Katrina's force changes insurance adjusters' tactics
By Holden Lewis• Bankrate.com

The people who assess Katrina-related property damage for insurance companies are working from the outside in, rather than the usual inside out. That's welcomed news for residents on the hurricane's periphery, but not so good news for residents of New Orleans and the St. Bernard Parish, neighboring the city's east.

The inspectors, called insurance claims adjusters, prefer to begin their work at the epicenter of a disaster and then work outward so they can get checks into the hands of the worst-affected people first. But with much of New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish underwater; and with gasoline and shelter scarce on the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, adjusters are first looking at homes farther north, where the damage wasn't catastrophic.

It could be two or three months before an adjuster visits your home if it was in the path of the worst destruction. Even so, the sooner you contact your insurance company the better. Or maybe that should be "companies" -- plural. It's not unusual to have a homeowner's policy with one company and a flood insurance policy with another.

Insurance adjusters recommend the following:

• If you can't contact the insurance agent and you don't know the name or phone number of the insurance company, call the mortgage lender and ask. Or your state's department of insurance might be able to track down the insurance agent to provide the information.
• Be patient. That two- or three-month estimate for inspections in the worst-hit areas might be optimistic.
• Try to be there when the adjuster visits the home. If that's impossible or impractical, don't freak out. The adjuster will make a damage estimate; if he or she missed something, you can request a return visit.
• If your bank is destroyed and you can't make a deposit, ask the adjuster if the insurance company has made accommodations with a functioning bank.

Insurance companies are sending armies of adjusters into the hurricane-affected areas. Allstate alone has 3,000 adjusters in the field, says Greg LaCost, senior counsel for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. The association doesn't have a head count on the total number of adjusters out there; one official said it's in the "many thousands."

Most adjusters in the area drive trucks with adequate ground clearance to drive over low obstacles. When they visit a house, they perform a visual inspection and enter information into laptop computers that calculate damage estimates.

Not everyone is so high tech in the first days after the disaster. In some of the harder-hit areas, claims adjusters are sleeping in offices with generator power. Those adjusters are going out in the field and taking loss reports on paper, then sending the documents by courier to an office farther north, where the information is entered into computers, says Bob Warner, claims manager for Louisiana Farm Bureau Insurance Companies.