The Tea Fires that swept Santa Barbara in November burned 1,940 acres and added to California’s already record breaking 2008 year of 801,726 burned acres. Besides costing almost 6 million dollars in firefighting costs alone, the Montecito Tea Fire destroyed  230 residents homes.   Along with the homes is valuable landscaping on hundreds of properties in the area that have also been destroyed or damaged.

It has been said that it is hard to put a price tag on living things, but with situations such as the current California Wildfires, it is vitally important to replace the live assets such as landscaping that was damaged in the Tea Fires.

We are very happy to see our partners, Horticultural Asset Management (HMI), are working side by side with the wildfire recovery effort and providing Tea Fire support.  We wish that more folks in the wildfire zones had been part of our Live Asset Insurance Programs for wildfire protection.

HMI has issued a press release outlining their unique role as valuation experts for plant material destroyed in the most recent California wildfires.

It’s a great example of how we, as a society and even as part of the insurance industry, cannot continue to ignore landscaping and other plant life as valuable and as necessary to natural disasters.  This sentence alone, speaks volumes;

“HMI was also able to provide emergency solutions for damaged landscaping and erosion protection, which is critical in the Santa Barbara area, due to the fact that the plant material located on hillsides is what stabilizes the earth and prevents mudslides.”

Please read HMI Supports Claims Efforts Following Recent Wildfires in California over at Insurance Newsnet.com

The press release highlights HMI’s “post damage” claim settling expertise. Their real value, however, was apparent to us a long time ago as “pre claim” experts. They provide both services to Live Asset Insurance.

Live Asset Insurance discovered HMI over a year and a half ago when I typed “money grows on trees” into a search engine and they popped up. Doug Cowles the CEO and I instantly saw the potential of marrying our services together, to provide a seamless solution to a “significant market need”. We located an Insurance Company that agreed with our vision, and together we created a protection program that includes inspections; to determine the plant condition, and valuations; to determine the replacement cost of the plant material, and insurance; so we could properly protect them like any other valuable asset.  Even in situations such as the California Tea Fires. Live Asset Insurance is proud of the work HMI performs, and we are very proud to have them exclusively support our Live Asset Insurance program.

As Managing Director of Live Asset Insurance I get a lot of requests to speak about our exciting new product to various interested groups across the country.

I was recently approached by Dr. David Reddick, PhD who runs a website www.climateandinsurance.orgthat is uniquely focused on insurance and climate change. Since our product provides weather related insurance relief he felt our product was worth learning about, and I agreed to an interview. The final interview is posted in the Climate and Insurance site in the Take Five column.

After the interview I was approached by Dr. Evan Mills who provided me with an exciting study “From Risk to Opportunity: Insures Resposonse to Climate Change”. This study was conducted by his group regarding the Insurance Community and the opportunity we have to set the pace for both innovative products like Live Asset Insurance, but also for social and environmental impact on the climate and our natural resources.

Live Asset Insurance is leading the green revolution with our new insurance product, but there are many other ways that the insurance community can play a role in helping bring about change not just change for change sake, but because change makes economic, social, and environmental sense.