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Avoid the cost and hassle of leaks by installing a water shut-off device.

They say that homes that experience one water loss are likely to experience more. After experiencing two separate water heater leaks in our home while my family was away on vacation, I guess it’s true.
The flood
The first incident involved an older water heater, which started leaking while we were gone for a week at the lake. We returned on Sunday to a huge mess. Everything on the floor was wet, including area rugs, photos and stored boxes.
Upon inspection, the problem was clear: the water heater had not been installed with a pan to catch and redirect water in the event of a leak. As a result, our home needed extensive repairs, including removing the bottom three feet of drywall, treating for mold and replacing dislodged floor tiles.
Noisy dehumidifiers and fans operated constantly for what seemed like weeks. Our area rugs were ruined, and it was nearly two months before the drywall was back in place and painted. Knowing all this took place in my basement is one thing. Thinking about what would happen on an upper floor is unimaginable. Needless to say, any relaxation from enjoying a week away turned to immediate stress.
The close call
The second incident was less devastating, thanks to our neighbors stopping by to check on a pet. We were headed out to dinner near the end of another trip when the neighbors called for instructions to turn off the water. The water heater had sprung another leak. It was in a pan this time, but that didn’t matter because the water was spraying from the top of the heater and bouncing off the ceiling.
We were lucky this time – because of our neighbors’ quick action, the damage was limited to one room. The water ran less than 24 hours, and our first incident had taught us not to keep belongings on the floor. Our neighbors kindly vacuumed up the water, preventing damage to the trim and drywall. In a few days, the dehumidifiers and fans brought the humidity back down to normal.
Peace of mind from Flo by Moen
After the second loss, we’d had enough of the water cleanup experience and decided to install a shut-off device through Flo by Moen. Moen connected me with a knowledgeable, trained and local plumber who arrived exactly two weeks later to install my device. The flat-rate installation saved me a few hundred dollars, and I paired some discounted sensors in potential trouble spots to trigger the shut-off if a leak occurs. Installing the device also made my family eligible for a premium discount on our homeowner insurance policy. This year my vacation was far less stressful.
Learn more about Flo by Moen

This loss control information is advisory only. The author assumes no responsibility for management or control of loss control activities. Not all exposures are identified in this article. Contact your local, independent insurance agent for coverage advice and policy service.

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Pay attention to wet floor protocols to keep your premises safe.

When unexpected spills, tracked-in snow or rain, leaking appliances or other sources lead to floor contamination, your employees’ response can easily be the difference between a slip and fall, prompting a potential injury claim, or it being a non-event.  
WET FLOOR PROTOCOL
To handle unexpected contamination of your floors, train your employees about wet floor protocol and enforce it.
Have supplies – wet floor signs, sweeping compound, mops and buckets, rolls of paper towels, broom and dustpan – staged at strategic locations so they can be retrieved quickly. At a minimum, wet floor signs should be available at various locations throughout the business.
Once a spill or other contaminant is detected, go to it immediately and warn others away from the area. Then, set out wet floor signs as quickly as possible.
Make sure the source of the contamination is contained so the situation does not get worse.
If additional supplies are needed to clean up the spill, have an employee stand guard to continue to warn people away while another employee retrieves supplies.
If a co-worker is not available to stand guard over a spill, mark the spill with something before leaving the area to retrieve cleaning supplies. In a restaurant, this might be placing an empty chair over the spill temporarily; in a grocery store, pull down some items from the shelf and block access to the spill. This will be more visible than the liquid covering the floor. This technique should not be left in place for longer than the time it takes to quickly obtain the cleaning supplies and return to the scene.
Clean up the contamination.
Keep warning signs in place until the area has been cleaned and has had time to dry.
WINTER WEATHER CONSIDERATIONS
If snow and ice are concerns in your location, you already know that these conditions can wreak havoc on your employees’ and customers’ ability to safely get in and out of your business. Assign someone to monitor weather forecasts, maintain adequate supplies of shovels and salt and coordinate snow plowing, shoveling, and  salt and sand application with either internal personnel or hired snow and ice removal contractors.
Be prepared to promptly clean up snow and water tracked into your building.
Accidents are, by definition, unexpected. How we react to them should not be.
This loss control information is advisory only. The author assumes no responsibility for management or control of loss control activities. Not all exposures are identified in this article. Contact your local, independent agent for insurance coverage advice and loss control information.

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Shortly after rampaging Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a fan of the president posted a message on the pro-Donald Trump website TheDonald.win. Inspired by the mob’s attempt to stop lawmakers from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win, user CONN_WYNN said in an all-caps message, replete with an expletive, that it was “TIME TO LEAVE THE KEYBOARD” and “FIGHT FOR MY…COUNTRY.”
Two days later, agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s San Francisco field office came calling, according to another post by CONN_WYNN on the same website.

“PRO TIP: Think before you post. They are watching. I learned the hard way,” wrote the user on Sunday alongside a photograph of a business card from the agents.
A spokesman for the FBI’s San Francisco office said he could not provide any details about the reported interaction or confirm whether agents actually paid a visit to the person who posted that message. But “if he has our business card and said he was visited, I’m pretty sure we visited him,” the spokesman said.
Before the Capitol attack, such a post may not have elicited a follow-up visit. But in the aftermath of the riot, which left five people dead, federal law enforcement agencies have intensified their scrutiny of extremist chatter online, activity that officials warn could be early warning signals of planned attacks around Biden’s inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.
“You don’t want to be the ones to have FBI agents knocking on your door at 6 a.m.,” Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday during a televised briefing with Vice President Mike Pence. “Anybody who plots or attempts violence in the coming week should count on a visit.”
For months, far-right extremists have been openly posting their threats on public sites. Now, wary of surveillance and amid a crackdown by social media, some are shifting their online communications to private chats or lesser known platforms that could make those threats harder to find.

Several social media websites that are popular havens for far-right views have closed, crashed or cracked down on violent rhetoric over the past week. For example, Apple and Amazon suspended the social media site Parler from their respective App Store and web hosting service, saying it had not taken adequate measures to prevent the spread of posts inciting violence.
That has pushed some users to more private platforms such as Telegram, the Dubai-based messaging app, and lesser-known social media sites like MeWe.
U.S. downloads of Telegram from Apple’s App Store and from Google Play rose to 1.2 million in the week after the Capitol assault, a 259% increase over the previous week, according to Sensor Tower, a data analytics firm. Roughly 829,000 U.S. users downloaded MeWe in the week after the attack, a 697% increase, the firm found.
David Westreich, a MeWe spokesman, said the company has frequent membership spikes and that “only a small fraction” of the hundreds of thousands of public groups on the platform dealt with politics. Westreich said MeWe’s terms of service were “designed to keep out lawbreakers, haters, bullies, harassment violence inciters.”
Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.
The FBI received nearly 100,000 “digital media tips” about potential unrest related to the election and Biden’s inauguration, an official told reporters on Tuesday, and has pleaded for more information from the American public.
Jared Maples, director of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, told Reuters his office was “doubling down” on its work to track possible domestic extremist threats and “making sure we’re aware of what the chatter is online.”
The FBI warned this week in bulletins and a call with law enforcement agencies nationwide of possible armed protests in Washington and at state capitols in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration.
Extremists seeking a politically motivated civil war and those seeking a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States,” officials wrote in a joint bulletin issued on Wednesday by the National Counterterrorism Center and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and seen by Reuters.
Wray said at the briefing on Thursday that his agency was tracking calls for potential armed protest in the lead-up to Wednesday’s inauguration, adding that “one of the real challenges in this space is trying to distinguish what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”
Monitoring More Difficult
The crackdown on public-facing extremist content is not necessarily all good news for law enforcement trying to combat threats, said Mike Sena, director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a “fusion center” staffed by federal, state and local public safety personnel who monitor threats and facilitate information sharing.
“When you shut down a platform that has public access, you drive people out of the light,” Sena said in an interview.
“Oftentimes that’s our only way to find them because they’re having conversation and making statements that are open to see.”
The upside of driving extremists underground, Sena said, is that it is harder for them to radicalize others when they do not have access to more mainstream platforms.
Law enforcement is also in the difficult position of determining whether people saying “despicable” things online intend harm or are “just practicing keyboard bravado,” Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, told reporters on Tuesday.
In the United States, freedom of speech is strongly protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
In Queens, New York, on Tuesday, federal agents arrested Eduard Florea at his home on a weapons charge after he posted violent threats to Parler on Jan. 5-6, prior to its suspension by its web host Amazon.
Florea posted that he had “a bunch of guys all armed and ready to deploy” to Washington, D.C., and threatened the life of Democratic U.S. Senator-elect Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is Black, according to a complaint filed in federal court. In court, his lawyer called the posts “blather on the internet.”
Migration To New Platforms
Days after the Capitol attack, Facebook and Twitter purged some accounts that violated their policies around violence and hate speech, and other companies followed suit.
Chris Hill, leader of the III% Security Force, a Georgia-based militia group, said his organization’s website had been taken offline on Jan. 8 by its hosting service GoDaddy for violating its terms of service. A GoDaddy spokesman said the site had been removed due to content that “both promoted and encouraged violence,” a claim Hill called “laughable.”
The moves sent users scrambling to other platforms.
On Telegram, Enrique Tarrio, leader of the right-wing Proud Boys, welcomed new users “to the darkest part of the web” with posts that made light of the Capitol siege and linked to other Proud Boys channels on the service.
Gab.com, a social media platform popular with right-wing users, said in a Twitter post on Thursday that it had drawn 2.3 million new users in the past week.
Amid the online reshuffling, conflicting messages have surfaced in far-right chat rooms and forums about possible protest actions around the inauguration.
Digital flyers have circulated in those spaces for weeks advertising armed marches in Washington and state capitals around the inauguration, posts that prompted recent warnings from federal law enforcement about potential violence.
But some far-right groups on public platforms have cautioned supporters to avoid such demonstrations, saying, without evidence, that they are traps set by law enforcement to crack down on gun rights.
Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors extremists, said that nearly all of the planned protests his group had been tracking around the inauguration had been canceled or gone underground.
“That said, we’re still receiving lots of anecdotal reports of individuals who were involved in the January 6 insurrection returning to DC on January 20,” he said in an email.
Missed Signs
A Jan. 5 memo from an FBI office in Virginia underscores the difficulties facing law enforcement agencies now in trying to determine which threats around the inauguration are real and which are bluster.
The memo described possible violence by Trump supporters at the Capitol last week. It was downplayed by many law enforcement agencies, partly because the FBI labeled the material unconfirmed “open source reporting,” according to a law enforcement source familiar with the memo.
Extremism experts had also noticed violent rhetoric lighting up online forums including Facebook, Gab and Parler in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“It was frightening how open folks were being about the violence they wanted to commit,” said Melissa Ryan, CEO of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.
Posters on TheDonald.win, for example, had fantasized about murdering members of Congress and even shared tips on how to tie nooses, Ryan said.
With many users now having migrated to harder-to-monitor communication channels like Telegram since last week, those kinds of threats are more difficult to spot now.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant FBI director for counterintelligence, said law enforcement officials will be more active in letting some right-wing online users fomenting violence know they are being watched.
“You bet they’re going to be knocking on more doors, letting people know, ‘We’re here’,” he said.

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WASHINGTON — Toyota Motor Corp settled a lengthy Justice Department civil probe into its delayed filing of emissions-related defect reports for $180 million, the government said on Thursday.
Reuters first reported the expected settlement, which resolves the violations of the Clean Air Act.

Toyota first disclosed in 2016 it was under investigation for the delayed reports to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Justice Department had not previously confirmed the investigation until Thursday’s announcement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan that the government had filed a civil lawsuit against the Japanese automaker. It simultaneously announced the settlement, which includes a consent decree that requires semi-annual compliance reports.
Toyota will record $180 million in after-tax charges against earnings in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021, for costs relating to the agreement.
The government said the settlement resolved Toyota’s “systematic, longstanding violations of Clean Air Act emission-related defect reporting requirements, which require manufacturers to report potential defects and recalls affecting vehicle components designed to control emissions.”
Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss in New York said: “Toyota shut its eyes to the noncompliance, failing to provide proper training, attention, and oversight to its Clean Air Act reporting obligations.”
She added that “Toyota’s actions undermined EPA’s self-disclosure system and likely led to delayed or avoided emission-related recalls, resulting in financial benefit to Toyota and excess emissions of air pollutants.”

Toyota said in a statement the company nearly five years ago “identified and self-reported a process gap that resulted in a delay in the filing of certain non-public EPA reports for emissions-related defects in vehicles.”
The automaker added that “while this reporting delay resulted in a negligible emissions impact, if any, we recognize that some of our reporting protocols fell short of our own high standards, and we are pleased to have resolved this matter.”
Over a 10-year period ending in 2015, Toyota “routinely filed emission defect reports to EPA materially late and, in many cases, failed to file such reports at all until a self-disclosure of non-compliance” in 2015, the Justice Department said in a court filing.
The government initially sought a substantially higher civil penalty from Toyota, sources briefed on the matter said.
The $180 million fine is the largest civil penalty for violation of EPA’s emission-reporting requirements.
“Toyota failed to report mandatory information about potential defects in their cars to the EPA, keeping the agency in the dark and evading oversight. EPA considers this failure to be a serious violation of the Clean Air Act,” said EPA Assistant Administrator Susan Bodine.
In recent years, the Justice Department has brought penalties in a number of auto emissions investigations, but unlike others including Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, the Toyota case has no allegations of emissions cheating.

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Dimitri Mikhaylov working the front register at Chelsea Bagel of Tudor CityBy Kris Maccini, Social Media Director, Triple-I
In support of Small Business Saturday, November 28, the Insurance Information Institute spotlights Chelsea Bagel, a business that has stayed resilient during the pandemic.
Deciding on your local bagel shop is a quintessential part of becoming a New Yorker. I’ve made this city my home for the past 17 years now, and it’s the first thing I do every time I move into a new neighborhood. About four years ago, I made Midtown East, Manhattan my home, and it didn’t take long for Chelsea Bagel of Tudor City to become my go-to shop.
Chelsea Bagel of Tudor City is owned by Dimitri Mikhaylov. He opened the shop and its sister restaurant, Chelsea Bagel & Café , along with his brother in 2015. Owning his own bagel shop became a dream after Dimitri invested in another coffee shop a few years prior. Never did he imagine just five years later, the world would be in a global pandemic.
The bagel and spread counterat Chelsea Bagel of Tudor City
“Prior to the pandemic, we were doing fine covering expenses. We had a steady flow of regular customers and high traffic from tourists. Facing the pandemic and this tough economy has been one of our biggest challenges,” says Dimitri.
In the early days of the pandemic, Dimitri had to make some difficult decisions to keep his doors open. He made reductions in staff, changed hours of operation, and withheld his own paycheck in order to pay his employees.
“The first four weeks of the pandemic, I spent a lot of my own money to meet business expenses, and I didn’t pay myself for 10 weeks,” he says. “My wife and I also had to make the decision to postpone our home mortgage for six months in order to pay for the business.”
“During that time, I thought that my business interruption insurance would have been able to help cover our losses, but after contacting my insurer, I realized pandemics are not covered. The next step was to apply for a government PPP loan.”
The small business PPP loan allowed Dimitri both to cover his expenses and hire back some staff. Since the summer, business has picked up, and he’s slowly welcoming back his regulars. There has been a 25% increase in customers in recent months compared to the start of the pandemic where business decreased by 75%.
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In addition to the PPP loan, Dimitri advises that small business owners really look at their expenses to see where they can cut off spending. At the height of the pandemic, he chose to do all the buying himself, which drastically cut down the cost of goods for his shop.
“I’m hoping that the economy returns and brings customers back,” Dimitri says. “This area [New York City] relies on tourists.”
“It crossed my mind not once but many times to give up the business during all this, but hope kept me going. I have a family to feed and my employees have families to feed.” […]

Triple-I’s chief actuary, James Lynch, gave this talk on the changes that COVID-19 is bringing to the automobile insurance business, at the American Academy of Actuaries Annual Meeting last week.
“Thanks for inviting me to be part of such an august panel. I wanted to spend a few moments talking about what Insurance Information Institute research indicates are significant changes happening in the sector right now and what may lie ahead.
Not surprisingly, the pandemic has had an enormous influence. Triple-I estimates that insurers will return $14 billion to customers because of the dramatic decrease in driving. Even with that, most insurers have shown improved results.
A good rule of thumb is that insurers returned about 15 percent of second quarter premiums. Fast Track data show that loss costs in the second quarter were between 7 and 40 percent lower than a year earlier, depending on coverage.
A closer look at the numbers show what might be a disturbing long-term trend. Frequency was way down in every coverage, but some coverages showed disturbing spikes in claim severity. Property damage frequency was down more than 30 percent from a year earlier, but severity was up almost 20 percent. This was likely caused by faster driving.  
Since the spring lockdowns have eased, customers are driving more again, but they still haven’t returned to the levels of a year ago. Right now people are driving about 12 percent fewer miles than they did a year ago.
However, there is ample evidence that drivers are still going faster than they did, particularly at rush hours. That’s why mileage driven this year is down 12 percent, but traffic fatalities are up 4 percent. The concern is that frequency patterns will return to the norm, but fast driving will keep claim severity high, putting upward pressure on rates.
There’s good news for insurers though. Telematic information was an important reason insurers could return money quickly to their customers, and that fact seems to have brought positive attention to usage-based insurance. Research by Arity shows that 58 percent of drivers surveyed this year are comfortable with insurers monitoring distracted driving to price insurance, up from 39 percent a year ago. There were similar increases for monitoring miles driven, speed and where a person drives.
There are lots of other questions about where the industry is going, and I guess I’ll step back and let us talk about those as a group.” […]