Category Archives: Safety

America’s Safest Driving Cities

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Winter weather has yet to appear in many parts of the country, but it’s on its way. When factoring rainy or snowy conditions into collision frequency, however, some cities are safer than others in many types of weather, according to the 2015 Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report.

driversWhile there are many factors that impact highway safety, an improving economy and lower gas prices have led to an increase in the number of miles being driven.

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According to the Federal Highway Administration’s latest Traffic Volume Trend Report, cumulative travel for 2015 is up by 3.

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5%. The September report is based on hourly traffic count data reported by the states, using data collected at about 4,000 continuous traffic counting locations nationwide.

Recently, the National Safety Council estimated that the U.S. is on track for its deadliest driving year since 2007. In the first six months of 2015, NSC reported traffic deaths were up 14% from a year ago, and serious injuries were 30% higher over the same period.

The city with the best driving report this year is Kansas City, Kansas. Factoring in precipitation, Cape Coral, Fla., and Brownsville, Tex., came in second and third, respectively. Cities at the bottom of the list of 200 were Boston, Massachusetts; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Baltimore, Maryland. New York City was listed at 151.

The report is based on Allstate’s claims data, ranking America’s 200 largest cities in terms of car collision frequency to identify which have the safest drivers. The data also shows how these cities rank when precipitation is a factor. The rankings are based on the expected driver performance given each city’s average annual precipitation as measured by NOAA, according to Allstate.

America’s safest driving cities:

ABD-Infographic-2015-1

Another Reminder About Emergency Planning for an Active Shooter

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Washington Post shooting calendarYesterday, Dec. 2, 2015, marked the 336th day of the year and 355th mass shooting, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, which logs incidents in which four or more people are shot. Indeed, there were two mass shootings yesterday: a smaller incident in Georgia in which a woman was killed and three men injured, and the slaughter of at least 14 people and injury of 17 at an office holiday party at San Bernadino’s Inland Regional Center, which provides social services to residents with developmental disabilities. No motive has been found thus far, but two shooters have been identified as a county employee who had attended the party and his wife.

As I wrote in the November issue of Risk Management magazine, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University found that the rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011. According to a study released last year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, active shooter incidents, where police arrive to a shooting in progress, are also on the rise. The FBI found that 160 of these incidents had taken place in the United States between 2000 and 2013, 70% of which occurred in either a business or educational environment. An average of 11.4 incidents occurred annually, averaging 6.4 in the first seven years studied, and 16.4 in the last seven years.

With the growing frequency and ever-increasing fatalities, risk managers clearly cannot afford to become so inured to these incidents. Rather, much like they do for other forms of crisis, from fires to tornadoes, they need to be acting now to train employees, develop emergency plans, and ensure business continuity provisions are in place.

“You have smart people leading organizations who know they need to do something, but you see them fall into a pattern of planning to have a plan, and they confuse that with taking action on the issue,” said Jay Hart, director of the Force Training Institute. “Planning to have a plan is not a plan. They need to understand that this is a leadership issue, because it is about protecting the people in the company.”

For tips on preparing for an active shooter incident, check out the Q&A with Hart from the December issue of Risk Management, and “Preparing for an Active Shooter Incident,” from the November issue. When developing a plan to respond to an active shooter crisis, make sure to:RM11.15_ff_shoot_side.630

Long-Awaited Infrastructure Repair Bill Nears Passage

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Road work

While short-term patches have been used to shore up our nation’s infrastructure for years, leaving large, long-term projects such as bridge repairs to languish, those issues may be remedied by a bill passed by Congress on Tuesday. The measure approves a long-awaited five-year measure of more than $300 billion to fund highways and mass transit. Known as TEA-21, the bill is expected to win final passage by the House and Senate.

“Right now, 11% of our bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient and another 13% are considered functionally obsolete,” Andrew W. Herrmann, 2012 president of ASCE and principal with Hardesty & Hanover LLP, an infrastructure engineering firm, told Risk Management in February 2014. “This means they were designed to an older standard, so they may not have the same lane widths or turning radius or may have been designed to carry lesser loads.”

Deterioration of the nation’s infrastructure jeopardizes public safety, threatens quality of life, and drains the U.S. economy. “If they have to start closing down, restricting or putting mileage postings on bridges, the economy will be affected,” said Herrmann, who served on the advisory council for the 2003, 2005 and 2013 report cards and chaired the council for the 2009 edition. “Bridges are the most pressing need in the infrastructure overall. You can have all the roads and highways you want, but if you don’t have the bridges to cross the rivers and intersections, it slows everything down.”

In California alone, 58% of roadways require rehabilitation or pavement maintenance, 20% need major maintenance or preventative work and 6% need to be replaced. Traffic volume is also growing 10 times faster than lane miles, the California Transportation Commission reported.

According to the Wall Street Journal, highlights of the bill include:

  • Extending the Highway Trust Fund through Sept. 30, 2020, and allowing for total transportation spending of as much as $305 billion.
  • Renewing the Export-Import Bank through September 2019.
  • Separating the budget for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor services from the rest of the passenger rail network. This would allow the carrier to invest more in the heavily-traveled lines between Boston and Washington.
  • Preserving a program that allots a share of mass-transit funding for seven high-density Northeast states, including New York and New Jersey. The House had earlier voted to eliminate the set-aside and use the money to fund bus programs whose funding had been slashed in 2012.
  • Providing a total $10.8 billion for freight projects, including establishing a $4.5 billion grant program designed to award money to large-scale freight projects.
  • Providing the largest share of funds to the federal highway-aid program, with authorization to spend $207.4 billion over five years.
  • Providing the next largest share of funding to mass transit projects, at $48.7 billion over five years, an increase over levels approved by the House.

Climate Change’s Impact on Cities and Businesses

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Growing populations around the globe have created larger cities, as well as greater concentrations of risk. It is projected that a rise in sea levels and increased intensity of events will amplify the impact of hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, floods and droughts. Because of this, climate change is seen as one of the biggest threats to cities and businesses and could account for an estimated 20% of the global GDP by the end of this century, according to “Business Unusual: Why the climate is changing the rules for our cities and SMEs” by AXA.

While some cities have worked to put resilience plans in place to reduce the impact of flooding and other disasters, there is much to be done and businesses are vulnerable, especially small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Only 26% of SMEs have taken action to protect themselves, yet 54% are worried about the impact climate change could have on their business, and the number rises to 75% in emerging markets, the study found.

AXA-SME impact

“These disasters would be magnified by the fact that populations and assets have never been so concentrated in disaster-prone areas,” Henri de Castries, chairman and CEO of AXA Group said in the report. “Half of the world’s population now resides in cities, often along coastlines, and this proportion is due to rise to nearly two-thirds by the middle of the century, representing some 6.4 billion people. It comes as little surprise, then, that 80% of the climate change adaptation costs for 2010-2050 would be borne by urban areas.”

According to the report, these are common elements of resilience planning:

  • Risk assessments to identify key vulnerabilities.
  • Adaptation of essential infrastructure to withstand changes to the environment.
  • Development of flood defenses to protect inhabited areas from flooding caused by extreme weather events and increased rainfall.
  • Urban planning and relocation of buildings, including adapting to future developments that allow greater resilience to the consequences of climate change.
  • Development of emergency warning and response plans—emergency response planning is a core pillar of resilience strategy.
  • Community engagement and awareness-raising activities.

Additional findings:

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