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Potholes Cost NYC $27.6 Million in Settlements Per Year

potholes infrastructure municipal risk

Earlier this month, the transportation research group TRIP found that more than 80% of the major roads and highways in the New York City and Newark metropolitan areas were in poor or mediocre condition—the country’s seventh worst ranking among cities with more than 500,000 residents. According to the report “Pothole City: A Data-Driven Look at NYC Roadways,” released yesterday by New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, this crumbling infrastructure has cost the city’s taxpayers over $138 million in the past six years—an average of $27.6 million per year.

The city’s failure to prioritize and effectively manage repairs of potholes on city roads has resulted in 12,268 property damage defective roadway claims and 5,913 personal injury defective roadway claims between fiscal years 2010 and 2015. Of the claims filed, 1,549 property damage claims were settled at a cost of nearly $1.5 million, while 2,681 personal injury claims were settled to the tune of $136.3 million.

The city’s potholes, Stringer said, are a “persistent and pervasive” problem that “deflate tires, break axles and twist ankles, often at a significant financial cost to the city.” His findings are part of an initiative introduced last year called ClaimStat Alert, which aims to identify patterns in claims made against the city in an attempt to reduce the amount paid in settlements, the New York Times reported.

In February 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg announced a series of steps to try to improve pothole maintenance, including weekly “pothole blitzes,” citywide targeted repaving, an asphalt engineering technology challenge, and an emphasis on impact prevention. Yet the difficult winter proved quite a challenge.  The average time to close a pothole work order in the first four months of FY 2015 was 6.7 days—nearly triple the 2.4 days during the same period in FY 2014, according to the report. The city stated that, while repair times were “atypically high” through the first quarter of FY 2015, they were “returning to normal levels by October 2014.” Stringer’s report did note, however, “to its credit, the DOT filled over 74,000 potholes (arterials and local streets) in the first four months of FY 2015, a 60% increase over the same period in FY 2014.”

The severe winters felt by the whole Northeast have correlated closely with the number of pothole claims—a predictor many cities may need to weigh more heavily when making weather preparations and budgets.

Snowfall and pothole claims

But patching does not present the best long-term investment of city funds, Stringer said. While the city has initiatives to make patching more efficient, the report said “a more cost-effective, long-term solution may be a complete reconstruction of certain city streets.”

Other financial drains due to road conditions include improperly restored streets and intersections following utility work, milled roadways and hummocks. The comptroller’s office recommended several municipal risk management tactics to tackle these potential claims generators, including:

  • Re-evaluating DOT protocols to ensure that restoration work conducted after street work is properly done. While private companies and utility providers such as Consolidated Edison and Verizon are required by the New York City Administrative Code 18 to maintain the area 12 inches around manholes, vaults and plates flush with the road surface, restoration work following construction sometimes does not match that standard. In addition, the NYPD should also perform spot checks to make sure that contractors performing street work in their precincts have proper permits.
  • Roadways are generally paved in a two-step process. A layer of the old roadway is scrapped off (milling), followed by the introduction of a layer of new asphalt. When the street is milled, it presents a hazard to pedestrians and vehicles using the roadway, and yet there is often a delay in repaving roadway. DOT should examine the extent of these delays and modify its procedures to insure that milled roadways are repaved as soon as possible.
  • Hummocks are variations in road conditions where asphalt is pushed up in a wave-like shape. In many cases, parked buses cause this condition on account of their weight and design. Given the trip hazard posed by hummocks, DOT should work with the MTA and private bus companies to explore the feasibility of using different pavement that is less likely to result in hummock conditions where buses commonly park.

For more about the public risk management challenges of roadways and bridges, check out Caroline McDonald’s article “A Bridge Too Far: Repairing America’s Aging Infrastructure,” from Risk Management magazine.

Aerospace Market Premiums Continue to Fall

Favorable loss records and low claims in the aerospace industry has led to steadily falling premiums of about 5% for the past eight years and jumping to 8% in 2014, according a report by Aon Risk Solutions.

Aon’s Aerospace Insurance Market Report 2015 found that the industry’s improved risk profile is the result of enhancements in technology and security as well as better working practices. Claims have averaged about $200 million, while annual premium is more than $700 million, which could suggest “that despite the price of lead premium falling for eight consecutive years, there is still a long way for the sector to fall,” Aon said, noting that the reality is that the premium level reflects the potential for massive, exceptionally complicated claims. “As a result, while the price of premium could continue to decline gradually in the absence of major claims, the soft market conditions are unlikely to accelerate.”

While an improved risk profile plays an important role, another major factor is that the insurance industry “has become a haven for global investment capital, offering enhanced returns in comparison with other financial markets,” according to the study. This has increased capacity in the market and created competition that has driven down prices. “This could mean that current levels of competition in the market for aerospace business will decline and the pace of reduction in the aerospace insurance markets will slow. There is little evidence that this process is taking place at this stage, but it is a factor that could change during the next couple of years,” the study said.

According to Aon:

FM Global Teaches Explosive Safety Lessons

FM Global Fire Hazard Lab

This week, I ventured up to West Glocester, Rhode Island, home of the coolest place any insurance broker, insurance client, or risk management journalist can visit: the FM Global Research Campus.

Hurricane Force Wind Simulation

Because FM Global is intently focused on prevention of loss as the chief means of minimizing claims, the company maintains a 1,600-acre campus dedicated to property loss prevention scientific research. The biggest center of its kind, the research center features some of the most advanced technology to conduct research on fire, natural hazards, electrical hazards, and hydraulics. Here, experts can recreate clients’ warehouse conditions to test whether existing suppression practices would be sufficient in the event of a massive fire, for example.
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Fabricated hail or seven-foot 2x4s are shot from a cannon-like instrument at plywood, windows, or roofing to test whether these materials can withstand debris that goes flying in hurricane-strength winds. Hydraulic, mechanical and environmental tests are conducted on components of fire protection systems, like sprinklers, to ensure effectiveness overall and under the specific conditions clients face. Further, in cases where there were not sufficient loss prevention solutions, the company’s scientists and engineers have even designed and patented new, more effective sprinklers and other loss prevention technology, the rights to which are released so anyone can manufacture these improved safety measures.

Fire is the leading cause of loss in every calendar year, and watching a pile of plastic pallets ignite into a 60-foot fire while you feel the radiant heat through the glass of the lab’s observation deck is a powerful reality check for anyone evaluating risk exposure in their facility. As you watch the pallets melt, forming a plastic pool that also catches fire and spreads, you see the fire double in size every 45 seconds. If your strategy is primarily to rely on the local fire station, the researchers note, a minimal response time, assuming decent proximity, no traffic or inclement weather, and full staffing, would probably be at least five to 10 minutes. It only took seven minutes for their sample fire to reach almost three stories high, flickering around the edges of the massive ceiling-mounted calorimeter (which measures heat and the particles and smoke released).

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One of the most striking demonstrations comes in the form of a dust explosion. Whether released through product manufacturing, a byproduct of processing, or simply lazy housekeeping, a wide variety of dusts can fill the air in many facilities. Flour, sugar, metal dust, wood and resin are all highly flammable and exceptionally common.

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To cause an explosion, you simply need a few conditions: fuel (the dust), oxygen, ignition, suspension (in other words, the dust has not settled, increasing the surface area), and a confined space (ie. inside the facility, the dust stays in the environment). What happens then? Check out the video below for a slow-motion look at the explosion that results from just a hard hat full of phenolic resin.

Tips for Preventing Virtual Shoplifters

E-commerce business models have many advantages over brick-and-mortar retailers, including lower overhead, more flexibility in product and price testing, and more opportunities to manage inventory at optimal levels based on shopper behavior and current web analytics. However, an e-commerce business can’t escape all the realities of merchants with physical storefronts—including shoplifters.

Here are six tips for preventing virtual shoplifters:

Safeguard your platform. An open-source e-commerce platform could make you more vulnerable to hackers. Ensure that you host your site with a platform that uses object-oriented programing language. Ideally, the administrative portions of your site should be completely inaccessible to anyone outside of your organization.

Maximize your SSL strategy. Use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates have become commonplace in online transactions that involve sensitive data. As Rick Andrews from Symantec recently advised in a CIO Magazine article, however, their opportunities can be further maximized—and it may even translate into conversion improvements at customer checkout. “Integrate the stronger EV SSL [Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer], URL green bar and SSL security seal so customers know that your website is safe,” Andrews said.

Additionally, mandate consistent business processes to ensure someone in your company is tasked with staying abreast of the latest changes in the world of online security, and keeping systems current in light of them. In mid-April, for example, the Payment Card Industry Standards Security Council (PCI SSI) announced it found vulnerabilities in the current SSL and TLC (Transport Layer Security) methodologies, exposed in part by Heartbleed and Poodle. Although merchants have until June 30, 2016 to revise their SSL protocol to remain PCI compliant, a business is vulnerable to hackers who are well aware of the opportunities to take advantage of such security “holes,” until the security updates are in place.

Follow PCI compliance standards. In addition to incorporating PCI-compliant secure payment gateways into your e-commerce site to process transactions, confirm that you aren’t storing sensitive customer data (also prohibited by PCI standards)—even if you do so to streamline return procedures.

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While it may extend the length of your checkout and return processes slightly, what your business stands to lose in the form of risk exposure due to stored sensitive data outweighs potential efficiency gains.

Verify card information with addresses. Although e-commerce transactions inherently include “card not present” scenarios, you can still take steps to reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. Implement address verification systems to detect potential information discrepancies between card information and the customer. Require that the customer input security information shown on the physical card, like the three- or four-digit card verification on the back or front of the card (in the case of American Express).

Set alerts—and pay attention to them.

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Security alerts can detect suspicious activity before it spirals into a full-scale cybertheft—but only if you take them seriously. In the case of the Target data breach, Bloomberg reported that the merchant’s security alerts did sense suspicious activity well before the data breach was underway, but that the threats weren’t taken seriously by technology staff. At minimum, every e-commerce business should have alerts to detect unusually high activity originating from a single IP address, and to flag customers who order multiple times using different cards, in a short period of time.

Install “patches” as soon as they are available.  Your software and operating systems are only secure if they’re current. When new versions of software are released, install them as soon as possible—and immediately, if the update involves a patch developed because a vulnerability was detected.

If you operated a brick-and-mortar business you wouldn’t leave your cash registers unattended or doors unlocked after business hours—but gaps in online security are akin to doing just that when you have an e-commerce business.

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Establish processes and security procedures to ensure that you remain aware of changes in security standards, potential threats and areas of vulnerability. While you may not stop virtual shoplifters and fraudulent transactions entirely, optimizing your site security is your best line of defense.