Insurance giant sues nearly 200 Illinois communities for failing to prepare for climate change

Farmers Insurance filed nine class action suits against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area, saying that local governments should have prepared for rising global temperatures that have led to heavier rains and flooding.

The suits charge that the municipalities did not do enough to fortify their sewers and stormwater drains, causing the insurance company to pay out claims that could have been averted.

While legal observers say the chances of Farmers winning the cases are slim, there may be another motive behind the strategy: insurance companies want to push cities to invest in prevention as a way to avoid future lawsuits.

The Farmers’ cases raise the question of how city governments should allocate funds in preparation for natural disasters.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in New York, told Reuters that he expects more lawsuits of this type. If disasters happen more frequently, it’s possible that cities would bear more legal responsibility to prepare for them, he indicated.

(http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0517/Climate-change-lawsuits-filed-against-some-200-US-communities)

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.