Did you experience the earthquake that hit south eastern Ontario and some of Quebec on June 23, 2010 at 1:41 pm EST?
The damage luckily wasn’t too major even though it hit 5 on the Richter Scale according to the US Geological Survey. Just 61 km north of Ottawa is where the centre of the earthquake began.
As stories came in, many individuals spoke of a gradual rumbling which increased in intensity, a bit like building work going off below or around you. One person even experienced it as high as the ninth floor of her office building. Lorne said that the rumblings felt quite mild where he was, but he clearly felt them.
The quake puts in your thoughts just how exposed we are in Canada to natural disaster, even though one of this size only occurs once a decade. So how do you try and ready and protect yourself for future natural catastrophes?
There are many things you can do to ready yourself for such emergencies, but one important thing to think about is life insurance.
What many individuals do not grasp is that along with disasters such as floods or windstorms, earthquakes are one of the most expensive natural disasters. To put it in simpler terms from 1950 to 2002, earthquakes answered for 30% of destruction by natural disasters alone. Still, they account for only 9% of the human cost, paling in comparison to famine, which killed 42% of people, but accounts for only 4% of the total destruction over those years.
People losing their lives fell in the 90’s from 86,328 per year in the 80’s to 75,252; but those touched by natural disaster climbed from147 million in the 80s to 211 million people a year in the 90’s.
When analyzing natural disasters today to the 1960’s we see that there are 3 times the amount happening and the financial impact has risen dramatically as well.
With more disasters happening then it stands to reason that more and more of us are going to have their lives affected by them, so it is only natural to look at ways of minimizing the impact on your family.
The five main Canadian insurance companies we surveyed do provide death benefits for you and your family if such disasters happen, but you need to check the policy carefully if you choose not to use them and go elsewhere. The one caveat is, the natural disaster cannot happen in a location that already has a travel exclusion like a war zone.
Delivered by Lorne S. Marr, the president of LSM Insurance and mortgage life insurance expert
