You can file the latest lawsuit Farmers Insurance has filed against every municipality in Cook County under the heading: “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Talk about chutzpah. Here is an insurance company, which is providing policies to homeowners who live in floodplains, complaining about having to pay out claims because of flooding.
The company claims that villages like Riverside, Brookfield and North Riverside, were negligent by not having sewer systems capable of handling runoff from record rainfall and not setting up temporary floodwalls, because they knew there was a lot of rain coming.
What it sounds like to us is that Farmers Insurance wants to eliminate its risk in selling insurance policies. Capacious sewer networks, inflatable flood barriers and armies of sandbag wall builders should have been deployed to decrease the risk that Farmers Insurance might have to pay a claim.
Did Farmers Insurance not take into account the municipalities’ ability to pay for and erect such things before selling the policies? That would be all part of the risk assessment, we think.
This is just rich. The poor insurance company is out a boatload of money because it took a risk and it came back to bite them. Once again, here’s a huge private corporation looking for a public bailout. It never gets old, does it?
