Monday, February 09, 2009

E-mail THIS video to the claims adjuster...


Click play. There has got to be some molten metal at the end of this.

You can also read an early account of the circumstances surrounding this fire in Beijing here. If you were going to send the gist of this story to someone in a text, it would read "prbly firewks." It was the last night of Lunar New Year, and by order of city officials, all fireworks had to be used by midnight. So no one's saving anything -- they're setting a match to every fuse. Speculation is that a stray rocket could perhaps have ignited debris at the site.

My question is, what's the insurance situation on something like that? The building was an unoccupied, soon-to-be-opened Mandarin Oriental hotel. Say you're the developer and you see the spreadsheet on the wall. So you arrange to have a small accident happen on Lunar New Year when there will be lots of explosions as a cover. Will the policy pay out more to the developers than they could have reasonably expected if the hotel had opened? Or, perhaps more likely, will it pay a return faster than opening and waiting for a global economic turndown to pay it off the old-fashioned way?

I'm not saying I'm just saying.

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