Back in 1962, they were building fallout shelters during the Cuban missile crisis. In the latest incarnation of getting ready for disaster, preppers are stocking up with nine months’ worth of food and other essentials in case of … you name it, economic collapse, a huge earthquake, an electromagnetic pulse attack that takes out our electronics.

Do you have 12 cases of peas and beans, seven pounds of powdered milk, 50 pounds of flour, 50 pounds of rice, 20 pounds of frozen chicken breasts, a 4,000-watt generator and some 35 gallons of gas in containers to run a freezer?

That’s just a sampling of what Robert Sarnes has stored in his family’s home — in the pantry, in the garage that’s stacked with metal and wood containers.

Sarnes is prepared for a disaster, and you’re probably not.

Especially you Seattle city slickers, says Sarnes in wonderment at your naiveté.

“Seattle? Maybe 1 in 1,000 families could survive more than five days comfortably,” he says.

By the way, in case the thought crosses your marauding mind about breaking into Sarnes’ home, he also has “in excess of 17″ pistols and rifles in a safe in his house.

Plus, right now as he’s being interviewed, he’s packing a compact .45 in a holster under his T-shirt.

Why pack heat around the house?

“I mean, in an emergency, I’m not gonna tell somebody, ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to get my gun.’ You want to be as prepared as you can be,” says Sarnes.

Sarnes, 43, married, with two young daughters, is a prepper, part of an ever-growing group here in the Northwest and throughout the country who have decided that if they haven’t stocked up that pantry shelf for a long emergency, nobody else will.

We’ve gone through periodic bouts of preparing for looming disaster. Aging baby boomers might recall news stories about people putting fallout shelters in their backyards during the Cold War and especially around the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Preppers network

These days, the Internet instantly connects you with others who worry what disaster the future might bring.

Tom Martin, 34, a long-haul truck driver based out of Port Angeles, is the founder of the American Preppers Network, or APN, as it likes to call itself. The website started in 2009, and now, he says, more than 16,000 people nationwide regularly take part on the site’s forums.

“Prepper” is a term that has become better known since the National Geographic Channel began airing a reality show last June called “Doomsday Preppers.” The show describes itself as exploring “the lives of otherwise ordinary Americans who are preparing for the end of the world as we know it.”

The program has been a ratings bonanza, with a 60 percent male audience, with an average age of 44. Guys do like their tough reality shows.

Martin says his group includes about 200 registered members from Washington state, and women make up half of the membership.

A recent topic of discussion on the prepper website was, “What do you fear/are you prepping for?” The responses included “economic collapse and the subsequent civil unrest,” an earthquake, and an “EMP attack,” the latter not referring to Paul Allen’s rock museum, but an electromagnetic pulse burst that supposedly could cause a mass power-system collapse.

Enough people have such worries that the prepper phenomenon has gone mainstream. Costco recently offered on sale for $3,199.99 a nine-month supply of emergency food to feed four people. The chain now has a “disaster-preparedness” section on its online catalog that sells everything from vegetable seeds for a one-acre garden ($42.99) to a powerful standby generator ($2,999.99).

The tipping point for Martin in becoming a prepper spokesman, he says, began a few years ago, when the bad economy cut his $90,000-a-year earnings down to about $40,000 a year. Then he saw his mom in Idaho going through tough times as her home went financially underwater.

Martin began blogging about preparing for tough times, and that led to forming the national preppers group.

He and other preppers are adamant about not being mistaken for survivalists, especially after the recent news stories about the North Bend man who police say shot himself in a hillside bunker after killing his wife and teen daughter.

Says Martin, “That guy sounded like a nut case, somebody who thinks everybody is out to get them.”

On its website, Puget Sound Preppers says, “This group is NOT involved in: revolution, war, militia, political parties, religious activities, racism, or lobbying. This group is about skills and knowledge.”

An upcoming meeting, for example, is on raising chickens.

Preppers, says Martin, are not much different from Mormons who make sure they have food, water and other supplies in case of an emergency.

He says preppers have no interest in toughing it out alone in the wilderness.

They’d rather have that stocked-up pantry, which, they say, means not having to shell out thousands of dollars at once for a nine-month supply. You watch for sales and stock up over time.

Guns and safety

At his Puyallup home, Sarnes answers the obvious question about keeping guns around with two children in the home.

His daughters, he says, have been well-trained in gun safety.

One of them is home from school because she’s feeling buggy. She goes through the drill about gun safety, led by her dad:

“What do you do when you see a gun? You tell a grown-up or police officer. Don’t touch it. If you do handle it, muzzle to the ground, finger off the trigger, treat it like it’s loaded even if you know it’s not, never point it at anybody.”

In agreeing to talk to a reporter, Martin and Sarnes are a bit unusual for preppers, who can be secretive.

A Bothell-area woman who goes by “Nurse Ellie” emails back about herself: “I believe in being prepared and self reliant. I am now a First Class Marksman and have one year of food supply and 3 months of Bottled drinking water. A rain Barrel and live one block from a River (fresh water) and have a Swimming Pool (cleaned regularly) … Safety first, so I will not give you anything further.”

Martin says one reason for secrecy is that during a disaster, people who failed to prepare can “come knocking on the door.” Better to keep it a secret how much you have stored up.

And there is the fear, he says, of being portrayed as “crazy nut-jobs on the fringe of society.”

The Preppers Network website answers, “Preppers are no more crazy than those wacky people who have homeowners insurance. … ”

When he talks, Sarnes uses plenty of military lingo, such as when showing off armor vests he has for himself; his wife, Jennifer; and their daughters, Hailey, 5, and Emma, 7.

“These are Level IV vests, able to stop all commercial-grade ammunition,” he explains.

Sarnes joined the Army at 19, and retired as a sergeant in 2004 after serving 18 years. He was in various air-defense artilleries and describes himself as a “typical grunt,” his record including medals for serving in Kuwait and Southwest Asia.

His wife works at an office and is going to community college, eventually planning a career in nursing or something similar, Sarnes says.

“Bug in, bug out,” is another term Sarnes likes to use, and that is often used on prepper forums.

Let’s say that disaster happens — and Sarnes believes that in the next decade, “there will be a failure of something, whether the economy fails or there is civil unrest.”

First you bug in and stay in your house for a month with all those supplies you’ve stockpiled.

But what happens if those unprepared neighbors do knock on your door?

“Well, piss-poor planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part,” says Sarnes. “It means I’m not going to sacrifice my family for them.”

And?

“If we have a snowstorm and we lose power for three weeks, I’ll share. But let’s say, for lack of a better term, that we have a civil war, something like that. My family’s life is more important than my neighbor’s life.”

Next in the preppers’ disaster scenario comes the bug-out part.

In that scenario, all those unprepared city slickers from places like Seattle will start heading out to the countryside to scavenge for supplies.

That is when Sarnes and his family will bug out to a remote location accessible by side country roads, not the now-jammed freeways.

And, says Sarnes, such a location actually exists for him, in Thurston County. He found a property through the Prepper Network, he says, a place where three families have agreed to combine resources.

With his military background, he says, “I’m an asset to them,” and he has given them basic firearms training.

At the property, Sarnes says, he has a 12-foot metal shipping container with hardened locks. Inside the container he has stored food, sleeping bags and other camping equipment.

“That would be basically to start a new standard of living. At that point, there won’t be any supermarkets, gas stations. You’ll have to provide for yourself with what you have on hand until crops start growing,” says Sarnes.

“Compelling hobby”

Sarnes is told what a sociologist who spent 20 years interviewing survivalists has to say about preppers.

He is Richard Mitchell, 69, of Corvallis, a professor emeritus in sociology at Oregon State University, and author of “Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times.”

What Mitchell says about preppers is that for them, going through various disaster scenarios, stocking up with all that food, is a “compelling hobby” that gives them a sense of creativity and individuality.

Much of the world is packaged these days, says Mitchell, and preppers want to feel that all their preparing really matters.

Mitchell also says preppers don’t take their scenarios to their logical conclusions.

Society has broken down; they’re bugging out in a remote area, and then what?

“Nobody ever talks about forming a city or a town. ‘It’s only I and my family that can be trusted,’ ” says Mitchell. “But what distinguishes us from other species is working together cooperatively and sharing ideas and resources.”

Sarnes responds that actually, what the preppers plan on doing is establishing new communities, each member contributing some kind of skill.

But he does admit this post-apocalypse world will be one in which stuff like the Internet will just be a memory.

“There will be a new definition of normal,” Sarnes says. “Just being able to put food in your belly and not freezing may be the new norm.”

Shake your head if you want, but for the preppers stocking their garages with canned goods, this is no movie treatment.

By Erik Lacitis

Seattle Times staff reporter

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018203926_preppers14m.html

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28% have tested their recovery plans

$12,500 is the per day median cost of downtime to small and mid-sized businesses

23% of the businesses surveyed back up their data daily

From Symantec 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey

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Already, there are separate published reports of massive solar storms of plasma – some as large as the Earth itself – flaring off of the sun’s surface and shooting out into space, with some recently having come close enough to Earth to affect worldwide communications and alter the flights of commercial aircraft near the North Pole.

But in February, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which represents the power industry, issued a stunning report asserting that a worst-case geomagnetic “super storm” like the 1859 Carrington Event likely wouldn’t damage most power grid transformers. Instead, it would cause voltage instability and possibly result in blackouts lasting only a few hours or days, but not months and years.

NERC’s assertion, however, is at serious variance with the 2008 congressional EMP Commission, the 2008 National Academy of Sciences report; a 2010 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report; the 2012 report by the Defense Committee of the British Parliament, and others.

Even the British scientists who contributed to the parliament report came to their own independent assessment that a great geomagnetic storm would cause widespread damage to power grid transformers and result in a protracted blackout lasting months, or even years, with catastrophic consequences for society.

Despite NERC’s assertion that there wouldn’t be widespread damage to the nation’s power grid transformers in the event of an intense solar storm, the FERC, which regulates interstate electricity and other energy sales but has no authority now over local utilities to harden their grid sites, says that as many as 130 million Americans could have problems for years.

NERC asserts that any blackout would last hours or days, at most.

“The FERC report relied on a four-part quantitative model of geomagnetic disturbance effects on the U.S. power grid to develop conclusions and recommendations, while the NERC report relied on meetings of industry employees in lieu of data collection or event investigation,” according to Peter Vincent Pry, who heads the congressional quasi-legislative Task Force on National and Homeland Security. Pry also was staff director to the EMP Commission.

Pry said that the Task Force had issued its own report comparing the scientific methodology used in the industry-sponsored NERC report with that used in 2010 FERC report.

He pointed out that the NERC report was the product of a so-called Geomagnetic Disturbance Task Force with membership consisting only of representatives from electricity generation and transmission companies.

“In contrast to the FERC report, no expert on geomagnetic storms and natural electromagnetic pulse effects participated in actual drafting of the NERC report,” Pry said.

He added that the FERC report used a “proven computer model” to predict specific geographic areas expected to experience power grid collapse during a major geomagnetic disturbance.

“The NERC report discussed how such models might be developed in the future,” Pry said.

Pry was particularly critical of the “extraordinary and unsupported claim” in the NERC report that a likely collapse of the power grid would prevent transformer overheating and damage. Pry said that the FERC asserts that internal heating as a likely mechanism of transformer damage is based on prior actual geomagnetic disturbance events.

U.S. transformers on the average are more than 30 years old and are susceptible to internal heating, according to FERC experts. Other federal studies have revealed that the transformers have to be custom-made for local utilities and are constructed only overseas.

In addition, utilities do not keep around spare transformers due to their expense. The NERC report, however, does not discuss the age of the nation’s transformers.

Nevertheless, there is ample evidence in the possession of the FERC revealing the damage to transformers from previous geomagnetic storms. For example, there was serious transformer damage to the Salem nuclear power plant in New Jersey in the aftermath of the same geomagnetic storm that caused the March 1989 Hydro-Quebec blackout. According to Pry, the NERC had removed any similar pictures from the published version of its report.

Even the Electric Infrastructure Security Council similarly has found fault with the NERC report. The EISC helps coordinate U.S. and international infrastructure protection against electromagnetic threats, whether natural or man-made.

Where the NERC report minimized the effect of a geomagnetic disturbance the EISC was highly critical of the NERC’s conclusions.

“Upon careful review of the report, we were unable to find any supporting material for such a definitive claim, which appears to be a significant departure from all previous report drafts and, indeed, from all previous U.S. government studies,” the EISC analysis said.

“We were disturbed to find that relevant data that could conflict with this conclusion has apparently been removed from the report, including photographs and other evidence of GMD transformer damage that appeared in previous report drafts,” EISC said.

“Since the report’s definitive, positive claim could discourage efforts to protect the U.S. from possible severe GMD-related grid damage, it must, of course, be backed up by extensive transformer data collection, review and corresponding detailed electrical and thermal modeling,” EISC added. “While such data collection and analysis were identified as urgent needs in the deliberations of the task force, this effort has not yet taken place, or even initiated, to our knowledge. In fact, the above, definitive assertion in the (NERC) report is likely to discourage any such effort….Nothing cited in the report supports the claim that voltage instability is ‘most likely.’”

EISC even went further and said of the NERC report that there is no known evidence that voltage instability would be a worst case scenario. In addition, the EISC analysis said, there is no evidence of grid “self-protection” that was noticed in previous GMD events.

“New concerns, heightened by the approaching solar maximum, over the possible recurrence of another great geomagnetic storm, like the 1859 Carrington Event or the 1921 Railroad Storm, have produced threat assessments by multiple government agencies, including some of the world’s best scientists and engineers,” Pry said.

Pry said that the effect of the NERC report actually could contribute to a possible failure to harden the U.S. grid against a severe geomagnetic storm.

“The electric grid alone is not at risk,” Pry warned.

“Everything in our modern society depends, directly or indirectly, upon electricity, including all the other critical infrastructures – communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water – that sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans,” he said.

“If a great geomagnetic storm proves to be catastrophic, as all previous U.S. government studies have warned would be the case, the NERC could be responsible for contributing to an unprecedented national catastrophe,” Pry added.

Pry will be joined by others who have been asked by FERC to testify at a technical panel on April 30 at its Washington, D.C. office “to do battle,” as Pry puts it, with NERC CEO Gerry Cauley and his staff on the merits of the NERC report.

F. Michael Maloof, G2 Bulletin

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“It’s unusual, but not unheard of,” said Kevin Fitzgerald, a National Weather Service meteorologist in State College, Pa., where the eastern part of the state saw rain, and the west, northwest and higher elevations dealt with snow.

Up to 12 inches of snow was expected in the higher elevations of central and western Pennsylvania, as well as New York state, south of Buffalo. A winter storm warning was issued for parts of northeastern Ohio, where 3 to 7 inches of snow was forecast.

Some schools in western Pennsylvania were closed Monday morning ahead of the storm. Districts in the state’s Allegheny Mountains began announcing closures Sunday night as the storm was expected to drop 5 to 7 inches of snow by early Tuesday morning.

Much of New Hampshire and western Maine were under a flood watch Monday with more heavy rain expected. Up to 2 to 3 inches of rain is expected in the area, with the possibility of some creeks and rivers flooding.

However, flood watches were canceled early Monday for the New York City area and in New Jersey.

Sustained winds of 20-30 mph were predicted throughout the Northeast, and gusts of up to 50 mph were expected off Cape Cod, Matthew Belk of the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass., said late Sunday.

One of the biggest concerns with the storm was the potential for power outages due to limbs and branches weighed down by heavy snow falling onto power lines.

Buffalo-based weather service meteorologist Sean Smith said the slow-moving storm could linger of the Northeast through Monday before moving out sometime Tuesday.

The Sunday storm caused plenty of disruptions. Major League Baseball postponed games in Boston, New York and Washington. The scheduled arrival of the space shuttle Enterprise in New York City was pushed back, and an Earth Day celebration at a park in Virginia Beach, Va., was canceled.

The rainfall was a welcome in parts of the Northeast, which is below normal for this time of year.

“We’re down 7 or 8 inches,” weather service forecaster Charlie Foley said. “This won’t completely wipe out the deficit but it will certainly help.”

Officials said the rain should go a long way toward alleviating drought conditions, which have helped spark several major brush fires in recent weeks.

Even Lake Champlain on the Vermont-New York border, normally close to flood stage this time of year because of rain and snowmelt, is near a record low. Just a year ago, it approached its highest level on record.

Another unseasonable nor’easter last year just before Halloween dumped up to 2 feet of wet, heavy snow that snapped tree limbs and power lines, and knocked out power to more than 3 million customers in the Northeast. In Connecticut, it broke a state record for the number of power company customers left in the dark by a single storm that had been set only two months earlier when the remnants of Hurricane Irene slammed the state as it barreled up the Eastern Seaboard.

The worst of the flooding from Irene was in Vermont and northern New York, where cleanups continue seven months later. Farmers are still grappling with crop-smothering rocks, trees, gravel and sand left behind when the flood waters receded. But the dry weather has eased the threat the debris that litters the landscape will rush downriver again.

Farther south, the rain intensified throughout the day Sunday over the Baltimore and Washington metro areas, where drivers were warned drivers to beware of low visibility and slick roadways. Boaters on the Chesapeake Bay were cautioned about the winds.

In Rockport, Mass., the storm forced authorities to halt until Tuesday a search for a missing 2-year-old girl who apparently disappeared from a beach Thursday when her mother went to retrieve a lost ball. The beach is known for strong riptides.

Authorities in New York also suspended work that began last week on digging up a basement in a search for the remains of 6-year-old Etan Patz, who disappeared in 1979 on his walk to his school bus stop. The search was to resume Monday.

By BOB LENTZ | Associated Press

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Powerful blasts from the sun have triggered intense geomagnetic storms on Earth before, and they’ll do so again. But at the moment our ability to predict these events and guard against their worst consequences — which can include interruptions of power grids and satellite navigation systems — is lacking, says Mike Hapgood of the British research and technology agency RAL Space.

“We need a much better understanding of the likelihood of space weather disruptions and their impacts, and we need to develop that knowledge quickly,” Hapgood, head of RAL Space’s space environment group, writes in a commentary in the April 19 issue of the journal Nature.

Potentially devastating storms

The solar storms we need to worry about, Hapgood says, are coronal mass ejections, huge clouds of charged solar plasma that can rocket into space at speeds of 3 million mph (5 million kilometers per hour) or more.

CMEs that hit Earth inject large amounts of energy into the planet’s magnetic field, spawning potentially devastating geomagnetic storms that can disrupt GPS signals, radio communications and power grids for days. [The Worst Solar Storms in History]

The world witnessed such effects not too long ago. In March 1989, a CME caused a power blackout in Quebec, leaving 5 million Canadians in the dark in cold weather for hours. The event caused about $2 billion in damages and lost business, Hapgood writes.

But CMEs are capable of much greater mischief. A huge ejection — now known as the Carrington event, after a British astronomer— slammed into Earth in 1859, setting off fires in telegraph offices. The world was not technologically advanced enough yet to suffer worse consequences, Hapgood noted.

“If we had a repeat of the Carrington event, I would expect several days of economic and social mayhem as many critical technological systems failed – e.g., localized power grid failures in many countries, widespread loss of GPS signals for navigation and timing, disruption of communications systems, shutdown of long-haul aviation,” Hapgood told SPACE.com via email.

And the short-term problems caused by such a storm could pale in comparison with its long-term impact, he added.

“What scares me is the possibility that this recovery could take a long time in many parts of the world,” Hapgood said. “Over the past few decades, we have become much more dependent on technology to sustain our everyday lives: e.g., electricity to pump clean water to our homes and remove sewage, just-in-time supply chains to feed us, ATMs and retail card readers to provide money for everyday shopping. Do we know how to recover quickly from the simultaneous disruption of a huge range of systems?”

Improving predictions

Despite a growing sense of concern among scientists — and decision-makers in politics and industry — our technology-dependent society remains vulnerable to a big CME-spawned geomagnetic storm, Hapgood says. [Photos: Huge Solar Flare Eruptions of 2012]

For starters, our forecasting ability, while improving, is still lacking. The United States’ Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) can currently provide warnings of strong geomagnetic storms 10 to 60 minutes in advance with about 50 percent accuracy, Hapgood writes. That’s a pretty small window for power companies to take protective measures.

SWPC scientists and other space-weather forecasters generally rely on observtions of approaching CMEs made by a handful of spacecraft. These include NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and Solar Terrestrial Rela­tions Observatory (STEREO) probes, as well as the NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

ACE launched in 1997, SOHO in 1995 and the twin STEREO craft in 2006. It’s time for an upgrade, Hapgood told SPACE.com.

“We really need to replace those spacecraft and their instruments that monitor CMEs and, if possible, upgrade the instruments so they are optimized for space weather monitoring – essentially to pull out the most critical data and get it back to Earth as soon as possible,” he said.

Preparing for the worst

The 1989 event spurred some power companies to require that all new transformers be able to withstand storms of similar magnitude.

But Hapgood thinks power, aviation and other vulnerable industries  — including finance, which depends on precise GPS time stamps for automatic trading — should take a longer view and guard against the huge storm that comes along just once every 1,000 years or so.

That’s tough to do, since researchers don’t know what a thousand-year storm might look like; data on such dramatic events are pretty hard to come by. But Hapgood says scientists could get a better idea by analyzing more data, including observations from a century or more ago.

Much of this historical information exists on paper only. Digitizing it would bring these records to the attention of many more researchers, Hapgood says, and he suggests enlisting citizen scientists to do the job on the Internet, much as the Galaxy Zoo project asks volunteers to classify galaxies online by the galaxies’ shapes.

Researchers also need to develop better physics-based models to improve their understanding of extreme space weather, Hapgood says. And he suggests that studying storms on other, sunlike stars could be helpful, too.

In general, Hapgood is calling for powerful geomagnetic storms to be regarded as natural hazards similar to big earthquakes and volcanic eruptions: infrequent, potentially devastating events.

“These events often transcend the experience of any individual because they happen so rarely. Thus there is an all-too-human tendency to ignore them — that they lie outside the awareness of the decision-maker and probably will not occur during his term of office,” Hapgood said. “But these events will happen sometime. We need to understand them and decide how far we should (i.e., can afford to) protect against them — and definitely not leave them until it’s too late.”

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer

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The sun erupted in an amazing solar flare today (April 16), unleashing an intense eruption of super-heated plasma that arced high above the star's surface before blasting out into space.

The powerful solar flare occurred at 1:45 p.m. EDT (1745 GMT) and registered as a moderate M1.7-class on the scale of sun storms, placing it firmly in the middle of the scale used by scientists to measure flare strength. The storm is not the strongest this year from the sun, but photos and video of the solar flare captured by NASA spacecraft revealed it to be an eye-popping display of magnetic plasma.

"Great eruption happening on the sun now," scientists with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) wrote in a Twitter post.

The solar flare erupted along the sun's eastern limb (its left side) from an active region that may also be responsible for solar storm activity observed on Sunday, SDO mission officials said. The flare kicked up a massive amount of solar plasma in an explosion known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME.

"Such eruptions are often associated with solar flares, and in this case an M1 class (medium-sized) flare did occur at the same time, though it was not aimed toward Earth," officials with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., explained in an image description. The Goddard center oversees the sun-monitoring SDO mission.

When aimed at Earth, strong solar flares and CMEs can supercharge the planet's auroras, also known as the northern and southern lights. Extremely powerful CMEs can pose a danger to astronauts and satellites in space, as well as power grids, navigation and communications systems on Earth.

Astronomers measure solar flares on a letter scale, with the strongest events falling into three categories: C, M and X. C-class solar flares are the weakest events, with the X-class sun storms marking the most powerful events on the sun.

The sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and is expected to reach its peak activity in 2013. The current solar weather cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24.

By Tariq Malik , SPACE.com Managing Editor Space.com | SPACE.com

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After a tornado ripped through Springfield, Massachusetts, last year, R. Paula Lazzari’s home was badly damaged. The retired teacher found broken windows, missing siding and a damaged roof. Her insurer offered to fund repairs for one broken window and some of the siding. It took nine months — and mediation services from an independent adjuster and the Massachusetts Division of Insurance — to get her bills paid, according to the parties involved.

In this era of unpredictable weather patterns, Lazzari’s case is not unique. Insurance companies are raising rates, cutting coverage, balking at some payouts and generally shifting more expense and liability to homeowners, according to reports from the industry and its critics.

“Insurance companies have significantly and methodically decreased their financial responsibility for weather catastrophes like hurricanes, tornados and floods in recent years,” the Consumer Federation of America said in a statement after studying industry data.

The industry concedes that it is trying to avoid getting trounced by those same punishing weather patterns.

“Last year (2011) was an extraordinary year for natural disasters,” said Michael Barry of the Insurance Information Institute (III), an industry trade group. “Insurers have taken a step back to assess whether or not they can absorb severe losses.”

STATES LEFT IN THE COLD

Some insurance companies have pulled out of weather-challenged states — meaning they will not write new homeowners policies and may not renew contracts with current policyholders.

In the wake of Hurricane Irene last summer, for example, Allstate informed some 45,000 North Carolina policyholders that it would not renew contracts that were not bundled with auto insurance.

After a spate of tornadoes last April caused $11 billion of property damage in Alabama, Alfa Mutual Group announced it would not renew 73,000 Alabama property insurance policies.

“The increased frequency and severity of storms over the last decade have highlighted the need for Alfa to review its overall property portfolio,” Alfa President Jerry Newby said in a statement.

Florida, where insurers have been dropping coverage since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, is a good example of where this can lead. With an annual average of $1,460 per home, homeowners’ premiums there are second-highest in the country (Texas, at $1,511 is first), according to the most recent data available, a 2010 report from the Insurance Information Institute.

“Florida’s off the charts when it comes to pricing,” said Mike McCartin, an Ashton, Maryland, independent insurance agent.

The state has stepped in to cover some 1.5 million properties via its publicly funded Citizens Property and Insurance Corporation as insurers drop more and more homes.

“You simply have major private insurers that are unwilling to write policies in Florida,” said Robin Westcott, the state’s insurance consumer advocate.

“It’s just a tough market to be in,” said Phil Supple, a spokesman for State Farm, which was once Florida’s largest property insurer. It stopped writing new homeowners’ policies there in 2007.

CHERRY-PICKING OF CUSTOMERS

Even though companies are not abandoning states at will, many opt to drop coverage on individual homes or customers that may seem prone to file claims. Insurers generally work on three-year contracts with homeowners, Barry said. At the end of those contracts, insurers can decide to raise rates or not renew.

When frozen pipes caused flooding in Phil Berger’s Ijamsville, Maryland, home last year, he got a $6,000 check from Allstate for the damages — and a policy review. Berger said an Allstate contractor told him to make $100,000 in repairs to his home at his expense or he would lose his coverage. He refused, and instead found a less expensive policy with a company that required only one smaller repair before covering the home.

“You just need to be on your toes at all times,” Berger said.

Allstate declined to comment on Berger’s case, but sent an email response to general questions about the company’s nonrenewal policies.

“Allstate responsibly manages its risk by opting to not renew policies as warranted,” company representative Kevin Smith wrote. “These actions are carefully considered, and help ensure Allstate’s continued ability to provide a wide variety of insurance products to consumers at a competitive rate, while remaining financially strong in every community we serve.”

PAYING MORE FOR LESS

Even homeowners that renew every year may find new limits buried in their policies. The Consumer Federation report said insurance companies have “sharply hollowed out the catastrophe coverage offered to consumers” by raising deductibles, capping replacement costs, and — significant for folks in the path of tornadoes and hurricanes — removing coverage for wind damage if another non-covered event (usually a flood) also occurs.

Industry groups say this misstates the facts.

“The …(CFA) could not be more wrong,” said Dr. Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute. “Cities such as Tuscaloosa, Birmingham and others are being rebuilt today because of private insurance companies paying losses — not from ‘hollowed out coverage’ policies.” Insurers have paid “literally billions” of dollars to “hundreds of thousands of claimants” affected by natural disasters, he said.

Hartwig also defended the practice by some insurance companies of leaving certain states or regions.

“If you tell an insurance company that they can’t raise rates despite nine hurricanes in two years, obviously insurers are going to have to reduce exposure,” he said.

But homeowners’ insurance premiums have been rising sharply. They have increased an average 6.33 percent annually between 2002 and 2009, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). This year, insurers have asked for rate increases of 18 percent or more in 11 states, according to the Consumer Federation.

Robert Hunter, the author of the consumer report, has questioned whether limit-laden policies are worth the rising costs. But mortgage lenders require homeowners insurance, and anyone who has observed a devastating house fire or storm is unlikely to be willing to go without coverage.

COMPARISON SHOPPING

So how can consumers, who have little choice but to keep their coverage, do as Berger suggests and keep on their toes?

Hunter tells homeowners to shop carefully. “Go on your state’s insurance policy website and look for houses similar to yours to compare prices,” he said.

The NAIC provides a map to all state insurance offices on its website, http://www.naic.org/state_web_map.htm), and provides information about consumer insurance complaints.

Hunter also recommends checking comparison websites such as insuranceproviders.com (http://www.insuranceproviders.com) or insweb.com (http://www.insweb.com) for companies with favorable consumer reviews for in your state.

Another step is to get a professional agent to help, said Jim Donelon, Louisiana’s insurance commissioner and president-elect of the NAIC.

“I recommend you talk to as many people as you can. Get an independent agent — someone who’s not attached to a specific company — and get in touch with captive agents but know that captive agents can only represent their company.”

The agents can check to make sure no important coverage — like wind — has been carved out of the policy.

Compare what the agents offer with what you can find online, said Randy Moses, assistant director with the South Dakota Insurance Department.

Even after getting coverage, consumers may find they need extra help. Lazzari needed both an independent broker and a public adjuster to resolve her case. Her insurer, Norfolk Dedham Insurance, not only initially refused to pay for most of her home repairs, but also planned to drop her as a customer, she said. Francis T. Hegarty Jr., president and CEO of Norfolk & Dedham Group, confirmed her version of events, but said it was not unusual for claims such as Lazzari’s to take time to resolve.

Lazzari contacted an independent broker who worked with Norfolk Dedham to successfully complete her home repairs. But the broker said switching insurers would increase her payments 185 percent. That’s when Lazzari contacted the Massachusetts Division of Insurance to find a public adjuster, who eventually persuaded Norfolk Dedham to keep her on its rolls.

“We were eventually able to work things out with Ms. Lazzari,” said Francis T. Hegarty Jr., president and CEO of Norfolk & Dedham Group. “In these kinds of cases with independent adjusters, the claims tend to get strung out and tend to take longer to resolve than they would otherwise. But cases like case are pretty common and, all in all, we’re pleased with how things turned out with her.”

By Matt Stroud | Reuters

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The massive blaze that swept across Manorville and Ridge has become one of the 10 largest wildfires in New York State over the past 37 years, according to state records.

The fire, estimated to have affected at 1,124 acres Tuesday, is the seventh biggest wildfire in the state since 1975, according to statistics from the Department of Environmental Conservation.

In fact, three of the top eight wildfires during that period have occurred in Suffolk County. The largest by far was the 1995 Sunrise Fire, which consumed more than 6,000 acres on eastern Long Island.

The frequency of fires in Suffolk might surprise some people who associate wildfires with sparsely populated woodlands, but it's a well-known fact among firefighting pros, said Andy Jacob, assistant director of the New York State Forest Rangers.

"The forests down there are filled with oak and pine, and those leaves burn very well," Jacob said. "And right now, while there are no oak leaves, the sun comes straight through the trees and bakes the moisture right out of the ground."

Plus Long Island gets a lot of wind and the conditions are ripe for big fires in the spring, he said.

"Cold air has been moving down from Canada," Jacob said, "and by the time it works through all the mountains in New York State, there's no moisture in that air."

Nearly half the annual wildfires in New York occur between mid-March and mid-May.

After Sunrise, the largest wildfire over the past four decades was a blaze that began by a campfire that went out of control in Woodbury in Orange County in April 1989. That fire consumed 3,650 acres. The third largest blaze began on the same day in nearby Tuxedo, and also stemmed from a campfire. It grew to 3,005 acres.

The Overlooks fire in 2008, ignited by a tossed cigarette, was the fourth largest wildfire. It damaged nearly 3,000 acres, mostly in Minnewaska State Park.

Originally published: April 10, 2012 3:41 PM
Updated: April 10, 2012 8:00 PM
By YANCEY ROY  yancey.roy@newsday.com

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So far, four buyers have plopped down a total of about $7 million for havens to flee to when disaster happens or the end is nigh. And developer Larry Hall has options to retro-fit three more Cold War-era silos when this one fills up.

“They worry about events ranging from solar flares, to economic collapse, to pandemics to terrorism to food shortages,” Hall told AFP on a tour of the site.

These “doomsday preppers”, as they are called, want a safe place and he will be there with them because Hall, 55, bought one of the condos for himself. He says his fear is that sun flares could wipe out the power grid and cause chaos.

He and his wife and son live in Denver and will use their condo mostly as a vacation home, he says, but if the grid goes, they will be ready.

Hall isn’t the first person to buy an abandoned nuclear missile silo and transform at least part of it into a shelter.

Built to withstand an atomic blast, even the most paranoid can find comfort inside concrete walls that are nine feet thick and stretch 174 feet (53 meters) underground.

Instead of simply setting up shop in the old living quarters provided for missile operators, Hall is building condos right up the missile shaft. Seven of the 14 underground floors will be condo space selling for $2 million a floor or $1 million a half floor. Three and a half units have been sold, two contracts are pending and only two more full units are available, Hall said.

For now, metal stairs stretch down to connect each floor but an elevator will later replace them. The units are within a steel and concrete core inside the original thick concrete, which makes them better able to withstand earthquakes.

He is also installing an indoor farm to grow enough fish and vegetables to feed 70 people for as long as they need to stay inside and also stockpiling enough dry goods to feed them for five years.

The top floor and an outside building above it will be for elaborate security. Other floors will be for a pool, a movie theater and a library, and when in lockdown mode there will be floors for a medical center and a school.

Complex life support systems provide energy supplies from sources of conventional power, as well as windmill power and generators. Giant underground water tanks will hold water pre-filtered through carbon and sand.

And, of course, an elaborate security system and staff will keep marauding hordes out.

The condo elevator will only operate if a person’s fingerprint matches its system, Hall said. Cameras will monitor a barbed-wire topped fence and give plenty of warning of possible intruders. Responses can range from a warning to lethal force.

“If they try to climb the fence we can stun them,” he said. “If they want to break into the system, we can put an end to that.”

Doomsday fears have flourished throughout history, but what once involved isolated pockets of fear now spreads worldwide through the media and Internet.

They have also expanded into the popular culture thanks to the success of dystopian fantasies like the Hunger Games and a National Geographic reality show about those preparing for doomsday.

“Fear sells even better than sex,” said John Hoopes, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Kansas who has studied the spread of doomsday culture.

“Now the entire planet is involved and that’s the result of the Internet,” he said.

“I think it’s mostly a strategy for feeling less alone and helpless,” he said. “People don’t like to feel they’re the only ones fearing the inevitable, which is each individual’s personal death.”

Those who sign on to prepare for the worst, he said, fall into a salesman’s strategy: “Act now, or you’re a loser.”

Hall says threats from nature and man are increasing and he wants to create a safe communal society where people survive chaos in comfort, with each person doing an assigned job and interacting with others.

A tombstone-shaped sign declaring “This Old Missile Base” leads to a locked fence surrounding the construction site northwest of Salina. Hall insists the exact location be kept secret.

The fence slides open and Hall leads reporters or potential buyers past an opening in the ground to the metal stairs stretching down the silo.

“You can stand here and literally it’s like a deprivation chamber — you can’t hear anything,” Hall said pointing out the 10-foot high ceilings and a cave-like quiet.

He is working to finish an 1,800 square-foot (167 square-meter) unit for a wealthy businesswoman with two teen children.

Electronic screens will serve as windows, offering views of Paris, New York, a beach, a forest or whatever she decides to see.

The unit itself will have top-end appliances, walk-in closets in the bedrooms, a kitchen and dining area and two living rooms to avoid arguments about what to watch on TV.

So far he has spent $4 million on the entire silo, including $300,000 he paid for it in 2008, when it was flooded with water and locked by giant steel doors. He expects to have all the seven floors of condos sold by August.

Interested buyers have included an NFL player, a racing car driver, a movie producer and famous politicians, he said, but he now requires all the money up front.

Four people who put down $250,000 deposits could not come up with the rest and he returned the deposits, but the economy is getting better and global warming, strange weather and disasters are stoking fears.

The recent earthquakes in Mexico prompted several calls from potential buyers, he said, predicting more bad things will happen and more silos will be waiting.

About 70 Atlas-F silos were built and he has options on three more of them, he said.

“One is an entire silo for one individual, but I won’t know that until his check clears the bank,” Hall said.

By Joe Lambe | AFP

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