Maui Wildfire: Reporting Claims and Helping Clients at a Critical Time

The wildfire that devastated Western Maui and other wildfires that continue to burn across Hawaii have resulted in hundreds of deaths and injuries and destroyed thousands of homes as well as commercial and public structures. With losses estimated in the billions of dollars and given the remote geographic location of Hawaii, claims and recovery will be a challenge for our clients and local communities.

Given the potentially significant damage to our clients’ property and ongoing business and service interruption issues, we should be ready to assist them at this critical time with any risk management and claims needs based on our extensive wildfire risk management expertise and experience.

In the first instance, please keep the following in mind if any coverage questions arise from clients or if reporting a client claim:

• Report directly to your Marsh claims advocate – Include as much information as possible (such as policy details), but do not delay reporting due to lack of information. You also can send an email with known details to the appropriate geographic email inbox as follows:
  • East: east.claimreporting@marsh.com
  • Central: central.claimreporting@marsh.com
  • West: west.claimreporting@marsh.com
• Report in a timely way – Not only for putting insurers on notice, but also for any necessary colleague resource deployments and trends identification.
• Do not speculate about coverage applicability – No discussions should be had with a client until after a claims advocate and other Marsh subject matter experts have completed their coverage and loss analyses.

You also should inform your clients that our specialist resources from across property, claims preparation and advocacy, business continuity, crisis management, and visual intelligence are ready to support them. Our people are available immediately for discussions about your clients’ issues and will be on the ground in affected areas when it is safe to do so.  

We are updating our wildfire-related content on marsh.com and posting new articles on coverage and claims considerations as we learn more about the issues being faced in Hawaii. Be sure to look there and on LinkedIn for posts that you can send to your own networks.

We also will be posting internal use only articles here, providing more in-depth perspectives on key issues affecting clients claim positions with insurers. We’ll share those articles and other resources below.

Thought leadership and solutions documents available on Colleague Connect to share with clients:

• Property claims preparation and management
• Post-loss damage assessment and business recovery management: FEMA claims
• FEMA insurance requirement reviews and advisory
• Claims project management and claims engineering services

Marsh and Guy Carpenter in the news:

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-11/maui-s-fires-risk-pushing-up-housing-costs-in-strained-market#xj4y7vzkg
• Squawk Box on Twitter: "The wildfires in Maui have left at least 55 people dead and the resort town of Lahaina in ruins. @contessabrewer has a look at the coming effort to rebuild, which @GovJoshGreenMD says will cost billions. https://t.co/0pYyUcF2Ay" / X

Useful government and non-government resources to direct clients to:

GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• Hawaii Emergency Management Agency
• Hawai‘i Wildfire Recovery and Resilience Resource Guide

NON-GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

• American Red Cross
• The Salvation Army
• United Way