martin moran – curious, furious and insurious.

Satellite image over Alberta – 7/23/2012, 17:00 MDT

As I write this post, I’m hanging up from a conference call with my staff in Edmonton, Alberta.  They were distracted during the call as they watched funnel clouds forming just outside their office windows, and they had just finished telling us that they had told their crews to get off the roads and back in to the office if possible due to a tornado warning.  There was such shock in their voice that one of the other participants asked them if they wanted to discontinue the call and pick it up again. It reminded me of July 24, 2004, when I was driving near where I lived in a small town just outside Edmonton.  The sky turned green – just like I had heard about the F4 tornado that hit Edmonton on July 31, 1987.  A huge twister formed in the sky right above my head; fortunately, it was too large and moving too fast to form.It also got me thinking about a recent report I’d read from Munich Reinsurance stating that catastrophe losses in 2012 were relatively moderate.  This has been news to me, as I’ve spent most of this summer dealing with the after effects of summer storms – two in particular in Thunder Bay and, most recently, in Edmonton, Alberta.  Both of them were interesting in their own rights, and both cities have had a history of similar losses. Read more