Question on comparison site : is your property within 400m of a watercourse. Yes I do.

MyRealNameToo

user1977 said:

MyRealNameToo said:

user1977 said:

I'm not sure how many people have a great idea of what 400m is, never mind the presence of any watercourses possibly several streets away. 

No doubt there could be some silly little thing that may not show up on maps but then it's not going to show up when the insurer checks either. 

The flood maps show relatively small watercourses which might not be very obvious in an urban environment (tucked away behind other properties, etc). The answer would be "yes" for both of my childhood homes, but that would be a stream which is culverted for much of its length through town.

I've had the joys of doing catastrophe modelling and then having arguments with the underwriters when they didnt like the results.  One of the common scenarios we run is a "ten ton truck bomb", the software has the details of all buildings we insure and it works out what the maximum likely loss would be if such a bomb went off. 

The top result was a point in Canary Wharf, unsurprisingly as we knew we had a concentration risk there but the UWs wouldnt accept it because the exact spot it had shown was 1' into one of the old docks and therefore they discredited as "you can't drive a truck there". The fact that if you moved the point onto land reduced the loss by 0.3% and still left it vastly higher than any other or the idea it might be a "ten ton boat bomb" were not considered acceptable and that clearly its just the software is flawed and cannot be trusted.