By Rebecca Feldhaus
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-906960.mp3
Clarksville, TN – Weeks after the high water receded from the swollen Cumberland River, Maggie Bradford goes in and out of her coffee shop waiting for construction to finish. Amongst the sound of nail guns and power drills Bradford looks out at her flowers beds, one planted in honor of her mother. Bradford and her husband planned to open Mag's Coffee on May 14th. Needless to say, they haven't yet had the grand opening they planned. When the rain started, she says she wasn't worried, but once reports of water on the road reached the public, they had little time to lose. Bradford explains.
"We managed to come in the back way and sure enough the water was up to the closest flower bed to the building. And so my husband and son got in there and moved things as high as we could because we didn't have time to get them out of the shop and within a couple of hours later, the water was in the shop."
Mag's Coffee sits at 201 South Riverside drive, yards away from the Cumberland River. If you take a drive down riverside now, the Cumberland is back in its banks, but the residual grime and gutted buildings left behind a big price tag. Bradford says business owners are hurting. By the end of the cleanup, she will have used all her money she had saved for payroll and she'll have to apply for a small business loan. Her husband estimates cleanup cost totaling between thirty and thirty-five thousand dollars. When asked why she didn't have flood coverage, she had a good sense of humor.
"I have no idea. I just know if it had burned down, we would have been covered."
Bradford is just one of the many business owners cleaning up from the flood. Insurance agents in Tennessee and Kentucky alike have likely been busy responding to claims.
Sandy West is a team manager with State Farm Insurance. She explains the basis of flood coverage.
"The National Flood Insurance Program was started in 1968 by Congress and it is a federally issued policy. The policy covers losses due specifically to flood and is sold on it's own as a stand-alone policy through agents around the country."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency handles National Flood Insurance Policies and individual communities can choose to participate. Basically, the federally run NFIP, pays for claims. The private agencies like State Farm, All State and Farm Bureau do the leg work. They sell the policies and do the claim adjustments. Policy holders write the checks to the private company, and the agents get a commission, and the rest of the sum is sent to the NFIP.
In Clarksville city, there are 225 residents and business owners with policies through the NFIP. The unincorporated part of Clarksville adds another 126. Clarksville is home to more than 100-thousand people. Communities despite location aren't required to offer flood coverage. If a community doesn't offer flood coverage, NFIP officials tell individuals to contact their local leaders and request the coverage.
If Bradford decided to insure her property and contents the cost could reach up to $11,000 in annual premiums.
During such a catastrophic clean up, flood-victims and their insurance agents have a delicate relationship - one that has recently been questioned. Nashville-based attorney David Raybin is researching claims that some insurance agents did not fully disclose information required of them to their clients. Because Raybin hasn't filed the case yet, he has declined to mention the name of any specific agent. He says this is a case against a few individual agents, not the insurance company as a whole. Raybin explains.
"Flood insurance is divided into two flavors, structure and contents. And many people have structure insurance, but not contents, and they were unaware of the distinction between the two. We believe the insurance agents had an obligation to tell folks about the availability of content insurance."
Raybin has screened approximately 30 clients so far both residential and business owners. Business owners have yet another insurance angle to worry about; interruption of business insurance. Joni Covington, owner of Hardware City could have used it. Outside of Covington's shop above piles of gardening equipment and cleaning buckets the marquis reads, "We need volunteers."
With the help of hundreds of volunteers from Clarksville, Nashville and parts of Kentucky, Covington and her employees have been cleaning out thousands of pieces of merchandise. They scrub the item, dip it in bleach water, and finally cleanse it in fresh water. Cleaning stations dot the parking lot. Covington estimates she lost about two-hundred-thousand-dollars worth of items. She didn't purchase flood insurance either. She explains why.
"In the flood in 1937, it still did not come in, it didn't get high enough to come in this building. And the other flood in '75, we still had about 18 inches before it came in. So I always thought I was pretty much safe but um - I was wrong."
Covington still pays rent on her business even though they are no where near opening. These days interruption of business insurance would have come in handy. Even with the harsh sites of this year's flood Covington says she's still unsure if she will purchase flood insurance. In the commotion of cleanup, Maggie Bradford hasn't thought of whether she will get flood insurance either. But, as Bradford says, hindsight is 20/20.