Getting to work: Suncorp assessor Jonathan Robson inspects damage in Mallacoota
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ushfires are as fickle as they are ferocious. Insurance specialists driving countless kilometres through bushfire-hit regions this summer have been amazed by the sheer extent of a razed landscape and the sometimes-random damage caused by fast-moving flames. “You would have a street of houses where there’s six properties, and five are burned to the ground while there’s one in the middle that doesn’t even have a scorch mark on it,” Suncorp National Event Assessing Advisor Jonathan Robson tells Insurance News. Residents have returned to properties not knowing if their home has been destroyed or has been one of those left largely unscathed. Other residents stayed to defend properties with varying results as wind-driven fires raced through dry forests and bushland. “You will have a customer that says ‘there are people worse off than me’, and you are looking at a pile of ash,” Mr Robson says. “It really puts into perspective the resilience that people have. “There was one couple who had been taken away on a boat out of Lake Conjola [south of Jervis Bay in New South Wales].
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He dropped off his wife and jumped back in the boat and tried to save their house. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to do so.” AFAC, the national council for fire, emergency services and land management, estimates bushfires have burned almost 12 million hectares this season, compared to the 2009 Black Saturday disaster which covered less than half a million hectares. The Victorian disaster caused the loss of 173 lives, while 33 people have died this season. Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) bushfire catastrophe declarations have covered Queensland, NSW, South Australia and Victoria, and estimated insurance losses since September total around $1.9 billion. Insurance personnel have travelled through stark and blackened landscapes as soon as its safe to enter, assessing property damage, assisting with claims and listening to people’s stories of loss and survival. IAG Major Events Specialist Terry Cheng drove the area from Port Macquarie to Foster earlier in the bushfire season, before more recently travelling through the NSW South Coast region and into East Gippsland. “It is such a widespread area,” he says. “Driving through on the highway and seeing
the trees and the forest areas, and the impact on a large number of towns and small communities…it’s quite sobering.” Insurers are increasingly aiming to be on the ground as soon as possible after major events and provide training for staff on the scenarios they can expect and how to respond with empathy and in situations of customer vulnerability. IAG Executive Manager Major Events Craig Byfield says being at the scene to listen to people’s experiences and understand their requirements has been greatly appreciated by policyholders. The insurer is boosting its fleet of major event rapid response vehicles, which this season stopped in towns devastated by the fires. In Cobargo in NSW, he met an elderly couple who had stayed to defend their home as the bushfire approached. “They had defended their own property and they talked about their experience of working together to save their house,” Mr Byfield tells Insurance News. “They lost a shed on the property and things like that, but for them to be able to tell their story and have people sit down and listen was an asset to them. I see that a lot in
