoes killed an 11-year-old boy. Investigators on the scene from Environment Canada and researchers connected to the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) expressed amazement more people didn’t die: the destruction happened at 7 p.m., right around dinner time, when many people would have been returning home after work.

Are these killer tornadoes the product of global warming?

Geoff Coulson, a warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada, said his 25 years of experience with these kinds of natural disasters tells him no. Southwestern Ontario is, after all, located in an area prone to tornadoes. And folk tales to the contrary, tornadoes can hit cities with the same likelihood that they hit sparsely populated rural areas.

So why does it feel like we are experiencing higher insured damage counts, even if the frequency of these tornadoes is anecdotally the same? After all, the province may have established records for tornado and storm damage twice in the past three years — totalling at least Cdn$1 billion — if insured damage from the 2009 storms did indeed set a new damage mark.

A variety of reasons are proposed.

Coulson proposes the first. His argument is very similar, in fact, to the observations made by insurance companies watching demographic patterns along the eastern seaboard of the United States. He argues population density is increasing.

According to this point of view, Florida, for example, could be getting the same number of hurricanes it’s always been getting, but the damages are higher each time, as more people insist on moving into a hurricane zone.

Similarly in Ontario, the area north of Toronto known affectionately as “cottage country” is in the middle of boom times. Frank Magazine once liked to post real estate values of the so-called “piles” built and owned by glitterati in the Muskoka-Haliburton area. One look at these “summer homes” — some of which are more decadent than you will find in the city (or even the suburbs, for that matter) — suggests extraordinary loss exposure.

A second reason has to do with the way tornadoes are currently identified. The Fujita scale is used to determine whether or not a tornado occurred, as well as its relative strength. Wind speeds in the Fujita scale are determined based on structural damage. In other words, if no damage is reported, then it would be difficult to apply the Fujita scale to determine if a tornado occurred. Conversely, the more people who report tornado-based wind damage, the more it will seem to us that the number of tornadoes is increasing.

Of course, living in a multi-media, interconnected, thrill-seeking world, many people almost seem “disappointed” to learn their houses were flooded or damaged by a mere thunderstorm, Coulson says. And the media tend to follow each other’s reports, augmenting the “storm-chaser” effect that inflates tornado reporting.

Strangely, although more people are settling into a known tornado zone, and even though more people are reporting potential tornado damage to their properties, very few seem to be paying attention to whether their homes are built to withstand the storms.

Tornadoes are furious in their intensity and will damage any and all kinds of homes. But eyewitnesses to the damage in Woodbridge and Maple, Ontario, where the tornadoes were most destructive, say a startling number of the homes lost their roofs over something as basic as improperly nailing the roofs to the walls.

Clearly, the building codes need to be reviewed in light of the storms, and the insurance industry is poised with information to help. Preventing or mitigating the destructive effects of tornadoes is of the utmost importance.